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
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/W19-4706.pdf