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 outside and inside. From material objects to subtle affections, everyone can be represented with them.
However, the way we shape words depends on how the society in which we were born and develop perceives the realities to which they allude, giving them nuances subject to the relationships that are forged with the environment.
That is why, although love has a specific word in all the cultures that are recognized today, it is very possible that it denotes different experiences in each case (since it could connect with very different “states”). , such as pride, shame or joy; depending on 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 given that they all harbor an evident symbolic value, it is a phenomenon that conditions the way in which we process and value our inner life.
The human vocabulary is very rich in nuances, since it pursues the purpose of translating a complex and practically infinite reality into visual or acoustic symbols, through which what is sometimes not possible to be captured with the senses is abstracted and shared. In the same way, affects also have their own concrete terms, with which members of society communicate their inner life: from crying to laughter, from sadness to joy; All of them are words different from what they indicate.
The study of emotions has come to the conclusion that there is a limited set of basic and irreducible affects, universal and coming from genetic baggage of our species: joy, fear, anger, sadness, surprise and disgust. However, although all people can feel them at some point in their lives, the experiential nuances that give them their full meaning are subject to unique cultural influences, which arise from the social environment in which we develop as individuals.
And it is that, definitively, with the use of the verb the reality that each one holds is constructed to understand the world in which they live. This form of constructivism requires directly the relationships that are forged with others, including the use of a common language that is inspired by the experience of people 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 their members use similar gestures to express what they have inside. And in addition to this, they have the necessary words to tell others what they are feeling at a certain moment, for which they translate their experience through verbal and non-verbal codes. It is precisely this elaboration process that spices the term with anthropological nuances, and the reason why the word used to label the emotion can have different meanings depending on the place in which it is pronounced.
Bringing up a hypothetical assumption, it could turn out that in a specific society “bravery” is privileged as the most desirable of all possible traits, so “fear” would be related to “shame” or even “dishonor.” “. On the other hand, in a different and distant region, where such an emotion did not have that same social consideration, it could be related to opposite ideas (such as “compassion”, for example); and even the morphology of the word itself would be different. These differential ways of referring to fear, which sink into the cultural terrain, promote diametrically different prisms of living it.
The degree of colexification of two terms, in different cultures, refers to their equivalence not only in formal terms, but also to the covariations with other constructs. In this way, 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 anthropological foundations (stories, culture, customs, etc.).
How words are constructed in a society
As noted previously, all emotions are universal, but the way in which they are transformed into words (and the connections they draw with other concepts) will be largely associated with cultural dimensions. One of the main purposes of those who have investigated these issues has been precisely to discover how this process develops, and if there are mechanisms common to all societies 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 are attached. In this way, different attributes will be associated with “fear” (or any other basic emotion), although oriented towards the same direction and very rarely opposite to each other. These connections are specific in each human collective.
It has been proven that, in all societies, words share two coordinates for their construction. Both allow us to provide them with a basic substrate: we are talking about valence and emotional activation. The first of them 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 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 this. 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 others. These findings prove that both emotion and its fundamental experience are keys 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 mixing. With this, it becomes evident that the experience of emotions, due to its additional connotation linked to social constructivism, is a very important factor to understand nuances of the experience of each of the subjects who 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 biology. This occurs mainly in polysemous 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 look at 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 may precisely underlie colexification as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. And it is that the infinite ways in which a term covaries with others imprints upon it the essential nuances that give it meaning to the community of speakers that uses it.
The word “grief”, in Spanish, refers to very varied emotions, such as “sadness” or “anxiety”. However, in Persian culture there is the term ænduh to describe both “sorrow” and “repentance”, while in the Sirkhi dialect dard would be used to capture “sorrow” and “anxiety”. From all this it follows, therefore, that “penalty” will have a very different background in each of these languages 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. The speakers of the Tai-Kadai languages ​​associate it with “fear”, while the users of all the Austroasiatic languages ​​link it more closely to “repentance”, from which it follows that in one case it is experienced as a fear prospective (in a similar way to how Western science understands it) and on the other as the result of acts that are felt to be improper (and concepts such as karma or providence).
Differences can also be found for the word “anger” in different cultures To cite an example, in the languages ​​that come from the Republic of Dagestan (Russia) this covaries with “envy”, while in the languages ​​that come from the Austronesian peoples it is associated with “hate” and a generic “bad”. . Again, it will be evident that the experiences of its speakers with “anger” will be largely different, and that it could even be triggered by different situations.
A very interesting case is found in the word “love” in 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 relate it to “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 experience, which leaves a wide margin for social aspects to intervene in a decisive way.
