Concepticon: A Resource for the Linking of Concept Lists

Concepticon: A Resource for the Linking of Concept Lists Johann-Mattis List1, Michael Cysouw2, Robert Forkel3 1CRLAO/EHESS and AIRE/UPMC, Paris, 2Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas, Marburg, 3Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena mattis.list@lingpy.org, cysouw@uni-marburg.de, forkel@shh.mpg.de Abstract We present an attempt to link the large amount of different concept lists which are used in the linguistic literature, ranging from Swadesh lists in historical linguistics to naming tests in clinical studies and psycholinguistics. This resource, our Concepticon, links 30 222 concept labels from 160 conceptlists to 2495 concept sets. Each concept set is given a unique identifier, a unique label, and a human-readable definition. Concept sets are further structured by defining different relations between the concepts. The resource can be used for various purposes. Serving as a rich reference for new and existing databases in diachronic and synchronic linguistics, it allows researchers a quick access to studies on semantic change, cross-linguistic polysemies, and semantic associations. Keywords: concepts, concept list, Swadesh list, naming test, word norms, cross-linguistically linked data 1. Introduction In 1950, Morris Swadesh (1909 – 1967) proposed the idea that certain parts of the lexicon of human languages are uni- versal, stable over time, and rather resistant to borrowing. As a result, he claimed that this part of the lexicon, which was later called basic vocabulary, would be very useful to address the problem of subgrouping in historical linguistics: [...] it is a well known fact that certain types of morphemes are relatively stable. Pronouns and numerals, for example, are occasionally replaced either by other forms from the same language or by borrowed elements, but such replacement is rare. The same is more or less true of other ev- eryday expressions connected with concepts and experiences common to all human groups or to the groups living in a given part of the world dur- ing a given epoch. (Swadesh, 1950, 157) He illustrated this by proposing a first list of basic concepts, which was, in fact, nothing else than a collection of concept labels, as shown below:1 I, thou, he, we, ye, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred, all, ani- mal, ashes, back, bad, bark, belly, big, [...] this, tongue, tooth, tree, warm, water, what, where, white, who, wife, wind, woman, year, yellow. (Swadesh, 1950, 161) In the following years, Swadesh refined his original concept lists of basic vocabulary items, thereby reducing the origi- nal test list of 215 items first to 200 (Swadesh, 1952) and then to 100 items (Swadesh, 1955). Scholars working on different language families and different datasets provided further modifications, be it that the concepts which Swadesh had proposed were lacking proper translational equivalents 1This list contains 123 items in total. According to Swadesh, these items occurred both in his original test list of English items, and in the data on the Salishan languages, which he employed for his first glottochronological study. in the languages they were working on, or that they turned out to be not as stable and universal …

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