Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 35because these differences are not fundamental, neither from a technical or
an interpretative point of view, we again concentrate on the original model
that includes the 23 observations.
Now, what can we conclude from the results as presented in the table?
In the first place, with more than 61% of explained variation (see the figure
indicated by Adjusted R squared), the model may be considered a good
one. With a significance value of less than 0.00001 for the F-test, the model
performs significantly better than an intercept only model, i.e. a model in
which the effect of the explanatory factors is not taken into account. In the
second place, all the factors that we included as explanatory variables ap-
pear to have a significant effect. (This is indicated by the significance fac-
tors in the final column of the table.) This is a crucial finding, because it
corroborates our initial and fundamental assumption that concept features,
and more specifically, heterodox concept features, influence lexical hetero-
geneity. In the third place, when we turn to the first column of figures, we
observe that all factors have a positive effect on lexical heterogeneity, ex-
cept for the factor 'missing places'. (This follows from the fact that all the
estimates are positive numbers, except the estimate for ‘missing places’.)
This means that heterogeneity increases as a concept is less familiar, exhi-
bits more multiword answers, overlaps more with other concepts, and has a
higher negative affect, but that heterogeneity decreases as the number of
places with zero observations rises. Except for the latter, these observations
are entirely in accordance with the hypotheses that we put forward.
The different behavior of the number of observational gaps is not a total
surprise, however. When we introduced the factor, we mentioned that ob-
servational gaps could be ambiguous, to the extent that they could either
result from an unsystematic survey technique, or from lack of familiarity
with the concept. A calculation of the effect of the factors (which we will
not present in detail here) shows that the effect of the number of observa-
tional gaps is the weakest of all the factors considered, which we take as an
extra indication that the factor needs to be scrutinized in more detail in the
course of further investigations.
- Suggesting further prospects
The central conclusions to be drawn from our exploratory investigation into
the sources of lexical heterogeneity in the Woordenboek van de Limburgse
Dialecten are clear. Taking into account non-orthodox concept features