As scientists, we[1] love what we are doing and we hope that our findings will outlive us, and we dread being shown wrong (probably for many of us, nightmares of discovering we’re naked in public are far outranked by being shown wrong in public). This is a foundational paradox, as any first year undergrad will breathlessly and smugly tell you that all theories are false and that what sets science apart from everything else is its falsifiability (Godfrey-Smith 2021; Newton-Smith 2001; Psillos and Curd 2008). Which means, by extension, that everything we do is ultimately wrong.

But surely there are degrees of wrongness: how many of us would not wish to be wrong the way Newton was, given that most of what we do, build, and even launch in space is still based on his theory, spectacularly falsified by a certain Albert more than a century ago. Or the way Darwin got it wrong with inheritance. Some kinds of wrongness are to be desired at all costs, as they make us advance, question fundamental assumptions, and find new, previously invisible paths. Other kinds of wrongness, such as fundamental overlooked problems in data analysis, are deeply dreaded. Another foundational paradox is the following: in general we dread being wrong but there can be no advancement without being wrong: discovery is, despite what various voices keep claiming, messy, costly, wasteful and resists “optimisation”, “rationing” and “ideology”. Discovery is intrinsically built on getting it wrong again, and again, and again.

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.

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.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data. 

In recent years, the lexicon has become increasingly popular as a subject for cross-linguistic study. Although there is some debate around the exact meaning, ‘lexical typology’ – as it has come to be known – is, at its broadest, the systematic study of cross-linguistic variation in words and vocabularies (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2008; Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. 2016). This special issue will treat lexico-semantic phenomena showing parallels across languages and address how these similarities may be described and accounted for – by universal tendencies, genetic relations among the languages, their contacts and/or their common extra-linguistic surrounding.

Morphosyntactic and phonological features are regularly used by linguists to establish the existence of linguistic areas and construct areally based typologies. By contrast, lexico-semantic phenomena have, with a few exceptions (e.g., Brown 2011; Enfield 2003; Matisoff 2004; Smith-Stark 1994; Sobolev 2001), received remarkably little attention from areal linguistics and areal typology, and little is known about the geographical variation they display. Matisoff (2004), Vanhove (2008), Zalizniak et al. (2012) and Urban (2012) give numerous examples of cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of polysemy; whilst some are found the world over, others are clearly areally restricted and witnesses of language contact.

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.

The chapter compares the temperature adjectives ('hot', 'cold' etc.) across Slavic against a broader typological background. The comparison targets both the systems as a whole and the forms involved in them. The main questions are how (dis)similar the temperature systems of closely related languages can be, and what is stable vs. changeable in the temperature terms of closely related languages. Slavic languages show substantial cross-linguistic variation in their systems (ranging from two to four main temperature values), while on the whole confirming several earlier tentative generalizations in Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2015). The temperature terms themselves differ in stability, both in meaning and in form (with 'warm' being the most stable term on both counts), even though most of them are traceable to proto-Slavic and even to proto-Indo-European. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world.

Linguistic expressions are instrumental in categorizing the world. Prototype semantics holds that categorization is centered on best exemplars, or prototypes, with other potential members of the categories evaluated in accordance with their similarity to it. Prototype effects have been documented in language acquisition and learning, reaction times, priming effects, saliency in listing tasks, etc. The debated issues include what the prototype really is and whether it changes with context. An important extension of categorization research concerns cross-linguistic comparison: what is universal and what is language specific in linguistic categorization and to what extent the emerging categories can be accounted for by reference to prototypes.