Investigating lexical change through crosslinguistic colexification patterns

Abstract Colexification—the expression of distinct concepts by a single word form—provides a valuable window onto how lexical meanings evolve. Using phylogenetic comparative models, we analyze lexical data from three language families—Austronesian, Indo-European, and Uralic—to investigate the evolutionary dynamics underlying colexification patterns. We assess the effects of three predictors: semantic relatedness, borrowability, and usage frequency. Our results suggest that more closely related concept pairs tend to be colexified across a larger portion of the family trees and change more slowly. Concept pairs that are more frequent and more prone to borrowing show a tendency to evolve more rapidly and be colexified less often, though these effects are not fully consistent across families. Differences between the language families suggest that areal and cultural factors also play a role.