{"pk":25832,"title":"A Computational Evaluation of Two Laws of Semantic Change","subtitle":null,"abstract":"For more than a century scholars have proposed laws of se-\nmantic change that characterize how words change in meaning\nover time. Two such laws are the law of differentiation, which\nproposes that near-synonyms tend to differentiate in meaning\nover time, and the law of parallel change, which proposes that\nrelated words tend to undergo parallel changes in meaning. Re-\nsearchers have identified a handful of changes that are consis-\ntent with each proposed law, but there are no systematic eval-\nuations that assess the validity and generality of these compet-\ning laws. Here we evaluate these laws by using a large corpus\nto assess how thousands of related words changed in meaning\nover the twentieth century. Our analyses show that the law of\nparallel change applies more broadly than the law of differ-\nentiation, and thereby illustrate how large-scale computational\nanalyses can place laws of semantic change on a more secure\nfooting.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"semantic change; law of differentiation; law of\nparallel change; computational semantics"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6301h6rd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Charles","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kemp","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25832/galley/15456/download/"}]}