Visualising Typological Relationships: Plotting WALS with Heat Maps

We present a quantitative investigation of the cross-linguistic usage of some (relatively) newly minted derivational morphemes. In particular, we examine the lexical semantic content expressed by three suffixes originating in English: -gate, -geddon and -athon. Using data from newspapers, we look at the distribution and lexical semantic usage of these morphemes not only within English, but across several languages and also across time, with a time-depth of 20 years. The occurrence of these suffixes in available corpora are comparatively rare, however, by investigating huge amounts of data, we are able to arrive at interesting insights into the distribution, meaning and spread of the suffixes. Processing and understanding the huge amounts of data is accomplished via visualization methods that allow the presentation of an overall distributional picture, with further details and different types of perspectives available on demand.