Semantic Evolution Research Articles

Exploring the Effectiveness and Specific Teaching Methods of English Etymology in Expanding Mental Lexicon for College Students

English etymology, as a discipline that studies the origin and development of words, reveals the intrinsic connection and meaning of vocabulary by tracing the historical background, etymology and semantic evolution of words, which not only helps learners to understand the deeper meaning of vocabulary, but also expands and builds their English mental lexicon effectively, thus helping students achieve effective vocabulary enhancement in a short time. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of English etymology in the construction and expansion of mental lexicon, analyze its actual teaching methods, and demonstrate its application and effect in educational practice.

The Verbal Root <i>Raqa‛</i> in Moslem and Biblical-Aramaic Texts

The paper pursues two goals: (1) to trace the evolution of semantics of the verbal root raqa‛ and its lexical derivatives (participles, verbal names, etc.) in Persian and Arabic Moslem texts; and (2) to compare the obtained results with semantics of the same Semitic root in the Biblical-Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. The comparison reveals a great variety in branches of the root raqa‛ in Persian and Arabic Moslem texts and shows a shortage of those in the Biblical-Aramaic texts. The author explains this phenomenon by the specific contents of the Old Testament where the verbal root raqa‛ with its derivatives is used to glorify God the Creator of the Universe and to curse idolatry.

„Głośnik” – preradiofoniczna historia słowa w polszczyźnie

The starting point of this article is the analysis of texts collected in the Polona.pl database and other databases of the Digital Libraries Federation. Based on these archives, the author outlines the transformation of the semantic scope of the word głośnik – “loudspeaker” – in 19th-century Polish. The functioning of this term is particularly interesting in the context of inventions which, from today’s perspective, appear as precursors of the modern loudspeaker. The development of radio broadcasting after the First World War popularised the contemporary understanding of the term; earlier – pre-radiophonic – uses in the 19th-century cultural press and dictionaries make it possible to trace changes not only within the language itself, but also the entire acoustemology of Polish society of the time. The semantic evolution of the term “loudspeaker” is at the same time a picture of deeper shifts in the perception of the role and meaning of sound. Under the pressure of the cultural policies of the partitioners, the Polish community retreated in its search for national identity to the level of language, and then – under the influence of new media and lifestyles, but also of the profound reforms of the Polish language in the interwar period – interacted with the cultural phenomenon of the new medium, with its help redefining its view of modernity. Key-words: acoustemology, speaker, semantic field, sound history, Polish history

Identifying Semantic Shift Reasons of Domain Entities Using Diachronic Embedding

ABSTRACTIn academic literature, the semantic evolution of scientific terms reflects the development of domain knowledge. While there have been studies using diachronic word embeddings to reveal cultural and social shifts, research on the semantic evolution of scientific terms remains limited. This paper proposes a method utilizing diachronic semantic vectors to elucidate the semantic evolution of scientific entities. Firstly, diachronic semantic vectors of entities are trained using incremental learning to compute the semantic shift (ΔA) of a given entity A between periods t1 and t2. Secondly, entities similar to ΔA in periods t1 and t2 are defined as leading reasons and accompanying reasons, respectively. The experiment result shows that the leading reasons can capture the shifts of entities in the nascent stage, and the accompanying reasons can capture the shifts of words in the mature stage. The proposed method offers a better quantitative insight into the details and reasons behind domain knowledge evolution.

The Relationship Between English Etymology and Semantic Change

This paper explores the intricate relationship between English etymology and semantic change, emphasizing how etymology provides a historical and cultural foundation for the evolution of word meanings. It discusses various forms of semantic change, including broadening, narrowing, elevation, pejoration, and shifts, and how these changes are influenced by social, cultural, and technological developments. The paper examines specific case studies such as irregular verbs, idioms, and specialized vocabulary in fields like medicine and law, to illustrate how etymology affects semantic evolution and vice versa. The analysis reveals that etymology and semantic change are deeply interconnected, reflecting the dynamic and adaptive nature of language. As globalization continues, these processes will further enrich the English language, offering valuable insights into the ongoing evolution of linguistic expression.

Using dynamic semantic structure of news flow to enhance financial forecasting: a twelve-year study on twitter news channels

AbstractThis research holds significance for advancing financial forecasting methodologies by shifting the focus from traditional sentiment analysis of individual tweets to exploring intricate semantic relationships within news tweets from top-followed news channels on Twitter. Addressing a notable research gap in financial forecasting, often dominated by sentiment analysis, our study endeavors to fill the void left by the underexplored intricate relationships within news entities and their dynamic semantic evolution. Motivated by the inherent challenges in predicting the random walk behavior of stock prices, we contend that incorporating longitudinal data derived from the semantic relationships between news entities can enhance the accuracy of stock market forecasts. The study pioneers a twelve-year exploration, encompassing data from 55 leading news channels on Twitter, boasting a collective following of 714 million users. The approach employs natural language processing (NLP) to extract two million unique entities, whose semantics are analyzed through complex network analysis, laying the foundation for the forecasting model. Finally, this research introduces a model linked to the dynamic semantic structure of news flow. The predictive model considers the impact of exogenous variables influenced by the evolving relationships among news entities. The results offer a proof of concept, highlighting the potential of utilizing dynamic semantic relationships among news entities for financial prediction. On average, the model demonstrates an improvement in accuracy of 40.3% across ten different stock price predictions. These findings are expounded through relevant theories, offering a theoretical foundation for observed patterns and indicating a promising direction for future research in this domain.

Evolving Representations of Childhood: A Diachronic Analysis of the Lexeme Child in British Newspapers from the 18th To 21st Centuries

This article investigates the semantic evolution of the lexeme CHILD in British newspaper discourse from the 18th to the 21st centuries, employing a diachronic approach and cognitive semantics framework. The study utilizes lexical analysis and frame modelling methodologies to trace changes in the lexical meaning of the lexeme CHILD during the mentioned period, drawing on dictionaries and newspaper archives. Findings reveal a dynamic semantic structure characterized by the emergence of new meanings and the persistence of core components like 'person' and 'juvenile'. The analysis identifies shifts influenced by societal, cultural, and ideological factors, reflecting changes in societal perceptions and linguistic representations over time. This research contributes to understanding how a language mirrors and shapes societal attitudes towards childhood across centuries, emphasizing the role of newspaper discourse in framing cultural norms and perceptions.

Reflecting the language of ancient civilizations: A diachronic transition of “爵” and contrastive analysis of Sino-Korean Chinese characters

This study focuses on the historical and cultural significance of the Chinese character “爵” (jue), reflecting the culture of the ancient Bronze Age, and examines its semantic evolution and characteristics from a cognitive linguistic perspective. In addition, it compares and contrasts this with its use in Korean hanja (Chinese characters used in the Korean language). The research highlights that in ancient China, “爵” was initially used to denote a ceremonial wine vessel, symbolizing authority and social status, and was closely associated with rites and nobility. Over time, the meanings of “爵” expanded to include titles of nobility and official positions. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of Chinese culture and language on Korea, showing how “爵” and its related concepts were adopted and adapted within the Korean language and culture, maintaining some of its original meanings while also developing unique interpretations. It suggests that many Korean hanja words share identical meanings with their Chinese counterparts, but some have evolved distinctively, especially in the realm of religion, highlighting the interplay and diversity of cultural and linguistic influences between China and Korea.

From the history of the lexeme ticket in Russian: from a word to a precedent phenomenon (on the material of F. M. Dostoevsky’s works)

This article considers the lexeme ticket as a representative example of those words that outlasted the golden age of semantic and cultural-historical evolution in the Russian language. We analyse possible extralinguistic and intralinguistic reasons for extending the lexical combinability and semantic spectrum of the lexeme ticket in the second half of the 19th century. These causes determined the gradual increase in the mental significance of the word, as well as the origins of its loss of conceptual significance in the period after 1917. The fact that the word ticket could have the status of a concept in the Russian language of the second half of the 19th century can be proved based on F. M. Dostoevsky’s texts. His works not only show the ample lexical combinability of the analysed lexeme, but also provide examples of its metaphorical use. The research employed the historical, descriptive, and comparative methods in conjunction with semantic and componential analysis. The paper concludes that the number of meanings and meaning shades of the word ticket increased considerably in the second half of the 19th century. Thus, its lexical combinability extended, and the lexeme reached the semantic evolution peak. As a result, any piece of paper with any text was actually called a ticket. The general linguistic significance of the word gradually developed into a conceptual one, which was reflected in F. M. Dostoevsky’s writings. His texts contain the best examples of the philosophical and metaphorical use of the lexeme. For instance, the image of a ticket returned to God in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov" became a precedent phenomenon in the works of Russian philosophers and writers.

La traduction, un processus évolutif vu en rétroaction par la théorie de construction de niche

Translation, an Evolving Process seen in Retroaction by Niche Construction Theory This article delves into the translation process as a complex, self-organised system, viewed through the lens of niche construction theory. It highlights three key aspects: the modification of translation’s environmental conditions, the selection pressures acting on translation as it shapes its environment, and the evolutionary responses observed within the translation process. Firstly, it underlines how translation modifies its own environmental conditions through feedback loops between translators and their practices. Drawing on the insights of Gideon Toury and Kobus Marais, this perspective portrays translation as a dynamic and retroactive system. For example, the semantic evolution of the term “translate” itself reflects the dynamic interaction between translators and their environments. This model illustrates how translation continually shapes and redefines its context, resulting in a continuously evolving discipline. Additionally, the article explores the selection pressures that impact translation, akin to natural selection, where translation serves as a cultural and linguistic vector undergoing processes of variation, adaptation, and heredity. It examines how translation adapts to changing environments while preserving knowledge. Moreover, the article examines evolutionary responses observable in the translation process, such as computer-assisted translation, machine translation, and translation memories. These examples underscore translation’s capacity for self-observation, self-organisation, and self-creation (autopoiesis), reflecting its inherent complexity and adaptability. In conclusion, the article draws parallels between the translation process and biological niche construction, particularly focusing on the feedback law. It proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the factors contributing to the translation environment, emphasizing the complexity and multiplicity inherent in translation processes. This niche construction theory provides insights into the dynamic nature of translation and its reciprocal relationship with its environment. As technology, particularly AI, advances, the translation niche may evolve into a cognitive niche, enhancing our ability to observe and control the translation process. Thus, this study advocates for an interdisciplinary approach that bridges sociological and biological perspectives, paving the way for future research in the evolving landscape of translation studies..

Lexical variation of woods and bush in Ontario English

AbstractThis paper examines ongoing lexical variability among words that describe areas with trees, such as woods, bush and forest, among others. The historical perspective shows ongoing semantic evolution of these terms, from wood(s) (c.825) to the emergence of bush in the late 16th century or early 17th century. We assess regional, social and linguistic patterns of variation in 1849 tokens, from individuals born in the late 1800s to early 200s across 21 communities in Ontario, Canada. The most common word is bush; use of woods is moderate while forest is rare. Ancestry and migration play key roles in their distribution, demonstrating that ancestral roots, migration and language contact play into the selection of a word. We argue that lexical variation, when analysed in a comparative sociolinguistic perspective in the context of social typology, history and geographic location, offers important insights into language use and human behaviour.

Human senses and sensors from Aristotle to the present.

This historical review on the semantic evolution of human senses and sensors revealed that Aristotle's list of the five senses sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell is still in use among non-scientific lay persons. It is no surprise that his classification in the work "De Anima" (On the Soul) from 350 BC confuses the sensor "touch" with the now more comprehensively defined somatosensory system and that senses are missing such as the later discovered vestibular system and the musculotendinous proprioception of the position of parts of the body in space. However, it is surprising that in the three most influential ancient cultures, Egypt, Greece, and China-which shaped the history of civilization-the concept prevailed that the heart rather than the brain processes perception, cognition, and emotions. This "cardiocentric view" can be traced back to the "Doctrine of Aristotle," the "Book of the Dead" in ancient Egypt, and the traditional Chinese medicine of correspondence documented in the book "Huang di Neijing." In Greek antiquity the philosophers Empedocles, Democritus and Aristotle were proponents of the allocation of the spirit and the soul to the heart connected to the body via the blood vessels. Opponents were the pre-Socratic mathematician Pythagoras, the philosopher Plato, and especially the Greek physician Hippocrates who regarded the brain as the most powerful organ in humans in his work "De Morbo Sacro." The Greek physician Galen of Pergamon further elaborated on the concept of the brain ("cephalocentric hypothesis") connected to the body by a network of nerves. The fundamental concepts for understanding functions and disorders of the vestibular system, the perception of self-motion, verticality and balance control were laid by a remarkable group of 19th century scientists including Purkynӗ, Mach, Breuer, Helmholtz, and Crum-Brown. It was also in the 19th century that Bell described a new sense of a reciprocal sensorimotor loop between the brain and the muscles which he called "muscular sense," later termed "kinaesthesia" by Bastian and defined in 1906 as "proprioception" by Sherrington as "the perception of joint and body movements as well as position of the body or body segments, in space." Both, the vestibular system and proprioception could be acknowledged as senses six or seven. However, we hesitate to recommend "pain"-which is variously assigned to the somatosensory system or extero-, intero-, visceroception-as a separate sensory system. Pain sensors are often not specific but have multisensory functions. Because of this inconsistent, partly contradictory classification even by experts in the current literature on senses and sensors we consider it justified to recommend a comprehensive reorganization of classification features according to the present state of knowledge with an expansion of the number of senses. Such a project has also to include the frequent task-dependent multisensory interactions for perceptual and sensorimotor achievements, and higher functions or disorders of the visual and vestibular systems as soon as cognition or emotions come into play. This requires a cooperation of sensory physiologists, neuroscientists and experienced physicians involved in the management of patients with sensory and multisensory disorders.

Акустический мутагенез в современном кабардинском языке

The article touches upon controversial issues of Adyghe etymology and semantics, as well as his-torical phonetics, concerning the nature and structure of root morphemes, which have not been comprehensively resolved to date. The existing approaches to the study of root morphemes, which have received their coverage in the works of scientists such as M.A. Kumakhov, A.K. Shagirov, N.R. Ivanokov, N.F. Yakovlev, do not seem to be definite and require clarification. This paper of-fers a different view of the problem raised and its original solution from the existing approaches. The root morphemes considered in the work, grammaticalized in diachrony, in the course of the presented etymological and semantic analysis, reveal traces of acoustic and semantic mutagenesis, which generally affects the further development of the lexical system of the language. For the first time, the term acoustic mutagenesis was introduced into scientific circulation, by which we mean the mutation of sounds in modern Adyghe and Kabardian languages while maintaining the same meaning or close to the original meaning. In the course of semantic evolution, the loss of one se-mantic meaning in the root element does not entail its consolidation in the structure of lexical in-novations, its clear state in a situation of preposition or postposition. Root morphemes, distin-guished in modern language as affixes, were at the same hierarchical level in the proto-language, and their position in the preposition only indicates their attachment to the rest of the root ele-ments, the position in the postposition indicates the opposite.

Analyzing semantic shifts in English and German by exploring historical influences and societal dynamics

This research examines the mechanisms of semantic change in English and German, focusing on comparing and contrasting these processes across the two languages and investigating the influence of major historical events and societal shifts. By utilizing digital text corpora, libraries, archives, and modern digital media, the study conducts qualitative analyses, including case studies and discourse analysis, to explore semantic evolution. Thematic analysis was employed to thoroughly examine and interpret the data, allowing for the identification of recurring patterns, themes, and significant insights. The results showed that both English and German undergo significant semantic shifts driven by a metaphorical extension (i.e., narrowing or broadening of meanings, pejoration and amelioration, frequency and pathway of change, cultural and historical influences) and historical events and societal shifts that influence semantic change (i.e., wars and conflicts, industrialization, technological advancement, globalization, and cultural exchange, societal movements, and ideological shifts). The role of metaphorical extension is seen in adapting language to technological advancements while highlighting linguistic evolution through narrowing and broadening meanings influenced by cultural, historical, and linguistic factors. Additionally, pejoration and amelioration reflect societal changes and attitudes. Historical events and societal shifts, such as wars, industrialization, technological advancements, globalization, and social movements, significantly impact semantic changes in both English and German. These external influences catalyze language use and meaning shifts, illustrating the interaction between language and human experience.

KEMoS: A knowledge-enhanced multi-modal summarizing framework for Chinese online meetings

The demand for “online meetings” and “collaborative office work” keeps surging recently, producing an abundant amount of relevant data. How to provide participants with accurate and fast summarizing service has attracted extensive attention. Existing meeting summarizing models overlook the utilization of multi-modal information and the information offsetting during summarizing. In this paper, we develop a knowledge-enhanced multi-modal summarizing framework. Firstly, we construct a three-layer multi-modal meeting knowledge graph, including basic, knowledge, and multi-modal layer, to integrate meeting information thoroughly. Then, we raise a topic-based hierarchical clustering approach, which considers information entropy and difference simultaneously, to capture the semantic evolution of meetings. Next, we devise a multi-modal enhanced encoding strategy, including a sentence-level cross-modal encoder, a joint loss function, and a knowledge graph embedding module, to learn the meeting and topic-level presentations. Finally, when generating summaries, we design a topic-enhanced decoding strategy for the Transformer decoder which mitigates semantic offsetting with the aid of topic information. Extensive experiments show that our proposed work consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on the Chinese meeting dataset, where the ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L are 49.98%, 21.03%, and 32.03% respectively.

On the spread and evolution of pudding

A better author could probably write a detective story about the word pudding. The cultural and linguistic complex associated with this word spans in its full extent a thousand years and six continents. This paper concerns itself only with its semantic evolution in English, and its spread to several of the geographically closest languages: German, French, and Italian, each of which has a different relationship with both the word and the dish. The intention is not to explain everything, it is too early for that, but rather to sketch the overall picture and thus to highlight those areas which require further investigation.

Semantic Characteristics of the Emerging Popular Construction "Cloud X" in Modern Chinese Language

Accompanied by the development of the Internet and big data, "cloud X" has become a popular construction that is more frequently used in the Internet in recent years. Studying and analyzing the generation mechanism and evolution process of "Cloud X" is of great reference significance for understanding the development of popular words in the new period and the word formation process of popular words. Therefore, this paper analyzes the popular word "cloud X" from the semantic perspective, taking the semantic evolution of "Yun (cloud)" as the entry point. In the process of exploring "Yun (cloud)", this paper will focus on the transformation of the semantic features of "Yun (cloud)", observing the original meaning of "Yun (cloud)",Yun (cloud)" in "cloud computing", and the semantic features of "Yun (cloud)" after "cloud X" has become a construction. By examining the similarities and differences of the semantic features, we can explore the process of "Yun (cloud)" gradually changing from a real word to a class of affixes and the reasons for the change.

Не те чух: опит за обяснение на една глаголна употреба в разговорния български език през погледа върху етимологията

The text attempts to explain the use of a verb in Bulgarian colloquial speech by examining the etymology of the corresponding common Slavic verb. On the basis of the registered forms in Slavic and the formal semantic parallels in more distant Indo-European languages, as well as what is known in science regarding the possible semantic evolution of the verbs for sense perception, an assumption is made as to what the considered meaning is due to.

Anomalous diffusion analysis of semantic evolution in major Indo-European languages.

How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major Indo-European languages: that semantic evolution is subdiffusive. Using an automated pipeline of diachronic distributional semantic embedding that controls for underlying symmetries, we show that words follow stochastic trajectories in meaning space with an anomalous diffusion exponent α = 0.45 ± 0.05 across languages, in contrast with diffusing particles that follow α = 1. Randomization methods indicate that preserving temporal correlations in semantic change directions is necessary to recover strongly subdiffusive behavior; however, correlations in change sizes play an important role too. We furthermore show that strong subdiffusion is a robust phenomenon under a wide variety of choices in data analysis and interpretation, such as the choice of fitting an ensemble average of displacements or averaging best-fit exponents of individual word trajectories.

Impact of social media on the evolution of English semantics through linguistic analysis

Social media (SM) influences social interaction in the age of digital media, impacting how languages develop. Since these networks play a role in daily life, they create new words and conceptual frameworks that define our contemporary society. The current investigation investigates Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit SM posts applying textual extraction. The seven-year temporal sample demonstrates significant semantic change caused by society and technology. The analysis notices the importance of new words, phrase meaning evolving, and sentiment changes in SM users’ English usage, proving their adaptability. The growing popularity of phrases like eavesdropping and doom-scrolling indicated how SM and daily life impact. This investigation distinguishes each platform’s unique linguistic features and digital developments by understanding language flow and leading research in the future.