(K128780) Támogató: Nemzeti Kutatás, Fejlesztés és Innovációs Iroda
MILAB(RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00004) Támogató: NKFIH
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.
