Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key

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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