摘要：The comment by Narrog (2010) raises various issues concerning my approach to semantic maps as presented in Cysouw (2010a). I thank Narrog for pointing out these issues because his comment gives me the opportunity to clarify a few conceptual assumptions that might not have been made explicit in the original paper (some of those assumptions are discussed in Cysouw (2008), which can be seen as the companion paper to Cysouw (2010a)). As a general conclusion, though, I wholeheartedly agree with Narrog that the endeavor of creating semantic maps is time well spent. My plea to be careful with their interpretation¡ªbecause semantic maps are always to be interpreted relative to the many analytical decisions made by a researcher (thus, more than one map is possible with the same data)¡ªshould surely not be interpreted as claiming that the creation of semantic maps is a futile and wholly relativistic research program. Far from that, I believe that the basic insight leading to semantic maps, namely that linguistic diversity can be used as a tool to investigate meaning, allows for breathtakingly new theories of language. My main problem with the ¨Dclassical¡¬ approach to semantic maps is that it is not using the full power of this insight and unnecessarily restricts itself to a single form of display. More variation in the graphical display of semantic maps is possible, and it is sorely needed in order to deal with the many different kinds of data amenable to the semantic map approach
