摘要：I first wish to thank Lestrade that he has taken interest in the topic of my contribution, and that he invested his time and energy in discussing issues brought up in my paper. And, to state this right at the beginning: I agree with the main point that his comment brings up, namely that representation of diachronic directionality and (synchronic) statistical information are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The simplest combination of these two types of information is probably to represent frequency of co-occurrence of two meanings or functions as the thickness of the arrow connecting them on a .classical map., as Lestrade also observes. If we are dealing with raw numbers, this does not require much mathematical sophistication. The question would rather be how much importance one assigns to this information, a question depending on the researcher.s theoretical biases. On the other hand, "draw[ing] arrows with different lengths on an MDS map" (Lestrade 2010) does not seem to be possible because the distances between points on a MDS map are the result of a statistical calculation, and manipulation of these distances would render the map meaningless (as a statistical map). However, arrows could be inserted between points on an MDS map. The ease with which this is possible will essentially depend on the nature of the data represented in the map. Croft and Toole.s (2008:15) map of indefinite pronouns, for example, would allow this as it features single points for each function, and it contains neither clustering nor overlap, but this is rather an exceptional case. In favor of classical maps, van der Auwera (2008) and Malchukov (2010) also point out that a .classical. map, being the result of .manual. analysis by the researcher, reflects the diachronic dimension more reliably, since diachronic noise can be excluded, while MDS maps are impartial with respect to the quality of the information on which they were built. As this point is discussed at length in the two papers just mentioned, I will not go into it any further
