Friday, February 5, 2016

Universal Structure of human lexical semantics


Today I would like to share a recent scientific discovery that provides evidence for a semantic parallelism between languages.

The Lexical Semantic's Universal Structure


Maybe it’s not so difficult to adapt ourselves to new languages because, we are all humans, and that makes languages highly similar. All we need to express the same things, although we use different words.
Youn, H. et al had published a surprising scientific result, they had empirically demonstrated that there is a universal structure of human lexical semantics.

What does this mean?
Semantic network is highly structured: structural semantic are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. 
There is a universal attribute of human cognition and language use and the reason is that the way concepts are organized in the human brain reflect properties universal to human cognition.

They state:
“Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to an underlying level of conceptual structure. We provide an empirical measure of semantic relatedness between concepts”.

Link to the full article:

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