Diachronica - Volume 40, Issue 2, 2023

This paper uses the tools of distributional semantics to investigate the semantic change of algo from a noun meaning ‘goods, possessions’ and an indefinite pronoun ‘something’ in the Medieval/Classical period of Spanish to an indefinite pronoun and degree adverb ‘a bit’ in contemporary Spanish. We compare the results of a previous corpus-based study (Amaral 2016) on the semantic change of algo with an analysis using word embeddings models with two goals: (i) to show how word embeddings can help identify different synchronic values of a word, and (ii) to provide measures of change through distributional semantic methods. We discuss the challenges of a study with this methodology using limited data from older periods of a language, hence putting into focus decisions that have to be made and their implications for the analysis. In this way, we hope to contribute to a fruitful integration of more traditional studies in diachronic semantics with the methodology of word embeddings.

Middle markers are characterized by a distribution halfway between grammar and the lexicon: with some verbs, middle marking encodes valency change, while with others it obligatorily occurs with no obvious synchronic motivation. Despite the existing cross-linguistic work on middle markers, their history is still largely unknown. In the typological literature, the standard view is that middle markers predominantly have their origin in reflexive markers, and that, in their development, it is invariantly the grammatical component that expands to the lexical component. In this paper, I challenge these assumptions based on the analysis of a sample of 129 middle marking languages. As I show, the sources and pathways whereby middle markers come about are much more numerous and varied than what has been reported in the literature. By taking a source-oriented approach, I also discuss how recurrent cross-linguistic trends in the distribution of middle markers can in part be explained by looking at their history.

Traditionally, historical phonologists have relied on tedious manual derivations to sequence the sound changes that have shaped the phonological evolution of languages. However, humans are prone to errors, and cannot track thousands of parallel derivations in any efficient manner. We demonstrate computerized forward reconstruction (CFR), deriving each etymon in parallel, as a task with metrics to optimize, and as a tool which drastically facilitates inquiry. To this end we present DiaSim, an application which simulates “cascades” of diachronic developments over a language’s lexicon and provides various diagnostics for “debugging” those cascades. We test our method on a Latin-to-French reflex prediction task, using a newly compiled, publicly available dataset FLLex consisting of 1368 paired Latin and Modern French forms. We also introduce a second dataset, FLLAPS, which maps 310 reflexes from Latin through five attested intermediate stages up to Modern French, derived from Pope’s (1934) periodic development tables. We present publicly available rule cascades: the baseline BaseCLEF and BaseCLEF* cascades, based on Pope’s (1934) widely-cited view of French development, and DiaCLEF, made from incremental corrections to BaseCLEF aided by DiaSim’s diagnostics. DiaCLEF outperforms the baselines by large margins, improving raw accuracy on FLLex from 3.2% to 84.9% of etyma, with similarly large improvements for each of FLLAPS’ periods. Changes were made to build DiaCLEF considering only the baseline and DiaSim’s diagnostics, but they often independently reproduced past work in French diachronic phonology, corroborating both our procedure and past endeavors; we discuss the implications of some of our findings in detail.