The influence of semantic features on lexical geographical variation

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the influence of semantic concept features on lexical geographical variation. More specifically, we take an onomasiological approach to inquire into the effect of concept vagueness, salience, affect and semantic field. We use quantitative operationalizations of these features as predictors in a linear regression analysis. Our response variable is a composite variable that takes into account the number of variants per concept and the degree to which the concepts are scattered across geographical space in a heterogeneous way. Our model reveals that vaguer, less salient and non-neutral concepts show significantly more variation and that the lexical variants for these concepts are scattered across geographical space in a less homogeneous way. We also find differences between semantic fields.