Abstract
This study investigates the mutual effects over time of semantically related function words on each other’s distribution over syntactic environments. Words that can have the same meaning are observed to have opposite trends of change in frequency across different syntactic structures which correspond to the shared meaning. This phenomenon is demonstrated to have a rational basis: it increases communicative efficiency by prioritizing words differently in the environments on which they compete.- Anthology ID:
- W19-4719
- 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:
- 151–160
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-4719
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-4719
- Cite (ACL):
- Omer Korat. 2019. The Rationality of Semantic Change. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 151–160, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- The Rationality of Semantic Change (Korat, LChange 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W19-4719.pdf