The principles of verbal colexification

The paper is devoted to the basic principles of verbal colexification defined at the cross-linguistic level. We understand colexification as a non-random association of two or more meanings within one and the same lexical item. We argue that these associations, reproducing in different languages, should follow certain principles and form clear patterns. Drawing on our extensive experience of lexical typological research and our new field data on the semantics of simple and complex verbs in Shughni, we show that verbal meanings colexify due to their partial denotative intersection, hence this process can be described in terms of the phase structure of the situation. As an illustration, we consider the structure of the semantic field of disappearance in Shughni, where the concept ‘disappear’ turns out to be adjacent to motion from the speaker / observer (tidow ‘to go, to flow’, sitow ‘to go’, zibidow ‘to jump’, etc.), processes of destruction (θidow ‘to burn’, virix̌tow ‘to break’, etc.), topological changes (gāx̌tow ‘to turn’, xangi / xāmb δêdow ‘disappear from sight’, lit. ‘a hollow / bend’ + a light verb ‘to fall’, etc.), and frustrating emotions (ayf sitow ‘go to waste’, lit. ‘alas’ + a light verb ‘to go’). We show what meanings constitute the domain of disappearance and how they relate denotatively to the adjacent concepts of directed motion, destruction, topological changes, and frustrating emotions.