From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level

Quentin Feltgen


Abstract
Language change has often been conceived as a competition between linguistic variants. However, language units may be complex organizations in themselves, e.g. in the case of schematic constructions, featuring a free slot. Such a slot is filled by words forming a set or ‘paradigm’ and engaging in inter-related dynamics within this constructional environment. To tackle this complexity, a simple computational method is offered to automatically characterize their interactions, and visualize them through networks of cooperation and competition. Applying this method to the French paradigm of quantifiers, I show that this method efficiently captures phenomena regarding the evolving organization of constructional paradigms, in particular the constitution of competing clusters of fillers that promote different semantic strategies overall.
Anthology ID:
2022.lchange-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Lars Borin
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
44–53
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lchange-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.lchange-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Quentin Feltgen. 2022. From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 44–53, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level (Feltgen, LChange 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lchange-1.5.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.lchange-1.5.mp4