arXiv cs.CL· Weiran Wang, Wenjuan Qin, Haitao Liu·· 13 小时前AI 评分29
81 种语言的意义收敛与分化：重新审视语言相对论
Where meanings converge and diverge: Revisiting linguistic relativity across 81 languages
AI 导读
研究用两个多语言模型的词嵌入比较了 81 种语言中 196 个基本概念之间的关系结构，发现跨语言对应程度在社会文化类意义上高于自然与运动类意义，这一对比在不同模型和分类下均成立。在社会文化领域内，关系差异随地理距离增大而增加，亲缘关系较远的语言在各领域差异都更大。结果表明普遍性与相对性在不同概念域中交织，并预测人类语义判断在社会文化意义上会有更高的跨语言一致性。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Do people who speak different languages organize concepts in similar ways? This question lies at the heart of the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis and debates about linguistic relativity. Shared basic meanings, however, need not imply shared relations among them. We compared relations among 196 basic concepts across 81 languages, using word embeddings from two multilingual models to quantify conceptual structure expressed in language. Cross-language correspondence was greater for sociocultural meanings than for meanings concerning nature and motion, a contrast recurring across models and classifications. Within the sociocultural domain, relational differences increased with geographic separation; less closely related languages differed more across all domains. These findings suggest that universality and relativity are interwoven across conceptual domains. They inform an account in which shared cognitive resources interact with linguistic and local experience, and predict greater cross-language correspondence in human semantic judgments for sociocultural than for nature and motion meanings.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.30778 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.30778v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.30778 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Weiran Wang [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:57:24 UTC (1,049 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CL · arxiv.org