Abstract
Language change has often been conceived as a competition between linguistic variants. However, language units may be complex organizations in themselves, e.g. in the case of schematic constructions, featuring a free slot. Such a slot is filled by words forming a set or ‘paradigm’ and engaging in inter-related dynamics within this constructional environment. To tackle this complexity, a simple computational method is offered to automatically characterize their interactions, and visualize them through networks of cooperation and competition. Applying this method to the French paradigm of quantifiers, I show that this method efficiently captures phenomena regarding the evolving organization of constructional paradigms, in particular the constitution of competing clusters of fillers that promote different semantic strategies overall.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.lchange-1.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Venue:
- LChange
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 44–53
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.lchange-1.5
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.lchange-1.5
- Cite (ACL):
- Quentin Feltgen. 2022. From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 44–53, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level (Feltgen, LChange 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2022.lchange-1.5.pdf