Colexification: a key concept in anthropology and linguistics

Words have the power to abstract, in a more or less simple and/or articulated sound, complex situations that any individual faces both inside and outside. From material objects to subtle affections, everyone can be represented with them.

However, the way we shape words depends on how the society we were born into and desarrollamos perceives the realities to which they allude, giving it some nuances subject to the relationships that are forged with the middle.

That is why, despite the fact that love has a specific word in all the cultures that are recognized today, it is very possible that it denotes different experiences in each of the cases (since it could connect with very different "states", such as pride, shame or happiness; according to the place and its traditions).

Colexification describes how a word is associated, at a semantic and comparative level, with other different words. in one or several communities. Thus, and since they all have an obvious symbolic value, it is a phenomenon that conditions the way in which we process and value our inner life.

• Related article: "What is Cultural Psychology?"

What is colexification?

The vocabulary of the human being is rich in nuances, since it pursues the purpose of translating a complex and practically infinite reality into symbols visual or acoustic, through which is abstracted and shared what sometimes cannot be captured with the senses. In the same way, affections also have their own specific terms, with which members of society communicate their inner life: from crying to laughter, from sadness to joy; they are all words other than what they point to.

The study on emotions has come to the conclusion that there is a limited set of basic and irreducible affects, universal and derived from the genetic baggage of our species: joy, fear, anger, sadness, surprise and disgust. However, despite the fact that all people can feel them at some point in their lives, the experiential nuances that their full meaning are subject to unique cultural influences, arising from the social environment in which we develop as individuals.

And it is that, definitely, with the use of the verb the reality that each one holds to understand the world in which he inhabits is constructed. This form of constructivism directly requires the relationships that are forged with others, including the use of a common language that is inspired by the experience of peoples and the history that cements their sense of identity. Thus, they can use certain words to identify an emotion, but this will also be linked to other related concepts in a potentially different way than what happens in other groups.

What has been observed, in all societies, is that its members use similar gestures to express what they have inside. And that in addition to this, they have the necessary words to tell others what things are feeling at a given moment, for which they translate their experience through verbal codes and not verbal. It is precisely this process of elaboration that seasons the term with anthropological nuances, and the reason why The word used to label the emotion can have different meanings depending on where it is found. utter.

Drawing up a hypothetical assumption, it could turn out that in a specific society "courage" is privileged as the most desirable of all possible traits, so "fear" would be related to "shame" or even shame. "dishonor". On the other hand, in a different and distant region, where such an emotion did not have the same social consideration, it could be related to opposite ideas (such as "compassion", for example); and even the very morphology of the word would be different. These differential ways of alluding to fear, which sink into the terrain of the cultural, foster diametrically different prisms of living it.

The degree of colexification of two terms, in different cultures, alludes to their equating not only in formal terms, but also to covariations with other constructs. Thus, when two words have a high colexification it would be assumed that the societies in which they are used have constructed the reality to which they allude in a similar way, or what is the same, that they share foundations of an anthropological order (stories, culture, customs, etc.).

• You may be interested in: "The Sapir-Whorf theory of language"

How words are constructed in a society

As previously noted, all emotions are universal, but the way in which they will transform in words (and the connections they will draw with other concepts) will be associated with cultural dimensions to a great extent. extent. One of the main purposes of those who have investigated these matters has been precisely to discover how this process develops, and if there are mechanisms common to all companies that can account for it.

The first thing that has been known is that, in all cases, emotions are organized as clusters, in which a central node can be seen (themselves) to which other words that harbor some degree of congruence among themselves adhere. In this way, "fear" (or any other basic emotion) will be associated with different attributes, although oriented in the same direction and very rarely in opposition to each other. These connections are specific to each human group.

It has been proven that, in all societies, words share two coordinates for their construction. Both allow them to be provided with a basic substrate: we are talking about valence and emotional activation. The first one refers to the dichotomous categorization between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, and the second to the degree of physiological activation (or arousal) that they promote. So, there would be "positive" and "negative" emotions (in the sense of their affective tone and/or their pleasantness), and that cause a high or low degree of autonomous and motor activation.

Likewise, it has been studied in depth whether other dimensions of bipolar structure, such as approach/distancing (tendency to seek or avoid), could also contribute to all of it. In any case, these seem to explain only a minimal variance of the phenomenon, with valence and the degree of activation standing out above all the others. With these findings it is verified that both emotion and its fundamental experience are key shared by our species, but that the social is necessary to shed light on all its diversity.

The colexification of any term in two different societies is closely associated with their territorial proximity., but also to the traditions of exchange that over the years have motivated their cultural and linguistic miscegenation. With this it becomes evident that the experience of emotions, due to its additional connotation linked to social constructivism, It is a very important factor to understand nuances of the experience of each of the subjects that are part of a group.

Although the words we use to describe an emotion exist due to the fact that all mammals share some internal experiences, their deep meaning cannot be reduced to the biology. This occurs mainly in polysemic words (or words that have more than one meaning), since they are also the most abstract. The same does not happen in those that describe unequivocal and/or tangible realities (objects that can be captured by the different sense organs). Let's see some examples.

Some examples of colexification

There are many bilingual people who say they feel differently when they use one language or another. to communicate, and perhaps this could precisely underlie colexification as a phenomenon sociolinguistic. And it is that the infinite ways in which a term covaries with others print on it the essential nuances that endow it with meaning for the community of speakers that uses it.

The word "sorrow" in Spanish refers to a wide variety of emotions, such as "sadness" or "anxiety." However, in Persian culture the term ænduh exists to describe both "sorrow" and pain. "regret", while in the Sirkhi dialect Dard would be used to capture "sorrow" and "anxiety". It therefore follows from all this that the "sorrow" will have in each of these languages ​​a very different background, since the word that describes it is related in a very different way to other words ("regret" for the first case and "anxiety" for the second).

Another example can be found in the word used to describe "anxiety" itself. Speakers of the Tai-Kadai languages ​​associate it with "fear", while users of all Austroasiatic languages ​​associate it in a more closely to "regret", from which it can be deduced that in one case it is experienced as a prospective fear (in a similar way to how the understood by Western science) and on the other as the result of acts that are felt to be wrong (and to concepts such as karma or providence).

Differences can also be found for the word "anger" in different cultures.. To cite an example, in languages ​​originating from the Republic of Dagestan (Russia) this covaries with the "envy", while in the languages ​​that come from the Austronesian peoples it is associated with "hatred" and a generic "bad". Again, it will be evident that the experiences of its speakers with "anger" will be different to a large extent, and even that it could be triggered by situations that are also disparate.

A very interesting case is found in the word "love" of the Austronesian languages, since they associate it closely with the word "shame". This means that "love", in their way of understanding it, has more negative meanings than those usually given to it by other peoples, who associate it with "joy" and "happiness".

Definitely, each language is very flexible and gives reality different nuances for each of the human collectivities, despite the fact that the nature of what it defines (in objective terms) is comparable for all. It is, therefore, an imprecise and ambiguous categorization of the experience, which gives a wide margin for the. social aspects interfere in a decisive way.

Bibliographic references:

• Jackson, J.C., Watts, J., Henry, T.R., List, J.M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P.J, Greenhill, S.J., Gray, R.D. and Lindquist, K.A. (2019). Emotion Semantics show both Cultural Variation and Universal Structure. Science, 366:pp. 1517 - 1522.
• Periclev, V. (2015). On Colexification among Basic Vocabulary. Journal of Universal Language, 16:pp. 63 - 93.