Heterodox concept features and onomasiological
heterogeneity in dialects
Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman
Abstract
We examine the role of concept characteristics in the study of lexical variation
among dialects: using a quantitative methodology, we show that onomasiological
heterogeneity in a dialect area may be determined by the prototype-theoretical
features of the concepts involved. More specifically, a regression analysis of data
taken from a large lexical database of Limburgish dialects in Belgium and The
Netherlands is conducted to illustrate that concept characteristics such as concept
salience, concept vagueness and negative affect contribute to the lexical heteroge-
neity in the dialect data.
Keywords: Dutch, lectal variation, lexical variation, dialectometry, dialectology,
onomasiology, prototypicality, semantic fuzziness, affect
- Setting the question
To what extent do concept features determine the onomasiological hetero-
geneity that occurs in dialectological data? Onomasiological heterogeneity,
in the way in which we intend it here, is the occurrence of synonymy across
language varieties - in our case, across dialects. The phenomenon is com-
mon enough: neighbouring dialects, even closely related ones, need not
feature the same word for the same concept. In dialectological and soci-
olinguistic research, the phenomenon is sometimes referred to as
'heteronymy' (Goossens 1969, Schippan 1992), and is then analyzed within
the basic framework of variational language studies: lexical variation in a
geographical or social continuum occurs because societal and material fac-
tors trigger the emergence and the subsequent interaction of different lan-
guage systems. But from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics, lexical
variation may be determined by other factors next to such lectal ones: the