@inproceedings{franco-etal-2022-deconstructing,
    title = "Deconstructing destruction: A Cognitive Linguistics perspective on a computational analysis of diachronic change",
    author = "Franco, Karlien  and
      Montes, Mariana  and
      Heylen, Kris",
    editor = "Tahmasebi, Nina  and
      Montariol, Syrielle  and
      Kutuzov, Andrey  and
      Hengchen, Simon  and
      Dubossarsky, Haim  and
      Borin, Lars",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2022.lchange-1.3/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.lchange-1.3",
    pages = "23--32",
    abstract = "In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms. We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as {\textquoteleft}to destroy', replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models. Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core."
}