«инглиз тили лексикологияси» кафедраси

Typological categorization within lexical fields and conceptual 
domains. 
The basic idea underlying cross-linguistic research on categorization 
within lexical fields and conceptual domains (coherent segments of 
experience and knowledge about them) is that human experience is not 
delivered in nicely pre-packed units, categories, and types, but has to be 
chunked, organized and categorized by human beings themselves. Categories 
correspond to experiences that are perceived to have features in common. 
When experiences are systematically encoded by one and the same linguistic 
label (e.g., by the same word) they are, most probably, perceived as being 
fairly similar to each other; that is, they are taken to represent one and the 
same class or to correspond to one and same concept or lexical meaning. 
A simple example of what can be meant by different ways of 
categorizing, or carving up a conceptual domain across languages is given in 
Table 1, which shows how the inventories of body-part terms in six languages 
differ in the extent to which they distinguish between hand vs. arm, foot vs. 
leg, and finger vs. toe by conventionalised, lexicalised expressions (“labels”). 
Table 1: Hand vs. arm, foot vs. leg, finger vs. toe in English, Russian, 
Uzbek, Italian, Rumanian, Estonian and Japanese. 
English Russian Uzbek 
Italian Rumanian Estonian 
Japane
se 
hand 
рука 
қўл 
mano 
minǎ 
käsi 
te 
arm 
braccio brat 
käsi(vars) 
ude 
foot 
нога 
оёқ 
piede 
picior 
jalg 
ashi 
leg 
gamba 
finger 
палец 
бармоқ dito 
deget 
sõrm 
yubi 
toe 
varvas 
The table above follows the same practice of representing 
“lexicalization” in a fairlyunsophisticated way without asking the question 
ofwhether 
рука 
in Russian or 
yubi 
in Japanese are polysemous or semantically 
general. 

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What matters here is simply how many different lexemes there are and 
how theypartition the domain. A somewhat more complicated example is 
given in Table 2, which shows the verbs used for talking about 
waterrelatedmotion (“aqua-motion”) in three languages – Swedish, Dutch and 
Russian.The table includes both motion of water itself (“flow” in English) and 
motion/location of other entities (other figures) with water as ground. Here, 
again, theRussian verbs 
плыть / плавать
are treated as one semantic unit, 
rather than two sets ofdifferent senses. 
Flyta 
in Swedish appears, however, at 
two different places – thisdoes not per se imply any strong conviction that the 
case is much different from theRussian verb couple, but shows rather 
problems with two-dimensionalrepresentations.