Colexification refers to linguistic phenomena where multiple concepts
(meanings) are expressed by the same lexical form, such as polysemy or
homophony. Colexifications have been found to be pervasive across languages and
cultures. The problem of concreteness/abstractness of concepts is
interdisciplinary, studied from a cognitive standpoint in linguistics,
psychology, psycholinguistics, neurophysiology, etc. In this paper, we
hypothesize that concepts that are closer in concreteness/abstractness are more
likey to colexify, and we test the hypothesis across indigenous languages in
Americas.

本文将考察语言学、语言学、多义性、具体性和抽象性这五个关键词在美洲土著语中的联系和共发现现象。

美洲土著语的共兰词中的亲密性和抽象性模式

Patterns of Closeness and Abstractness in Colexifications: The Case of  Indigenous Languages in the Americas

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and
emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the
word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study
establishing the extent to which this is also true on the discourse level. This
paper explores which textual and perceptual features human annotators perceive
as important for the metaphoricity of discourses and expressions, and addresses
two research questions more specifically. First, is a metaphorically-perceived
discourse more abstract and more emotional in comparison to a
literally-perceived discourse? Second, is a metaphorical expression preceded by
a more metaphorical/abstract/emotional context than a synonymous literal
alternative? We used a dataset of 1,000 corpus-extracted discourses for which
crowdsourced annotators (1) provided judgements on whether they perceived the
discourses as more metaphorical or more literal, and (2) systematically listed
lexical terms which triggered their decisions in (1). Our results indicate that
metaphorical discourses are more emotional and to a certain extent more
abstract than literal discourses. However, neither the metaphoricity nor the
abstractness and emotionality of the preceding discourse seem to play a role in
triggering the choice between synonymous metaphorical vs. literal expressions.
Our dataset is available at
this https URL.

本研究探讨心理学领域中隐喻言语的抽象性和情感性如何影响篇章层面的隐喻性，并通过语料抽取和众包实验的方式，揭示人类注释者在判断隐喻表达方式及其的原因时使用的文本和感性特征。研究结果表明，与直喻相比，隐喻篇章更加情绪化和抽象化，而前文段中的隐喻性、抽象性和情感性并未对隐喻表达方式的选择产生影响。