How to discover lexical variation

Ellen Johnson

Sat. 4:00-5:40 D

This paper examines the factors that determine why some concepts exhibits a great amount of lexical variation and others show very little. It will offer a summary of ideas on why the amount of variation differs, and then look at figures from a study of lexical variation in Southern (US) English as evidence. Before we can analyze variation, we must document it; such a study can point the way to where we might find it.

Years ago, linguistic geographers looking for regional variation went to "the vocabulary of the intimate everyday life of the home and farm" (Kurath 9-10). The idea was to ask about topics that are not generally a part of the public discourse in order to avoid semantic fields where the terminology is national or even international. Hence the studies of words for items such as dragonflies (alongside more common referents, such as pants and sofas) leading perhaps to the entomological analogy of dialectologists as "butterfly collectors", compiling data on trivia from the backwaters of the lexicon.

Berlin's (1995, 1992) findings seem to further vindicate this principle for uncovering lexical variation. He collects plants rather than insects, and his results show that the plants that have the most importance as food and medicine for a culture have the fewest names, while plants that are less useful have names that vary from region to region. At first glance, this may seem to contradict his earlier claims that the most culturally salient areas of the lexicon have the greatest semantic depth (1973) (e.g. snow for Eskimos). However, this semantic depth merely involves a greater number of vocabulary items which make subtle distinctions between similar referents, rather than many synonyms with the exact same meaning.

Johnson (1995) discusses an apparently large increase in the total number of lexical forms used for a set of 150 linguistic variables between 1930 and 1990, suggesting that education, technology and other cultural changes have added vocabulary to speakers' repertoires without necessarily leading to the loss of previously used words. This paper will report on analysis of that data designed to see whether Berlin's work with indigenous Central American cultures can be corroborated with data from the southeastern United States.

Much has been written about the relationship between language change and variation. Factors inhibiting or encouraging change could effect the amount of variation, as well. Weinreich, in 1953, articulated the idea that frequent words are more stable, infrequent ones less so. Antilla writes about the motivation of taboo for language change via the creation of euphemisms, and also discusses the notion of "lexical crowding", according to which an excessive number of synonyms would lead to vocabulary loss. This type of language change resulting from variation offers a new perspective on linguistic cycles of elaboration and simplification and needs to be explored more thoroughly.

References

Anttila, Raimo. 1972. An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.

Berlin, Brent. 1972. Speculations on the Growth of Ethnobotanical Nomenclature. Language in Society 1:51-86.

Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Berlin, Brent. 1995. Lexical Reflections of the Pharmacological and Ethnoecological Importance of Medicinal Plants. Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Athens, GA.

Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. New York: Linguistic Circle.