Linguistic practices allow individuals to build conceptions of experience that are culture
specific and community shared. We examine this process in relation to a metalinguistic …

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship
between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its …

A key function of the lexicon is to express novel concepts as they emerge over time through
a process known as lexicalization. The most common lexicalization strategies are the reuse …

A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in
processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether …

This letter addresses two issues in language research that are important to cognitive
science: the comparability of word meanings across languages and the neglect of an …

How are concepts related to fundamental human experiences organized within the human
mind? Our insights are drawn from a semantic network created using the Cross-Linguistic …

Diachronic corpus analyses reveal that syntactic usage patterns change over time. Are these
changes reflected in differences in language processing across the human lifespan? We …

How do cognitive pressures shape the lexicons of natural languages? Here, we reframe
George Kingsley Zipf's proposed “law of abbreviation” within a more general framework that …

As the world changes, humans encounter new things that need to be described using a finite
set of words. A common strategy for labeling these novelties is to reuse existing words—ie …

Creative processes of semantic extension play a key role in language change,
grammaticalisation, and (by hypothesis) the early origins and evolution of language. In this …