@inproceedings{luo-etal-2019-insanely,
    title = "From Insanely Jealous to Insanely Delicious: Computational Models for the Semantic Bleaching of {E}nglish Intensifiers",
    author = "Luo, Yiwei  and
      Jurafsky, Dan  and
      Levin, Beth",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/W19-4701",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-4701",
    pages = "1--13",
    abstract = "We introduce novel computational models for modeling semantic bleaching, a widespread category of change in which words become more abstract or lose elements of meaning, like the development of {``}arrive{''} from its earlier meaning {`}become at shore.{'} We validate our methods on a widespread case of bleaching in English: de-adjectival adverbs that originate as manner adverbs (as in {``}awfully behaved{''}) and later become intensifying adverbs (as in {``}awfully nice{''}). Our methods formally quantify three reflexes of bleaching: decreasing similarity to the source meaning (e.g., {``}awful{''}), increasing similarity to a fully bleached prototype (e.g., {``}very{''}), and increasing productivity (e.g., the breadth of adjectives that an adverb modifies). We also test a new causal model and find evidence that bleaching is initially triggered in contexts such as {``}conspicuously evident{''} and {``}insanely jealous{''}, where an adverb premodifies a semantically similar adjective. These contexts provide a form of {``}bridging context{''} (Evans and Wilkins, 2000) that allow a manner adverb to be reinterpreted as an intensifying adverb similar to {``}very{''}.",
}