Computational approaches to semantic change (Volume 6)

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans

Emotions in motion. Towards a corpus-based description of the diachronic evolution of anger words

This paper outlines some of the challenges and possibilities of a corpus-based approach to the diachronic description of the semantics of emotion words. It analyses three German anger words (Wut, Zorn and Ärger) in two corpora: DTA (Deutsches Textarchiv, covering the period 1600-1899) and DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, which covers twentieth-century German). The study is based on two complementary approaches: a semantic and pragmatic analysis of co-occurrences (Oster, 2012); and the use of semantic foci (Ogarkova & Soriano, 2014). This allows for a detailed description of the semantic evolution of the three anger words for four aspects of emotion – Control, Lack of Control, Visibility and Internalization – while exploring the advantages of a combined quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis

Registerial adaptation vs. innovation across situational contexts : 18th century women in transition

Endeavors to computationally model language variation and change are ever increasing. While analyses of recent diachronic trends are frequently conducted, long-term trends accounting for sociolinguistic variation are less well-studied. Our work sheds light on the temporal dynamics of language use of British 18th century women as a group in transition across two situational contexts. Our findings reveal that in formal contexts women adapt to register conventions, while in informal contexts they act as innovators of change in language use influencing others. While adopted from other disciplines, our methods inform (historical) sociolinguistic work in novel ways. These methods include diachronic periodization by Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine periods of change and relevant features of variation, and event cascades as influencer models.Peer reviewe

Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar

In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.. Readership: The book is especially relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics

A Methodology to Measure the Diachronic Language Distance between Three Languages Based on Perplexity

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics on 01 Mar 2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09296174.2020.1732177The aim of this paper is to apply a corpus-based methodology, based on the measure of perplexity, to automatically calculate the cross-lingual language distance between historical periods of three languages. The three historical corpora have been constructed and collected with the closest spelling to the original on a balanced basis of fiction and non-fiction. This methodology has been applied to measure the historical distance of Galician with respect to Portuguese and Spanish, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century, both in original spelling and automatically transcribed spelling. The quantitative results are contrasted with hypotheses extracted from experts in historical linguistics. Results show that Galician and Portuguese are varieties of the same language in the Middle Ages and that Galician converges and diverges with Portuguese and Spanish since the last period of the 19th century. In this process, orthography plays a relevant role. It should be pointed out that the method is unsupervised and can be applied to other languagesThis work has received financial support from DOMINO project [PGC2018-102041-B-I00, MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE]; eRisk project [RTI2018-093336-B-C21]; the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2016-2019, ED431G/08, Consolidation and structuring of Groups with Growth Potential: 745ED431B 2017/39) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)S

Optimizing scientific communication : the role of relative clauses as markers of complexity in English and German scientific writing between 1650 and 1900

The aim of this thesis is to show that both scientific English and German have become increasingly optimized for scientific communication from 1650 to 1900 by adapting the usage of relative clauses as markers of grammatical complexity. While the lexico-grammatical changes in terms of features and their frequency distribution in scientific writing during this period are well documented, in the present work we are interested in the underlying factors driving these changes and how they affect efficient scientific communication. As the scientific register emerges and evolves, it continuously adapts to the changing communicative needs posed by extra-linguistic pressures arising from the scientific community and its achievements. We assume that, over time, scientific language maintains communicative efficiency by balancing lexico-semantic expansion with a reduction in (lexico-)grammatical complexity on different linguistic levels. This is based on the idea that linguistic complexity affects processing difficulty and, in turn, communicative efficiency. To achieve optimization, complexity is adjusted on the level of lexico-grammar, which is related to expectation-based processing cost, and syntax, which is linked to working memory-based processing cost. We conduct five corpus-based studies comparing English and German scientific writing to general language. The first two investigate the development of relative clauses in terms of lexico-grammar, measuring the paradigmatic richness and syntagmatic predictability of relativizers as indicators of expectation-based processing cost. The results confirm that both levels undergo a reduction in complexity over time. The other three studies focus on the syntactic complexity of relative clauses, investigating syntactic intricacy, locality, and accessibility. Results show that intricacy and locality decrease, leading to lower grammatical complexity and thus mitigating memory-based processing cost. However, accessibility is not a factor of complexity reduction over time. Our studies reveal a register-specific diachronic complexity reduction in scientific language both in lexico-grammar and syntax. The cross-linguistic comparison shows that English is more advanced in its register-specific development while German lags behind due to a later establishment of the vernacular as a language of scientific communication.This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 232722074 – SFB 110