Abstract
This paper presents a corpus-based study of recent change in the English way-construction, drawing on data from the 1830s to the 2000s. Semantic change in the distribution of the construction is characterized by means of a distributional semantic model, which captures semantic similarity between verbs through their co-occurrence frequency with other words in the corpus. By plotting and comparing the semantic domain of the three senses of the construction at different points in time, it is found that they all have gained in semantic diversity. These findings are interpreted in terms of increases in schematicity, either of the verb slot or the motion component contributed by the construction.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to Amanda Patten for her help with the inter-annotator agreement study and her feedback on the article.
References
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Supplemental Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2016-0014).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Using the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law to measure diachronic lexical, syntactical and stylistic changes – a large-scale corpus analysis
- Register variation by Spanish users of English: The Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English
- Recent change in the productivity and schematicity of the way-construction: A distributional semantic analysis
- A multivariate analysis of the partitive genitive in Dutch. Bringing quantitative data into a theoretical discussion
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Using the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law to measure diachronic lexical, syntactical and stylistic changes – a large-scale corpus analysis
- Register variation by Spanish users of English: The Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English
- Recent change in the productivity and schematicity of the way-construction: A distributional semantic analysis
- A multivariate analysis of the partitive genitive in Dutch. Bringing quantitative data into a theoretical discussion
- Log-likelihood and odds ratio: Keyness statistics for different purposes of keyword analysis
- Prosodic modeling and position analysis of pragmatic markers in English conversation