Half' in a typological perspective

Student: Sazonova ViStoria

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

Our study examines the concept of ‘half’ across several European languages. Lexical typology is one of the main trends in contemporary lexical semantics, yet so far ‘half’ has not been studied from a typological perspective. We consider this semantic field a worthy object of typological analysis because, first, the meaning of ‘half’ is one of the very basic semantic concepts, with a possible claim for universality. Second, this field has important semantic extensions and parallels, e.g., words denoting ‘half’ may function as numerals or approximators. Additionally, ‘half’ develops metaphoric and metonymic extensions which may vary across languages. We use a corpus-based approach and frame semantics to account for the range of meanings that words for ‘half’ develop across different languages. We also study constructions based on ‘half’ words and their grammaticalization. Our results can be used for future lexical typological studies and also in research of other linguistic fields.

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