The Rationality of Semantic Change

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.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  LChange@ACL

• Publication date

  2019-08-01

• Fields of study

  Linguistics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.18653/v1/W19-4719
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• A Deeper Look into Dependency-Based Word Embeddings

  2018cited by this paper
• Evaluating the Stability of Embedding-based Word Similarities

  2018cited by this paper
• Conflict, cheap talk, and Jespersen’s cycle

  2017influential reference
• Analyzing imperfective games

  2017cited by this paper
• Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change

  2016cited by this paper
• Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change

  2016cited by this paper
• Aligning Packed Dependency Trees: A Theory of Composition for Distributional Semantics

  2016cited by this paper
• Dependency Based Embeddings for Sentence Classification Tasks

  2016cited by this paper
• Diachronic Analysis of the Italian Language exploiting Google Ngram

  2016cited by this paper
• Ambiguity Avoidance is Overrated

  2015cited by this paper
• A Computational Evaluation of Two Laws of Semantic Change

  2015cited by this paper
• The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization paths: The progressive to imperfective shift

  2015cited by this paper
• Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change

  2014cited by this paper
• A Survey of WordNet Annotated Corpora

  2014cited by this paper
• Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space

  2013cited by this paper
• Game-Theoretic Pragmatics Under Conflicting and Common Interests

  2013cited by this paper
• Modelling the “Aoristic Drift of the Present Perfect” as Inflation An Essay in Historical Pragmatics

  2012cited by this paper
• Knowledge and implicature: Modeling language understanding as social cognition

  2012cited by this paper
• Predicting Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Games

  2012cited by this paper
• Distributional Memory: A General Framework for Corpus-Based Semantics

  2010cited by this paper
• Prinzipien Der Sprachgeschichte

  2009cited by this paper
• Dependency-Based Construction of Semantic Space Models

  2007cited by this paper
• Logic and Conversation

  2005cited by this paper
• THE ROLE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN A THEORY OF GRAMMATICALIZATION

  1998cited by this paper
• From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure

  1996cited by this paper
• On the pragmatics of contrast

  1990cited by this paper
• On the coherence and structure of discourse

  1985cited by this paper
• When Nouns Surface as Verbs

  1979cited by this paper
• ‘Already’ and ‘yet’: a suppletive set of aspect-markers?

  1969cited by this paper
• Semantics, An Introduction to The Science of Meaning

  1965cited by this paper
• Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning

  1962cited by this paper
• THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROGRESSIVE TO IMPERFECTIVE DIACHRONIC CYCLE IN REINFORCEMENT-LEARNING AGENTS

  year unknowncited by this paper
• Essai de sémantique : (science des significations)

  year unknowncited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.