Abstract
The paper presents a study in lexical typology. We focus on the semantic domain of pain as one of the most universal and complex areas of human experience. The predicates of unpleasant bodily sensations are compared in a sample of 23 languages. The collected material demonstrates that the use of pain verbs is dependent on the range of factors of different nature. This data heterogeneity poses the problem of cross-linguistic comparability of pain predicates. As a way to overcome this problem, we propose the construction of a typological database. The multidimensional classifications implemented in the database allow for various cross-linguistic generalizations on pain and human body conceptualizations as well as on regularities of semantic shifts in different languages.
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Bonch-Osmolovskaya, A., Rakhilina, E., Reznikova, T. (2009). Conceptualization of Pain: A Database for Lexical Typology. In: Bosch, P., Gabelaia, D., Lang, J. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5422. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00665-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00665-4_10
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