We present a new approach for modeling diachronic linguistic change in grammatical usage. We illustrate the approach on English scientific writing in Late Modern English, focusing on grammatical patterns that are potentially indicative of shifts in register, genre and/or style. Commonly, diachronic change is characterized by the relative frequency of typical linguistic features over time. Howev...

English Historical Linguistics has a rich and long-standing tradition of corpus-based work (cf. the surveys in Rissanen 2008, Kytö 2012). Resources such as the HELSINKI corpus, the BROWN family of corpora, and ARCHER have spawned active research programs for the study of lexical and grammatical change, both long-term (Curzan 2008) and short-term (Mair 2008). In addition, corpus resources inform...

We provide motivation and a notation for representing in description logics certain \dynamic constraints" concerning changes of state. After providing a semantics for such descriptions using pairs of ordinary interpretations , we show that one can use existing DL inference engines to reason about such extended diachronic descriptions with no additional cost compared to the standard synchronic v...

In this paper, we report on our ongoing research on the development of a diachronic legal terminology, which deals with temporal changes in legal terms. Focusing on provisions for definitions in acts, we successfully extracted legal terms, their explanations, and their relations. Thus far, we have collected 27,737 terms and 36,698 relations. Picking up two acts, we analyzed their legal terms fr...

This paper presents the morphosemantic field model, claiming that it is relevant in the description of lexical structures in grammatically-motivated languages such as Croatian. Arguments are presented for the applicability of the model in synchronic and diachronic lexical analysis. The fact that many characteristics of morphosemantic fields are compatible with the theoretical framework of cogni...

Schwa deletion is an important issue in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for IndoAryan languages (IAL). In this paper, we describe a syllable minimization based algorithm for dealing with this that outperforms the existing methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy. The algorithm is motivated by the fact that deletion of schwa is a diachronic and sociolinguistic phenomenon that facilitates faste...

The paper argues that, based on insight gained from the syntax of earlier English, comparative inversion (CI) reveals itself as a far simpler process than what is standardly assumed. Starting from the insight of a suggestion made by Haeberli (2002) and adapting it to comparatives, the major syntactic diachronic developments of CI are explored. This conference paper is available in University of...

SYNOPSIS. Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975) did not respect the traditional boundaries established between genetics, embryology, and evolutionary biology. Rather, he viewed them together as a ‘‘diachronic biology.’’ In this diachronic biology, evolutionary change was caused by heritable alterations in development. Stabilizing selection within the embryo was followed by normative selection on th...