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Maria Koptjevskaja TammProfessor

About me

Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm [maˈriːa kɔpˈt͡ʃɛfskaja ˈtam] graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Lomonosov University in Moscow in 1979 and acquired her PhD degree at the Department of linguistics, Stockholm university in 1988 where she has been working since then. She was appointed as full Professor in 2001 and is currently the head of the Section for General Linguistics. She was director of FoSprak, the Special Doctoral Programme in Language and Linguistics at Stockholm University 2010–2019.

Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm has published extensively on various aspects of semantically oriented typology, where she often combines synchronic and diachronic approaches. A large portion of her work focuses on the interplay between lexical and grammatical semantics, in particular on the interaction of the lexical semantics of different classes of words with their possible syntactic and pragmatic functions and how this interaction is reflected in their morphosyntax. The phenomena studied include nominalisations, adnominal possession, quantification, mass/count distinctions (including the domain of pluralia tantum), kin-terms, proper names, finiteness etc. An important direction in Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm’s work has been areal typology, with the main focus on the European and, particularly, the circum-Baltic languages. She was a member of the Noun Phrase Group within the ESF Programme on the Typology of the European Languages (EUROTYP, 1989–1994) and contributor to the World Atlas of Language Structures.

Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm’s most recent interests include cross-linguistic research on lexical typology (temperature terms, motion verbs, antonymy), including its areal aspects, she has published work on the methodology of lexical-typological research and has been active in promoting lexical typology at various conferences and in courses at several European universities and summer schools.

Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm is a fellow of Academia Europaea, and was a member of its Section Committee for Linguistic Studies in 2013–2019. She is the Editor-in-chief of Linguistic Typology. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung and Studia Linguistica (earlier also of Rivista di Linguistica), and of the open-access book series Studies in Linguistic Diversity at Language Science Press. She is a member of the Board of Consulting Editors of Linguistics, a member of the Advisory Board of Legon Journal of the Humanities, and a member of the Scientific Council at Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC). She was a member of the Review Panel for the EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Programme ”EuroBABEL: Better Analyses Based on Endangered Languages”, ESF, 2008.

Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm has received the big Rettig Prize in the philosophical-philological class 2018 conferred by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. 

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • A cross-linguistic study of lexical and derived antonymy

    2024. Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Matti Miestamo, Carl Borstell. Linguistics

    Article

    Antonymy is the lexical relation of opposition. The nature of the oppositeness may differ - e.g., contradictory ('true'-'false') or gradable ('tall'-'short') - and there may be variation as to the relationship in their formal encoding, whether the antonyms are expressed as distinct lexical forms (e.g., true vs. false) or if one form is derived from the other (e.g., true vs. untrue). We investigate the relationship between the two members of 37 antonym pairs across 55 spoken languages in order to see whether there are patterns in how antonymy is expressed and which of the two antonym members is more likely to be derived from the other. We find great variation in the extent to which languages use derivation (labeled neg-constructed forms) as an antonym-formation strategy. However, when we do find a derived form, this tends to target the member of the pair that is either lower in valence (positive vs. negative) or magnitude (more vs. less), in line with our hypotheses. We also find that antonyms that belong to a core set of property concepts are more likely to encode antonyms as distinct lexical forms, whereas peripheral property concepts are relatively more likely to encode the antonyms with derived forms.

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  • Revered and reviled: a sentiment analysis of female and male referents in three languages

    2024. Natalia Levshina, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Robert Östling. Frontiers in Communication 9

    Article

    Our study contributes to the less explored domain of lexical typology, focusing on semantic prosody and connotation. Semantic derogation, or pejoration of nouns referring to women, whereby such words acquire connotations and further denotations of social pejoration, immorality and/or loose sexuality, has been a very prominent question in studies on gender and language (change). It has been argued that pejoration emerges due to the general derogatory attitudes toward female referents. However, the evidence for systematic differences in connotations of female- vs. male-related words is fragmentary and often fairly impressionistic; moreover, many researchers argue that expressed sentiments toward women (as well as men) often are ambivalent. One should also expect gender differences in connotations to have decreased in the recent years, thanks to the advances of feminism and social progress. We test these ideas in a study of positive and negative connotations of feminine and masculine term pairs such as woman - man, girl - boy, wife - husband, etc. Sentences containing these words were sampled from diachronic corpora of English, Chinese and Russian, and sentiment scores for every word were obtained using two systems for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: PyABSA, and OpenAI's large language model GPT-3.5. The Generalized Linear Mixed Models of our data provide no indications of significantly more negative sentiment toward female referents in comparison with their male counterparts. However, some of the models suggest that female referents are more infrequently associated with neutral sentiment than male ones. Neither do our data support the hypothesis of the diachronic convergence between the genders. In sum, results suggest that pejoration is unlikely to be explained simply by negative attitudes to female referents in general.

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  • Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon

    2022. Volker Gast, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm. Linguistic typology 26 (2), 403-438

    Article

    This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair concerns the genealogical stability (persistence) and susceptibility to contact-induced change (diffusibility) of colexification patterns and phonological matter in the 40 most genealogically stable elements of the 100-items Swadesh list, which we call “nuclear vocabulary”. We hypothesize that colexification patterns are (a) less persistent, and (b) more diffusible, than the phonological form of nuclear vocabulary. The second pair of hypotheses concerns degrees of diffusibility in two different sections of the lexicon – “core vocabulary” (all 100 elements of the Swadesh list) and its complement (“non-core/peripheral vocabulary”). We hypothesize that the colexification patterns associated with core vocabulary are (a) more persistent, and (b) less diffusible, than colexification patterns associated with peripheral vocabulary. The four hypotheses are tested using the lexical-semantic data from the CLICS database and independently determined phonological dissimilarity measures. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are less persistent than the phonological matter of nuclear vocabulary receives clear support. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are more diffusible than phonological matter receives some support, but a significant difference can only be observed for unrelated languages. The hypothesis that colexification patterns involving core vocabulary are more genealogically stable than colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon cannot be confirmed, but the data seem to indicate a higher degree of diffusibility for colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon. While we regard the results of our study as valid, we emphasize the tentativeness of our conclusions and point out some limitations as well as desiderata for future research to enable a better understanding of the genealogical versus areal distribution of linguistic features.

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  • Talking About Temperature and Social Thermoregulation in the Languages of the World

    2021. Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Dmitry Nikolaev. International Review of Social Psychology (IRSP) 34 (1)

    Article

    The last decade saw rapid growth of the body of work devoted to relations between social thermoregulation and various other domains, with a particular focus on the connection between prosociality and physical warmth. This paper reports on a first systematic cross-linguistic study of the exponents of conceptual metaphor affection is warmth (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Grady, 1997), which provides the motivation for the large share of research in this area. Assumed to be universal, it enables researchers, mostly speakers of major European languages, to treat words like warm and cold as self-evident and easily translatable between languages - both in their concrete uses (to feel warm/cold) and as applied to interpersonal relationships (a cold/warm person, warm feelings, etc.). Based on a sample of 94 languages from all around the world and using methodology borrowed from typological linguistics and mixed-effects regression modelling, we show that the relevant expressions show a remarkably skewed distribution and seem to be absent or extremely marginal in the majority of language families and linguistic macro-areas. The study demonstrates once again the dramatic influence of the Anglocentric, Standard Average European, and WEIRD perspectives on many of the central concepts and conclusions in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive research and discusses how changing this perspective can impact research in social psychology in general and in social thermoregulation in particular.

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  • Lexical Typology in Morphology

    2020. Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm, Ljuba Veselinova. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

    Chapter

    The goal of this chapter is to explicate the common ground and shared pursuits of lexical typology and morphology. Bringing those to the fore is beneficial to the scholarship of both disciplines and will allow their methodologies to be combined in more fruitful ways. In fact, such explication also opens up a whole new domain of study. This overview article focuses on a set of important research questions common to both lexical typology and morphology. Specifically, it considers vocabulary structure in human languages, cross-linguistic research on morphological analysis and word formation, and finally inventories of very complex lexical items. After a critical examination of the pertinent literature, some directions for future research are suggested. Some of them include working out methodologies for more systematic exploration of vocabulary structure and further scrutiny of how languages package and distribute semantic material among linguistic units. Finally, more effort is to be devoted to the study of vocabularies where basic concepts are encoded by complex lexical items.

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  • The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies

    2020. Christoph Rzymski (et al.). Scientific Data 7 (1)

    Article

    Advances in computer-assisted linguistic research have been greatly influential in reshaping linguistic research. With the increasing availability of interconnected datasets created and curated by researchers, more and more interwoven questions can now be investigated. Such advances, however, are bringing high requirements in terms of rigorousness for preparing and curating datasets. Here we present CLICS, a Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). CLICS tackles interconnected interdisciplinary research questions about the colexification of words across semantic categories in the world's languages, and show-cases best practices for preparing data for cross-linguistic research. This is done by addressing shortcomings of an earlier version of the database, CLICS2, and by supplying an updated version with CLICS3, which massively increases the size and scope of the project. We provide tools and guidelines for this purpose and discuss insights resulting from organizing student tasks for database updates.

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  • The linguistics of temperature

    2015. Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm.

    Book (ed)

    The volume is the first comprehensive typological study of the conceptualisation of temperature in languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms (hot, cold, to freeze, etc). The key questions addressed here include such as how languages categorize the temperature domain and what other uses the temperature expressions may have, e.g., when metaphorically referring to emotions (‘warm words’). The volume contains studies of more than 50 genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages and is unique in considering cross-linguistic patterns defined both by lexical and grammatical information. The detailed descriptions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic facts will serve as an important step in teasing apart the role of the different factors in how we speak about temperature – neurophysiology, cognition, environment, social-cultural practices, genetic relations among languages, and linguistic contact. The book is a significant contribution to semantic typology, and will be of interest for linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers.

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