Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key

Claire Bowern


Abstract
I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate models in Pama-Nyungan to identify meaning classes most appropriate for lexical phylogenetic inference, particularly highlighting the importance of variation in studying change over time.
Anthology ID:
W19-4706
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
48–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4706
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4706
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claire Bowern. 2019. Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 48–55, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key (Bowern, LChange 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4706.pdf