AUTHOR=Haspelmath Martin TITLE=Coexpression and synexpression patterns across languages: comparative concepts and possible explanations JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=14 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1236853 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1236853 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Meanings and linguistic shapes (or forms) do not always map onto each other in a unique way, and linguists have used all kinds of different terms for such situations: Ambiguity, polysemy, syncretism, lexicalization, semantic maps; portmanteau, cumulative exponence, feature bundling, underspecification, and so on. In the domain of lexical comparison, the term colexification has become generally established in recent years, and in the present paper, I extend this word-formation pattern in a regular way (cogrammification, coexpression; syllexification, syngrammification, synexpression). These novel terms allow us to chart the range of relevant phenomena in a systematic way across the grammar-lexicon continuum, and to ask whether highly general explanations of coexpression and synexpression patterns are possible. While there is no new proposal for explaining coexpression here, I will suggest that frequency of occurrence plays a crucial role in explaining synexpression patterns.