Building semantic maps: The case of person marking

Abstract

When comparing languages, a method is needed to deal with variability. Semantic maps are a frequently used method in typology to analyze and display cross-linguistic diversity. In my dissertation on the paradigmatic structure of person marking, I made a semantic map of person marking to summarise some structural aspects of my findings (Cysouw 2001a: 185– 187). However, the resulting map was not very satisfying, and I subsequently removed this attempt in the published version of my thesis (Cysouw 2003). In this paper I will revisit the attempt to build a semantic map for person marking, based on the data as discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 from Cysouw (2003). My main conclusion will be that there is no such thing as the semantic map for person marking. Instead, various semantic maps are possible, and the traditional kind of semantic map should be seen as just one possible display of cross-linguistic variability. More generally, I will criticize the received view on establishing semantic maps (as summarised in Haspelmath 2003) because frequency of occurrence is ignored in that tradition. In Section 2, I will first discuss why there is a need for semantic maps and what is the methodological status of this approach in linguistic theory. Following this, in Section 3, I will turn to person marking, which will be the example I will use in this paper to illustrate my arguments. I will first make a semantic map for person marking along the received approach, and then sketch various ways to improve on this by including frequencies of occurrence. Section 4 will outline some possibilities of using similar approaches on different levels of linguistic structure. A summary and an outlook on further possible developments will be given in Section 5.

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