36 Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman
(salience and vagueness) helps to account for lexical heterogeneity in di-
alect databases: studying dialectological lexical heterogeneity purely from
the point of view of geographic differentiation is too restrictive. And as the
influence of negative affect shows, concept features need to be taken into
account more generally: it is not just the features highlighted by prototype
theory and cognitive semantics that turn out to be relevant for the explana-
tion of heterogeneity.
On top of these theoretically relevant conclusions, there is an important
methodological conclusion to be highlighted: more advanced forms of
quantitative analysis, like in our case, multiple regression analysis, clearly
help to cope with the complexity of dialectological lexical materials.
Given the apparent fruitfulness of the approach illustrated here, we may
conclude with the identification of prospects for further research. Quite a
number of perspectives open up. In the first place, we may try out alterna-
tive forms of the study as it was presented here. As we indicated earlier,
alternative operationalizations of the factors should be explored, like a to-
ken-based rather than a type-based measure of lexical non-uniqueness, or
similarly, a token-based measure of diversity. In the same vein, we may
consider an alternative calculation of range and dispersion on the basis of
‘number of places’ instead of surfaces and distances, and we should con-
sider measures to distinguish between vagueness and polysemy in the cal-
culation of non-uniqueness. The design may be varied in still other re-
spects: we may split up the results for different geographic regions (do the
variables work in the same way in the Belgian province of Limburg as in
the Dutch province of Limburg?), or we may have a separate look at the
two components of heterogeneity, i.e. diversity and geographic fragmenta-
tion, instead of combining them in a single measure.
In the second place, we may extend the study beyond its present limits
by taking into account other regions: if we take similar data from the dic-
tionaries of the Brabantish dialects and the Flemish dialects (which are
compiled in parallel to the dictionary of the Limburgish dialects), can we
confirm our findings? And even more appropriately, given our interest in
semantics, we may envisage an extension towards other lexical fields, as
represented by other installments of the dictionary: do the various factors
that we have identified for the lexical field of human body play the same
role in other fields, and what is the role of the field itself?