Diachronic Change in Verbal Agreement Patterns withMajorité

Diachronic Explanations of Sound Patterns

Phonological systems show clear signs of being shaped by phonetics. Sound patterns are overwhelmingly phonetically ‘natural’, in that they reflect the influence of physical constraints on speech production and perception, and categorical phonological processes often mirror low-level gradient phonetic effects. The question of how best to explain and model the influence of phonetics on phonology ...

Diachronic Word Sense Change Identification

Language has continuously changed over time. New senses for some words took birth while some old senses demised. For an example the word ‘instant’ which referred to the current month about a century ago but is now used to refer to a very small brief time; ‘economy’ referred to management of resources in the past and is now being referred to state of country in terms of productions. Diachronic w...

Analyzing lexical change in diachronic corpora

Identifying diachronic change in semantic relations

test the hypothesis that words which are similar in meaning occur in similar contexts, this being a corollary of the initial hypothesis that the meaning of a word is defined by the collocational company which it keeps. This similarity is measured by creating 'collocational profiles'-summaries of the words typically occurring in the context of a given word-for each unique word form (type) in a l...

Understanding Grammars through Diachronic Change

In this paper, I will vindicate the importance of syntactic change for the study of synchronic stages of natural languages, according to the following outline. First, I will analyze the relationship between the diachrony and synchrony of grammars, introducing some basic concepts: the notions of I-language/E-language, the role of Chomsky's (2005) three factors in language change, and some assump...