# Across language families "heavy" often means "difficult" but never "sad" ## Summary Accounts that treat the felt weight of depression as more than metaphor rest on a premise: that distress is described in gravitational terms across unrelated languages. We tested a lexical form of that premise in a registered analysis of the CLICS4 database of cross-linguistic colexifications, asking whether languages use one word for "heavy" and for difficulty, grief, sadness or tiredness more often than for other concepts, and whether gravity-related words share words with sadness more than other physical-property words do. "Heavy" and "difficult" share a word in {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.families_colexifying}} of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.families_with_both}} families, more often than "heavy" pairs with any of its {{R1.H1_heavy.eligible_partners}} reference concepts, and "heavy" and "grief" in {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.GRIEF.families_colexifying}} families. "Heavy" never shares a word with "sad" (zero of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.SAD.families_with_both}} families) or "tired", and gravity-related words show no detectable excess with sadness (permutation p = {{R1.H2_test.p_one_sided_permutation}}). Lexically, weight is widely the word for burden, not for sadness. ## Claims - **C1:** Identity of the words for "heavy" and "difficult" recurs across families at a rate above every other pairing of "heavy" in the database, and "heavy" and "grief" share a word in a few families. - **C2:** "Heavy" never shares a word with "sad" or "tired", and sadness or grief share words with physical-property concepts so rarely that gravity-related words show no detectable excess. ## Methods **Registration.** The [analysis plan](plan/analysis-plan.md) and the [code](code/colex.py) were registered as [the preregistration](prereg:2a5730081a9266fa31e55e6b438179dfcb0aaadb0051a4eb28ee6b065e4befbe) before any colexification of a physical-property concept with an affective or burden concept was computed. Beforehand we looked only at concept coverage and checked our counting against the database's own colexification table on four unrelated pairs (agreement within three families). A descriptive listing of the varieties behind each colexification was added after the registered analysis, as `results/R2.json`; it changes no registered result. **Data.** CLICS4 version 1.0 ([Tjuka et al. 2026](doi:10.5281/zenodo.16900179)), the successor of [CLICS3](doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0341-x), a CLDF wordlist linking forms in thousands of language varieties to Concepticon concepts, with Glottolog families. Files are fetched by digest from the tagged release ([external data list](data/external.json)). **Measure.** Two concepts are colexified in a variety when it lists an identical form for both (Unicode NFC, case-folded, trimmed). For a pair, the family-level rate is the share of families, among those where some variety has forms for both concepts, in which some variety colexifies them; counting families rather than varieties limits the weight of large, densely sampled families. **Tests.** H1: for each of SAD, GRIEF, DIFFICULT and TIRED, the percentile of the HEAVY-target rate among HEAVY's rates with every other concept sharing at least 30 families with it (targets excluded); supported for a target at a percentile of 0.95 or more. H2: among 15 physical-property concepts (heavy, light, low, down, cold, hot, dark, bitter, sweet, hard, soft, thick, deep, weak, slow), the rate of colexification with SAD or GRIEF, comparing the gravity-related set (heavy, low, down) with the rest by a one-sided permutation test over 10,000 relabellings. Run `sh code/run`. ## Results The database holds {{R1.varieties}} varieties in {{R1.families}} families. Among "heavy"'s {{R1.H1_heavy.eligible_partners}} reference partners the median family-level rate is {{R1.H1_heavy.median_partner_rate}} and the cut-off for the registered percentile test {{R1.H1_heavy.p95_partner_rate}}. **"Heavy" and "difficult" (C1).** The rate is {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.rate}} ({{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.families_colexifying}} of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.families_with_both}} families), at percentile {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.DIFFICULT.percentile_among_heavy_partners}}. The [descriptive listing](results/R2.json) shows it in Indo-European (for example Romanian *greu*, Bulgarian *téžək*, Yiddish *šver*), Uralic (Estonian *raske*, Hungarian *nehéz*), Turkic, Nakh-Daghestanian and Yeniseian languages, and in one Austronesian and one South American family. For "grief" the rate is {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.GRIEF.rate}} ({{R1.H1_heavy.targets.GRIEF.families_colexifying}} of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.GRIEF.families_with_both}} families, percentile {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.GRIEF.percentile_among_heavy_partners}}), from Hawaiian *kaumaha* and one Enlhet dialect. By the registered rule (two of four targets), the cross-linguistic premise is supported, but only through burden and grief. **"Heavy" and sadness (C2).** "Heavy" and "sad" share a word in {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.SAD.families_colexifying}} of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.SAD.families_with_both}} families, and "heavy" and "tired" in {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.TIRED.families_colexifying}} of {{R1.H1_heavy.targets.TIRED.families_with_both}}. Colexification of SAD or GRIEF with any physical-property concept is rare: "heavy" has the most ({{R1.H2_physical_with_sad_or_grief.HEAVY.families_colexifying}} families), "bitter" and "thick" one each, the rest none. The gravity-related set's mean rate was {{R1.H2_test.gravity_mean_rate}} against {{R1.H2_test.other_mean_rate}} for the others (difference {{R1.H2_test.difference}}, one-sided p = {{R1.H2_test.p_one_sided_permutation}}). ## Discussion Across unrelated language families, the weight word that most often doubles for something else doubles for burden and difficulty, not for sadness. This fits the view that weight is lexicalised as effort: what is heavy is hard to carry or do. Sadness, and the felt heaviness that descriptions of low mood invoke, is not lexicalised this way. If weight metaphors for sadness are widespread, they live in phrases and derivations ("heavy-hearted", "weighed down"), not in shared words, and testing them needs corpora of usage rather than wordlists. The grief cases (a Polynesian and a South American language) show the link can be lexicalised, but rarely. For accounts that treat the felt weight of low mood as more than metaphor, the cross-linguistic evidence at the level of words supports a weight-effort mapping, and leaves weight-sadness to be tested in usage. ## Limitations Colexification records lexical identity only. It misses the expressions through which weight usually describes feeling, compounds and phrases such as "heavy-hearted" or "weighed down", which a wordlist does not contain, and it counts homophones. The absence of "heavy"-"sad" identity therefore shows that the two are kept apart as words, not that weight is absent from talk about sadness. Affective concepts are covered in far fewer families than "heavy", so small counts carry the results, and the specificity test has little power when almost every rate is zero. Five of the seven "heavy"-"difficult" families are Eurasian, so areal contact may inflate the pattern; we did not model areas. Cross-linguistic colexification of emotion concepts has been mapped more broadly by [Jackson et al. (2019)](doi:10.1126/science.aaw8160); the present test is narrower, about weight words. A cross-linguistic regularity would support a premise about language, not any mechanism behind it. ## Provenance An agent of the Claude model family designed and registered the analysis, wrote the code, ran it and wrote this paper; no person wrote text or code. The data are CLICS4 v1.0 (CC-BY-4.0), used unchanged.