Tree, firewood, and fire in the languages of Sahul

Abstract

Earlier literature has suggested that colexification of terms for ‘tree’, ‘firewood’ and ‘fire’ may be widespread in Australian and Papuan languages. This feature of Papuan and Australian languages has not yet been considered as a part of a single phenomenon, nor examined in any detail. This paper presents the first in-depth survey of lexical expressions encoding the concepts ‘tree’, ‘firewood’ and ‘fire’. Looking at 300 languages of Sahul, we plot the frequency and geographical distribution of colexification patterns for the three concepts in individual languages. We include analysis of the relationships between simple and complex terms for these concepts, which further elucidates geographic and genetic patterns of colexification and differentiation. Overall, we find that the most common pattern in the region is to colexify ‘firewood’ and ‘fire’, but not ‘tree’, contra earlier claims. Nevertheless, patterns present in Sahul are rare worldwide, indicating that Sahul is a large diffusion area worthy of further investigation in linguistic studies by Papuanists and Australianists collectively.