• Semantic Relations in Diachronic Word Families

    Author(s):
    Nathanael Erik Schweikhard (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Subject(s):
    Historical linguistics, Semantics, Morphology, Language and languages--Etymology, Computational linguistics, Germans
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    semantic change, word formation, lexical typology, semantic relations, Etymology, German
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/03dk-tk62
    Abstract:
    This paper investigates semantic relations in semantic change, word forma­tion, and borrowing in the etymological histories of 480 German nouns of basic voca­bu­lary. Contiguity is shown to be the most frequent semantic rela­tion, followed by taxonomy, confirming previous research. The use of diachronic data and analysis by multiple factors however demonstrate that the choice of the kind of semantic relation in creating new lexical meanings is strongly dependent on various as­pects. Those include the part of speech of the words involved, the semantic field of the concepts, and whether the semantic relation is found in normal semantic change, in semantic change accompany­ing borrowing from another language, or in word formation, in the last case further dependent on the kind of word for­mation. Additionally, significant dif­ferences are found between attested and reconstructed parts of etymologies, providing insights into possible points of im­provement for semantic recon­struction.
    Notes:
    Draft paper under review. Please cite as: Nathanael E. Schweikhard (2021): Semantic Relations in Diachronic Word Families. Unrevised preprint, submitted to Studies in Language.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    1 year ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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