A study finds that human activity has led to a severe decrease in Caribbean shark abundance.
Image credit: Sean Mattson (International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Colombia).
Edited by E. Anne Cutler, University of Western Sydney, Penrith South, New South Wales, and approved December 14, 2015 (received for review October 23, 2015)
Significance
Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to an underlying level of conceptual structure. To what degree this conceptual structure is universal or is due to properties of cultural histories, or to the environment inhabited by a speech community, is still controversial. Meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize, for quantitative comparative studies. Using cross-linguistic dictionaries across languages carefully selected as an unbiased sample reflecting the diversity of human languages, we provide an empirical measure of semantic relatedness between concepts. Our analysis uncovers a universal structure underlying the sampled vocabulary across language groups independent of their phylogenetic relations, their speakers’ culture, and geographic environment.
Abstract
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. The methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: visang{at}santafe.edu or tanmoy{at}lanl.gov.
Author contributions: H.Y., E.S., C.M., J.F.W., W.C., and T.B. designed research; H.Y., L.S., E.S., C.M., J.F.W., I.M., and T.B. performed research; L.S. and W.C. collected the data; H.Y., E.S., C.M., J.F.W., I.M., W.C., and T.B. analyzed data; and H.Y., E.S., C.M., W.C., and T.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1520752113/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Universal structure of human lexical semantics
Article Classifications
- Biological Sciences
- Anthropology
- Social Sciences
- Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Sign up for Article Alerts
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
A study suggests that male dragonflies will evolve smaller melanin wing patches by 2070 as global warming continues.
Image credit: Pixabay/liggraphy.
The largest pandemic-related declines in nitrogen dioxide pollution occurred in the least White census tracts in the United States, which nonetheless faced higher levels during the pandemic than most White communities before the pandemic.
Image credit: Pixabay/SD-Pictures.
A special kind of electrical discharge generated near the base of the plume could provide researchers with a heads-up that an eruption has started.
Image credit: NASA/Mike Barratt (photographer).
Genome editing technology has grown too quickly, and stakeholders in the debate are too diverse, for current approaches to establish a robust regulatory regime.
Image credit: Shutterstock/vchal.