A computational analysis of crosslinguistic regularity in semantic change

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• dc.contributor.author Fugikawa, Olivia
• dc.contributor.author Hayman, Oliver
• dc.contributor.author Liu, Raymond
• dc.contributor.author Yu, Lei
• dc.contributor.author Brochhagen, Thomas
• dc.contributor.author Xu, Yang
• dc.date.accessioned 2023-07-05T07:03:45Z
• dc.date.available 2023-07-05T07:03:45Z
• dc.date.issued 2023
• dc.description.abstract Semantic change is attested commonly in the historical development of lexicons across the world’s languages. Extensive research has sought to characterize regularity in semantic change, but existing studies have typically relied on manual approaches or the analysis of a restricted set of languages. We present a large-scale computational analysis to explore regular patterns in word meaning change shared across many languages. We focus on two levels of analysis: (1) regularity in directionality, which we explore by inferring the historical direction of semantic change between a sourcemeaning and a targetmeaning; (2) regularity in source-target mapping, which we explore by inferring the target meaning given a sourcemeaning.We work with DatSemShift, the world’s largest public database of semantic change that records thousands ofmeaning changes fromover hundreds of languages. For directionality inference, we find that concreteness explains directionality in more than 70% of the attested cases of semantic change and is the strongest predictor among the alternatives including frequency and valence. For target inference, we find that a parallelogram-style analogy model based on contextual embeddings predicts the attested source-targetmappings substantially better than chance and similarity-based models. Clustering the meaning pairs of semantic change reveals regular meaning shiftings between domains, such as body parts to geological formations. Our study provides an automated approach and large-scale evidence for multifaceted regularity in semantic change across languages.
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Fugikawa O, Hayman O, Liu R, Yu L, Brochhagen T, Xu Y. A computational analysis of crosslinguistic regularity in semantic change. Front. Commun. 2023;8:1136338. DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1136338
• dc.identifier.doi https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1136338
• dc.identifier.issn 2297-900X
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57466
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Frontiers
• dc.relation.ispartof Frontiers in communication. 2023;8:1136338.
• dc.rights © 2023 Fugikawa, Hayman, Liu, Yu, Brochhagen and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Word meaning
• dc.subject.keyword Historical semantics
• dc.subject.keyword Semantic change
• dc.subject.keyword Crosslinguistic regularity
• dc.subject.keyword Computational analysis
• dc.title A computational analysis of crosslinguistic regularity in semantic change
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion