Previous linguistic research on scientific writing has shown that language use in the scientific domain varies considerably in register and style over time. In this paper we investigate the introduction of information theory inspired features to study long term diachronic change on three levels: lexis, part-of-speech and syntax. Our approach is based on distinguishing between sentences from 19t...

The various chapters of this handbook have painted a fairly complete picture of what morphology is, what constructs are needed in the morphological component of a grammar, and how these constructs interact with one another and with other parts of the grammar. For the most part, the perspective taken on these questions has been purely synchronic, yet, as with all aspects of language (and indeed ...

The primary goal of Evolutionary Phonology is to explain recurrent sound patterns in spoken languages across time and space. One domain of explanation is diachronic, and much of my own work has focused on diachronic explanations (e.g. Blevins 2004, 2006a, To appear a, To appear b, To appear c, this volume). Another domain of explanation is synchronic. A range of synchronic factors, from the mec...

The annotation of large corpora is usually restricted to syntactic structure and word class. Pure lexical information and information on the structure of words are stored in specialized dictionaries (Baayen et al., 1995). Both data structures – dictionary and text corpus – can be matched to get e.g. a distribution of certain (restricted) lexical information from a text. This procedure works fin...

Since the 1990s, the Brown ‘family’ corpora have been widely used for various diachronic studies of 20th century English language. However, the existing methodologies failed to exploit its full potential as they only used the four main text categories. In this paper, we present the results of two experiments on diachronic changes of the Coleman-Liau readability Index (CLI) in British and Americ...

In this paper I discuss the foundations of a formal theory of coherent and conservative belief change that is (a) suitable to be used as a method for constructing iterated changes of belief, (b) sensitive to the history of earlier belief changes, and (c) independent of any form of dispositional coherence. I review various ways to conceive the relationship between the beliefs actually held by an...

This paper presents a new approach to detecting and tracking changes in word meaning by visually modeling and representing diachronic development in word contexts. Previous studies have shown that computational models are capable of clustering and disambiguating senses, a more recent trend investigates whether changes in word meaning can be tracked by automatic methods. The aim of our study is ...

Proper names are usually key to understanding the information contained in a document. Our work focuses on increasing the vocabulary coverage of a speech transcription system by automatically retrieving new proper names from contemporary diachronic text documents. The idea is to use in-vocabulary proper names as an anchor to collect new linked proper names from the diachronic corpus. Our assump...

Objective Bayesianism has been criticised on the grounds that objective Bayesian updating, which on a finite outcome space appeals to the maximum entropy principle, differs from Bayesian conditionalisation. The main task of this paper is to show that this objection backfires: the difference between the two forms of updating reflects negatively on Bayesian conditionalisation rather than on objec...

In this article we present a Semantic Web-based model for creating lexical resources in which the diachronic and, more broadly, contextual dimensions of word meaning can be explicitly represented as part of a graph-based data structure. We start by discussing why Linked Data is the right publishing approach for such diachronic datasets. We then describe our model, lemonEty, which utilizes the o...