Martin Hilpert: "Meaning change in a petri dish: Constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts"
This talk will explore how the visualization tool of motion charts, i.e. ‘animated’ scatterplots that show temporal developments, can be used for the analysis of meaning change in linguistic constructions. In previous work (Hilpert 2011, 2013), motion charts have been used to represent diachronic frequency trends and also changes in the relative similarities between sets of linguistic units. An approach of this kind can reveal different kinds of developments, for instance that a verb diachronically gravitates towards one syntactic pattern, at the expense of a different pattern. It can also be shown that in a set of constructions, two members become more and more similar whereas the remaining members dissimilate. The present talk will build on these studies but present a new application of motion charts that is geared towards the analysis of meaning change. Specifically, the construction that will be analyzed is the many a NOUN construction (Hilpert 2012), which is exemplified by phrases such as many a time or many a day. Diachronic corpus data indicate that this construction has undergone a substantial frequency decrease over the past 150 years. Interestingly, this has not affected the productivity of the construction. Speakers can be frequently observed to use the construction with new noun types, as in many a Labrador-owner. In order to explore why this might be the case, a subset of the most frequent noun types occurring in the construction were analyzed through a semantic vector space model (Turney and Pantel 2010), which yields a two-dimensional scatterplot of noun types that can be seen as the ‘semantic landscape’ that is covered by the many a NOUN construction. In combination with diachronic frequency data, visualized through a motion chart, this kind of data can show which areas of the semantic landscape used to be more densely populated during earlier periods of English. It can also be shown whether the semantic landscape of a construction on the whole is shrinking or expanding. The case study of many a NOUN will be used to raise a many a question pertaining to productivity and speakers’ knowledge of language.
References
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax. [Studies in English Language] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hilpert, Martin. 2012. Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase. Studying many a noun in COHA. In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 233-244. Hilpert, Martin. 2011. Dynamic visualizations of language change: Motion charts on the basis of bivariate and multivariate data from diachronic corpora.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16/4, 435-461. Turney, Peter D. and Patrick Pantel. 2010. From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 37: 141-188.