Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 31geographic fragmentation: there is more heterogeneity when there is non-
homogeneity (or ‘scatter’) in the geographic distribution of those different
words. Heterogeneity, then, may be defined as the product of lexical diver-
sity and geographic fragmentation. Geographic fragmentation, however,
needs to be analyzed further. On the one hand, it is linked to the geographi-
cal range of the terms: a smaller average range indicates higher fragmenta-
tion. On the other hand, it is linked to the dispersion of the terms within
that range: holes in the distribution indicate higher fragmentation. Let us
now have a closer look at each of the three relevant phenomena (diversity,
range, dispersion) and their operationalization.
- Lexical diversity is straightforwardly defined as the number of different
types (including multiword expressions) in the onomasiological range of a
concept. In follow-up research, we intend to explore measures of diversity
in which the distribution of tokens over types is taken into account as well
(like a type/token ratio, or the measure of internal uniformity used in Geer-
aerts, Grondelaers and Speelman 1999).
Figure 1. A schematic representation of geographical dispersion
- The dispersion of a concept is illustrated by means of Figure 1: disper-
sion is the extent to which the lexical attestations of a concept cover the
total set of observational points under consideration. If we think of the dot-
ted rectangle in the figure as the total area under consideration (in our case,
the Limburgish dialect area), then the solid line may be used to indicate that
part of the global area in which a given concept appears. (In most cases in
our database, the concepts appear in the Limburgish region in its entirety.)