Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon

Abstract This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods, including weighted semantic maps, formal concept lattices, correlation analysis, and dimensionality reduction, we identify colexification patterns in the domains in question and evaluate the extent to which these patterns are specific to particular areas. This paper contributes to the methodology of investigating areal patterns in the lexicon, and identifies a number of cross-linguistic regularities and of area-specific properties in the structuring of lexicons.