Hierarchy in lexical organisation of natural languages

Words have often been compared to living organisms. One of the first authors to develop this idea was the French linguist Arsène Darmesteter who wrote in 1887 a book entitled La vie des mots étudiée dans leurs significations (Darmesteter 1887). He described the evolution of the meanings of words as a 'struggle for life' (concurrence vitale in his own words). To stay alive, words need to occupy as much 'semantic ground' as possible, particularly by taking over 'territories' in new semantic domains, creating thus the important phenomenon of polysemy (see also Bréal, 1897). Some words enjoy real 'success stories', expanding their meanings in many different directions, in a rather monopolistic way, while others decline and eventually die.