Semantically speaking: Does meaning structure unite languages?

Humans' common cognitive abilities, language dependance may provide an underlying semantic order to the world's languages

We create words to label people, places, actions, thoughts, and more so we can express ourselves meaningfully to others. Do humans' shared cognitive abilities and dependence on languages naturally provide a universal means of organizing certain concepts? Or do environment and culture influence each language uniquely? Using a new methodology that measures how closely words' meanings are related within and between languages, an international team of researchers has revealed that for many universal concepts, the world's languages feature a common structure of semantic relatedness.

"Before this work, little was known about how to measure [a culture's sense of] the semantic nearness between concepts," says co-author and Santa Fe Institute Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya. "For example, are the concepts of sun and moon close to each other, as they are both bright blobs in the sky? How about sand and sea, as they occur close by? Which of these pairs is the closer? How do we know?"

Translation, the mapping of relative word meanings across languages, would provide clues. But examining the problem with scientific rigor called for an empirical means to denote the degree of semantic relatedness between concepts.

To get reliable answers, Bhattacharya needed to fully quantify a comparative method that is commonly used to infer linguistic history qualitatively. (He and collaborators had previously developed this quantitative method to study changes in sounds of words as languages evolve.)

"Translation uncovers a disagreement between two languages on how concepts are grouped under a single word," says co-author and Santa Fe Institute and Oxford researcher Hyejin Youn. "Spanish, for example, groups 'fire' and 'passion' under 'incendio,' whereas Swahili groups 'fire' with 'anger' (but not 'passion')."

To quantify the problem, the researchers chose a few basic concepts that we see in nature (sun, moon, mountain, fire, and so on). Each concept was translated from English into 81 diverse languages, then back into English. Based on these translations, a weighted network was created. The structure of the network was used to compare languages' ways of partitioning concepts.

The team found that the translated concepts consistently formed three theme clusters in a network, densely connected within themselves and weakly to one another: water, solid natural materials, and earth and sky.

"For the first time, we now have a method to quantify how universal these relations are," says Bhattacharya. "What is universal -- and what is not -- about how we group clusters of meanings teaches us a lot about psycholinguistics, the conceptual structures that underlie language use."

The researchers hope to expand this study's domain, adding more concepts, then investigating how the universal structure they reveal underlies meaning shift. Their research was published today in PNAS.
_________________
Reference:

Science Daily. 2016. “Semantically speaking: Does meaning structure unite languages?”. Science Daily. Posted: February 1, 2016. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160201215635.htm

What's the semantic organization of human language?

A Chinese semantic network with semantic (argument structure) annotation was built and investigated for finding its global statistical properties. The results show that semantic network is also small-world and scale-free but it is different from syntactic network in hierarchical structure and correlation between the degree of a node and that of its neighbors.

Language networks are small-world and scale-free, although they are built based on different principles. Similar global statistical properties shown by language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology. So, do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?

Institute of Applied Linguistics at Communication University of China has shown that dynamic semantic network of human language is also small-world and scale-free but it is different from syntactic network in hierarchical structure and node's degree correlation. The study is reported in Volume 54, Issue 16 (August 2008) of the Chinese Science Bulletin because of its significant scientific value.

"Semantic networks, in particular, dynamic semantic networks based on real language usage, are useful to explore the organization of human semantic (or conceptual) knowledge and human performance in semantic or knowledge processing, helpful to develop better natural language processing system," noted principal investigator Haitao Liu, professor and director of Institute of Applied Linguistics at Communication University of China. "This research is the first paper to observe the dynamic semantic networks of human language."

The research built Chinese semantic network with semantic role annotation and explored its global statistical properties. The method in this research can also be applied to other languages.

The study shows that the semantic network tends to create a longer path length between two nodes and a greater diameter than syntactic networks. That makes semantic network a poorer hierarchy. There is a weaker correlation between the degree of a node and that of its neighbors in a semantic network than that in a syntactic network. The disassortative property of a syntactic network can reflect the relation between content and functional words. As a result, the absence of functional words makes a flatter curve in semantic network. It is perhaps interesting to notice the similarity between syntactic and biological networks, which is demonstrating the biological foundations of language as claimed in biolinguistics. However, it needs much more explanations on why semantic network is less biological than syntactic network in the future.

Structurally, semantic network is more similar to conceptual network in the brain. Therefore the study is helpful for finding better statistical patterns to describe linguistic and cognitive universals from the viewpoint of complex networks.
__________________
References:

Anonymous.2009. "What's the semantic organization of human language?" Posted: August 11, 2009. Available online: http://www.physorg.com/news169201575.html

Liu H T. "Statistical properties of Chinese semantic networks". Chinese Sci Bull, 2009, 54: 2781―2785, doi: 10.1007/s11434-009-0467-x