In this study, we present the results of the investigation of diachronic stylistic changes in 20th century religious texts in two major English language varieties – British and American. We examined a total of 146 stylistic features, divided into three main feature sets: (average sentence length, Automated readability index, lexical density and lexical richness), part-of-speech frequencies and ...

This paper describes the USAAR-CHRONOS participation in the Diachronic Text Evaluation task of SemEval-2015 to identify the time period of historical text snippets. We adapt a web crawler to retrieve the original source of the text snippets and determine the publication year of the retrieved texts from their URLs. We report a precision score of >90% in identifying the text epoch. Additionally, ...

Abstract This paper extends the scope of application semantic map model to diachronic lexical semantics. Combining a quantitative approach large-scale synchronic polysemy data with qualitative evaluation material in two text languages, ancient Egyptian and Greek, it shows that weighted maps can capture informative generalizations about organization lexicon its reshaping over time. The general m...

Abstract Diachronic emergence has recently been characterised as transformation. This aims to capture the thought that entities emerge are radically new or different. Transformation is hence closely linked with a central (but rarely raised) challenge for all emergentists: how account identity and individuation of involved in emergence. With this view, I develop probe four interpretations transf...

Difference and sameness -or identity -are correlated concepts: to understand one is to understand the other. I will distinguish two accounts of sameness and difference: first, an essentialist account of sameness against which an understanding of difference is presented as derivative; secondly, a contextualist account which relates both sameness and difference to a more fundamental horizon or co...

The aim of this paper is to show that Uzbek has the crosslinguistically rather unusual property of using two indefinite articles, namely the expressions bir and bitta. From a synchronic perspective the two indefinite articles can be shown to compete (at least in certain environments), and from a diachronic perspective there is evidence that bitta significantly expands to the expense of bir. The...