Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 27that would be of interest to us (could it be the case that lesser known con-
cepts are lexically more heterogeneous than others?), but we will only be
able to investigate such effects if we can rule out, or at least minimize, the
occurrence of the former situation.With the restrictions that we applied, we
can base our investigation on a database of 32591 tokens of lexical items,
divided over 206 concepts and 201 geographical places.
2.2. The explanatory variables
The concept features that we will incorporate into the analysis are three-
fold: the salience of the concepts, the vagueness of the concepts, and the
negative affect of the concepts. Vagueness and salience are features that
may be typically associated with prototype theory and a cognitive linguistic
conception of lexical meaning. Negative affect, on the other hand, is a more
traditional semantic feature. Vagueness and negative affect will be included
in the form of a single operationalization, but salience will be measured in
the form of three distinct factors (which will be considered separately in the
analysis): the habituality of the concept, the number of null responses for
the concept, and the number of multiword expressions featuring among the
designations of the concept. Let us now look at each of these five factors
(the three salience factors, vagueness, and negative affect) in turn, and indi-
cate why exactly we have included them and how we have tried to measure
them.
- The lack of familiarity of a concept is relevant because we suspect that
less habitual concepts increase lexical uncertainty among language users,
and decrease the probability of uniformity across dialects. If a concept is
less common, it is communicatively less prominent, and the possibility (or
perhaps also the necessity) for standardization is more restricted. Our oper-
ational measurement of lack of conceptual habituality is relatively basic:
we have conducted a survey among seven members of our research group,
asking them to rate the 206 bodily concepts in the database on a five point
scale of habituality, with 1 indicating no risk of unfamiliarity, and 5 a high
risk of unfamiliarity. The results we get on the survey are consistent and
intuitively plausible. At the lower end of the scale, for instance, we find
such concepts as KNOKKELKUILTJES 'the little dents between the knuckles
of the hand', BLOEDWEI 'blood plasma, the liquid component of blood',
LEVEND VLEES ONDER DE HUID 'living flesh underneath the skin', VOOR-