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

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families

Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

" The Siouan family comprises some twenty languages, historically spoken across a broad swath of the central North American plains and woodlands, as well as in parts of the southeastern United States. In spite of its geographical extent and diversity, and the size and importance of several Siouan-speaking tribes, this family has received relatively little attention in the linguistic literature and many of the individual Siouan languages are severely understudied. This volume aims to make work on Siouan languages more broadly available and to encourage deeper investigation of the myriad typological, theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogical issues they raise. The 17 chapters in this volume present a broad range of current Siouan research, focusing on various Siouan languages, from a variety of linguistic perspectives: historical-genetic, philological, applied, descriptive, formal/generative, and comparative/typological. The editors' preface summarizes characteristic features of the Siouan family, including head-final and ""verb-centered"" syntax, a complex system of verbal affixes including applicatives and subject-possessives, head-internal relative clauses, gendered speech markers, stop-systems including ejectives, and a preference for certain prosodic and phonotactic patterns. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Robert L. Rankin, a towering figure in Siouan linguistics throughout his long career, who passed away in February of 2014.

A Grammar of Brokpa: a Trans-Himalayan language of Bhutan

Pema Wangdi investigated the Brokpa language spoken in the Eastern Himalayas, and produced a comprehensive grammar of this language, accompanied by a collection of texts. His works dealt with the core areas of this language including its sound system, the structure of words, phrases, and sentences. Linguistic typologists, cultural anthropologists, and students are using his works

Cultural evolution of scalar categorization: how cognition and communication affect the structure of categories on scalar conceptual domains

Concepts can be thought of as regions of geometrically structured conceptual domains. Of all such possible regions, only very few are lexicalized, i.e. expressed by natural language in a morphologically simple fashion. In the thesis, I discuss lexicalized concepts on conceptual domains that are scalar, more specifically the concepts expressed by gradable adjectives and quantifiers. I consider two generalizations about such concepts. The first generalization is that lexicalized scalar concepts are monotonic, i.e. they can be defined in terms of a single threshold on the scale. The second is that if the conceptual domain has a maximum or a minimum, the threshold is often positioned at one of the extrema. I show that these two properties are non-trivial, in the sense that some scalar concepts, while semantically coherent and cognitively plausible, fail to have these properties. The main of this thesis is to develop an account of how these two properties of monotonicity and extremeness evolve. I focus first on monotonicity, and show with a computational model that its emergence can be explained as an adaptation of language to two pressures, namely a pressure favouring languages that are easy to learn and a pressure on languages to be useful in communication. This explanation of monotonicity relies on the assumption that language users are pragmatically skilful. Moreover, the model makes assumptions about the cognitive biases of the language users. These assumptions are tested in a series of six category learning experiments. The results of three of these experiments are analysed with a Bayesian cognitive model. Overall, the experimental results are inconclusive. I present an agent-based model where learners are neural networks, which provides evidence that monotonic categories are easier to learn than non-monotonic categories. Finally, I turn to the evolution of extremeness. Previous literature has focussed on the role that communicative accuracy plays in the evolution of extremeness. In contrast to previous approaches, I study the role of learning. I show with an evolutionary computational model that extreme categories evolve more often than chance even under a pressure from learning alone, as long as the language teachers and learners are pragmatically skilful