Résultat de la recherche
Change in modal meanings: Another look at the shifting collocates of may
This paper discusses how modal auxiliaries fit into a constructional view of language and how this view allows us to think in new ways about diachronic meaning change in modal auxiliaries. These issues will be illustrated on the basis of a diachronic corpus-based study of the modal auxiliary may, specifically on changes in its collocational preferences during the past 200 years. The main point of this paper is the claim that a constructional view needs to take account of the mutual associations between modal auxiliaries and the lexical elements with which they occur. Changes in these mutual associations are usefully understood as change in a complex network of constructions.
Meaning change in a petri dish: constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts
This paper explores how the visualization tool of motion charts can be used for the analysis of meaning change in linguistic constructions. In previous work, linguistic motion charts have been used to represent diachronic frequency trends and changes in the morphosyntactic behavior of linguistic units. The present paper builds on that work, but it shifts the focus to the study of semantic change. How can motion charts be used to visualize semantic change over time? In order to answer this question, we draw on semantic vector space modeling to visualize aspects of linguistic meaning. As an analogy to this approach, the title of this paper alludes to a petri dish in which the growth and development of biological microorganisms can be observed. On the basis of diachronic corpus data, we monitor developments in the semantic ecology of a construction. This allows us to observe processes such as semantic broadening, semantic narrowing, or semantic shift. We illustrate our approach on the basis of a case study that investigates the diachrony of an English construction that we call the ‘many a NOUN’ construction.