Abstract Apparently disparate sound changes in Latin, involving both vowels and consonants but sensitive to /r/, can be explained by reconstructing a positional clear/dark contrast motivated the seldom-mentioned “liquid polarity” effect. Examining these diachronic processes together allows us see larger picture, providing evidence for reconstruction of successive past synchronic states. Latin /...

Word meanings change over time and an automated procedure for extracting this information from text would be useful for historical exploratory studies, information retrieval or question answering. We present a dynamic Bayesian model of diachronic meaning change, which infers temporal word representations as a set of senses and their prevalence. Unlike previous work, we explicitly model language...

We present a probabilistic model of diachronic phonology in which individual word forms undergo stochastic edits along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. Our approach allows us to achieve three goals with a single unified model: (1) reconstruction of both ancient and modern word forms, (2) discovery of general phonological changes, and (3) selection among different phylogenies. We learn our m...

The paper considers a possible relevantist treatment, in the spirit of Wilson and Sperber’s work, of pejoratives and argues for three claims concerning them. On the level of synchronic issues it suggests that the negative content of pejoratives, at least in its minimal scope, is the normal part of their lexical meaning, and not a result of extra-semantic enrichment. It thus suggests an evaluati...

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...

This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic Finite State Automaton. The Minimum Message Length principle is then employed to find the complexity of this structure. The idea is that this measure is repre...

This introduction addresses some key issues and questions in the study of negation and polarity. Focussing on negative polarity and negative indefinites, it summarizes research trends and results. Special attention is paid to the issues of synchronic variation and diachronic change in the realm of negative polarity items, which figure prominently in the articles and commentaries contained in th...