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=<p>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 <italic>colexification</italic> has become generally established in recent years, and in the present paper, I extend this word-formation pattern in a regular way (<italic>cogrammification</italic>, <italic>coexpression</italic>; <italic>syllexification</italic>, <italic>syngrammification</italic>, <italic>synexpression</italic>). 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.</p>