Vector spaces for historical linguistics: Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony
Florent Perek · 2014
This paper describes an application of dis-tributional semantics to the study of syn-tactic productivity in diachrony, i.e., the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical items over time. By providing an empirical measure of seman-tic similarity between words derived from lexical co-occurrences, distributional se-mantics not only reliably captures how the verbs in the distribution of a construc-tion are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic develop-ment of a construction over time and iden-tify the semantic determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data. 1