Abstract

One way in which humans convey non-conventionalized meaning is by repurposing familiar  words in a creative manner. In this way, speakers build on their language's finite lexical means to express new ideas or talk about new referents. A technological innovation is called "mouse"; talks can be presided by "chairs"; certain kinds of lawyers are "sharks"; and so on. Such lexical creativity is manifested at different timescales, ranging from language development in children (e.g., a child calling a centipede a "comb") to the evolution of word meanings over history. In this talk, I will discuss a recent study that explores whether these different manifestations of lexical creativity build on a common foundation. Our results suggest that, indeed, a parsimonious set of semantic knowledge types characterize developmental data as well as evolutionary products of meaning extension spanning over 1400 languages. I will argue that these findings suggest a unified foundation for human lexical creativity underlying both the fleeting products of individual ontogeny and the evolutionary products of phylogeny across languages. Other than presenting the study itself, the talk will focus on methodological and conceptual upshots as well as on current shortcomings of this kind of large scale computational study on the way meaning is organized.