Patterns of Closeness and Abstractness in Colexifications: The Case of
  Indigenous Languages in the Americas
Yiyi Chen Johannes Bjerva
Colexification refers to linguistic phenomena where multiple concepts
(meanings) are expressed by the same lexical form, such as polysemy or
homophony. Colexifications have been found to be pervasive across languages and
cultures. The problem of concreteness/abstractness of concepts is
interdisciplinary, studied from a cognitive standpoint in linguistics,
psychology, psycholinguistics, neurophysiology, etc. In this paper, we
hypothesize that concepts that are closer in concreteness/abstractness are more
likey to colexify, and we test the hypothesis across indigenous languages in
Americas.