One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood. Colexification -- the phenomenon of expressing multiple distinct concepts using the same word form -- serves as a valuable window onto the dynamics of meaning change across languages. Here, we apply phylogenetic comparative models to dictionary data from three language families, Austronesian, Indo-European, and Uralic, in order to shed light on the evolutionary dynamics underlying the colexification of concept pairs. We assess the effects of three predictors: associativity, borrowability, and usage frequency. Our results show that more closely related concept pairs are colexified across a larger portion of the family tree and exhibit slower rates of change. In contrast, concept pairs that are more frequent and more prone to borrowing tend to change more rapidly and are less often colexified. We also find considerable differences between the language families under study, suggesting that areal and cultural factors may play a role.

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.