Studying Laws of Semantic Divergence across Languages using Cognate Sets
Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. Intra-lingual semantic shift has been previously studied in computational linguistics, but this can only provide a limited picture of the evolution of word meanings, which often develop in a multilingual environment. In this paper we investigate semantic change across languages by measuring the semantic distance of cognate words in multiple languages. By comparing current meanings of cognates in different languages, we hope to uncover information about their previous meanings, and about how they diverged in their respective languages from their common original etymon. We further study the properties of their semantic divergence, by analyzing how the features of words such as frequency and polysemy are related to the divergence in their meaning, and thus make the first steps towards formulating laws of cross-lingual semantic change.
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