Diachronic unity is the belief that, despite changes, we are the same person across the lifespan. We propose that diachronic unity is supported by the experience of remembering the self over time during episodic recall (i.e., phenomenological continuity). However, we also predict that diachronic unity is also possible when episodic memory is impaired, as long as the ability to construct life na...

In philosophy, the criteria for personhood (PH) at a specific point in time (synchronic), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity (PI) over time (diachronic) are traditionally separated. Hence, the transition between both timescales of a person's life remains largely unclear. Personal habits reflect a decision-making (DM) process that binds together synchronic and diach...

This paper reviews state-of-the-art of one emerging field in computational linguistics — semantic change computation, proposing a framework that summarizes the literature by identifying and expounding five essential components in the field: diachronic corpus, diachronic word sense characterization, change modelling, evaluation data and data visualization. Despite the potential of the field, the...

In this study we investigate the impact of affectedness on the diachronic development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. DOM in Spanish synchronically depends on (i) the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and (ii) the semantics of the verb. Several studies have also shown that the diachronic development of DOM proceeds along the Animacy ...

This paper deals with the construction of a maximally flexible corpus architecture for building and analyzing diachronic corpora. Historical data poses many challenges with regard to representation and analysis, and diachronic corpora are even more varied and unsystematic (Claridge, 2008). Since historical and diachronic corpora are so difficult and expensive to build, it is crucial that they b...

Pronominal affixes in polysynthetic languages have an ambiguous status in the sense that they have characteristics normally associated with free pronouns as well as characteristics associated with agreement markers. This situation arises because pronominal affixes represent intermediate stages in a diachronic development from independent pronouns to agreement markers. Because this diachronic ch...

A diachronic thesaurus is a lexical resource that aims to map between modern terms and their semantically related terms in earlier periods. In this paper, we investigate the task of collecting a list of relevant modern target terms for a domain-specific diachronic thesaurus. We propose a supervised learning scheme, which integrates features from two closely related fields: Terminology Extractio...

In this paper we present the results of a study investigating the diachronic changes of four stylistic features: average sentence length, Automated Readability Index, lexical density and lexical richness in 20th century written English language. All experiments were conducted on the largest existing diachronic corpora of British and American English – the Brown ‘family’ corpora, employing NLP t...

The origin of the uvular trill [ö] in the languages of Western Europe is a matter of some debate. The diachronic change from an alveolar trill to a uvular trill is widely believed to be standard and the reverse process seems unattested. The present study approaches this diachronic asymmetry by examining the aerodynamics of uvular and alveolar trills produced under laboratory conditions.