3 - Cases of lexical anisomorphism

Summary

Introduction

I now turn to the concrete manifestations of cross-linguistic lexical anisomorphism. Possible configurations of concrete CLA cases are addressed first, in terms both of their essence and of the applied linguistic responses to them. This will then be followed by piecing these configurations into a succinct and deployable taxonomy of CLA.

It is important to keep in mind the famous formulation by Jakobson (1959: 236, emphasis in original): “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” CLA exists primarily when one language must express something lexically and the other does not have to. It is also important to stress that there is no cause-and-effect or priority relation between the two sides in any CLA pair. Khanina (2008: 842–3, emphasis in original) emphasizes this very clearly, explicating the idea of macrofunctionality established by Gil (2004):

[S]ome languages make distinctions that are insignificant for other languages, and in such cases there are generally no objective criteria to define which group of languages do this more “naturally” and thus represent a more basic semantic pattern, and which do it less “naturally” and thus represent a derived semantic pattern. The simplest example might be that of color systems: e.g., English has one word blue whereas Russian has two words, sinij “dark blue” and goluboj “light blue”. The notion of macrofunctionality enables one to say that neither the English nor the Russian pattern is “basic”, and that the English blue is macrofunctional, unifying in one function the ideas of “dark blue” and “light blue”. In fact, what is perceived as different functions by one language (e.g., “light blue” and “dark blue” by Russian, or a situation of wanting and a situation of liking by English) can readily be perceived as a single function by another language (e.g., “blue” by English, or a situation of wanting/liking by Bahasa Indonesia). There is no way to tell whether the first language is splitting up one “originally” unitary semantic unit, or whether the second language is unifying two “originally” distinct units.

To illustrate this further in a somewhat broader sense, while it is correct to register the case of zero equivalence when the English language does not have a word for a ceremony, food item, musical instrument, etc.