Deconstructing destruction: A Cognitive Linguistics perspective on a computational analysis of diachronic change
Karlien Franco, Mariana Montes, Kris Heylen · 2022
In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms.We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as 'to destroy', replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models.Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core.