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arXiv · 1906.05760

Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key

Claire Bowern
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Abstract

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate models in Pama-Nyungan to identify meaning classes most appropriate for lexical phylogenetic inference, particularly highlighting the importance of variation in studying change over time.

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Claire Bowern. 2019-06-13. Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05760

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