A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages

Claims about lexical elaboration (e.g. Mongolian has many horse-related terms) are widespread in the scholarly and popular literature. Here we introduce BILA, a dataset including 1606 bilingual dictionaries, and show how it can be used to study lexical elaboration at scale. We first validate our approach by showing that it confirms 146 out of 163 previous claims from the literature. We then identify previously unreported examples of lexical elaboration, and analyze how lexical elaboration relates to ecological and cultural variables. Claims about lexical elaboration are sometimes dismissed as either obvious or fanciful, but our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture.