Temporal Word Embeddings in the Study of Metaphor Change over Time and across Genres: A Proof-of-concept Study on English

Veronica Mangiaterra, Chiara Barattieri Di San Pietro, Valentina Bambini


Abstract
Temporal word embeddings have been successfully employed in semantic change research to identify and trace shifts in the meaning of words. In a previous work, we developed an approach to study the diachrony of complex expressions, namely literary metaphors extracted from Italian literary texts. Capitalizing on the evidence that measures of cosine similarity between the two terms of a metaphor approximate human judgments on the difficulty of the expression, we used time-locked measures of similarity to reconstruct the evolution of processing costs of literary metaphors over the past two centuries. In this work, we present a proof-of-concept study testing the crosslinguistic applicability of this approach on a set of 19th-century English literary metaphors. Our results show that metaphors changed as a function of textual genre but not of epoch: cosine similarity between the two terms of literary metaphors is higher in literary compared to nonliterary texts, and this difference is stable across epochs. We show that the difference between genres is affected by the frequency of the metaphor’s vehicle and the stability of the meaning of both topic and vehicle. Overall, the processing costs of English literary metaphors do not differin different time points, but are influenced by the textual genres of language. In a broader perspective, general considerations can be drawn about the history of literary and nonliterary English language and the semantic change of words
Anthology ID:
2024.clicit-1.65
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024)
Month:
December
Year:
2024
Address:
Pisa, Italy
Editors:
Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venue:
CLiC-it
SIG:
Publisher:
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Note:
Pages:
548–555
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.65/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Veronica Mangiaterra, Chiara Barattieri Di San Pietro, and Valentina Bambini. 2024. Temporal Word Embeddings in the Study of Metaphor Change over Time and across Genres: A Proof-of-concept Study on English. In Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024), pages 548–555, Pisa, Italy. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Cite (Informal):
Temporal Word Embeddings in the Study of Metaphor Change over Time and across Genres: A Proof-of-concept Study on English (Mangiaterra et al., CLiC-it 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.65.pdf