Meaning change in token space: a token-based computational approach to diachronic prototype semantics

In recent years, the computational modeling of semantic change has witnessed an enormous growth, testified by the introduction of new techniques and the increasing availability of historical data. However, these studies lack a firm grounding in historical semantic scholarship. Conversely, historical lexical-semantic theorizing has not yet embraced the opportunities of data-driven approaches to substantiate its claims. The aim of this project is to provide a tighter connection between those two communities. Taking our starting point in the cognitive-semantic literature on semantic change, we will put the theoretical insights of diachronic prototype semantics to empirical test by means of token-based vector space models, a computational technique devised to model the meaning of individual corpus occurrences of words. Specifically, this project will operationalize and test the four central tenets of a prototype-theoretical conception of meaning change. This endeavor will be the first thorough, large-scale and semi-automatic empirical assessment of the descriptive power of said theory. The testing of these hypotheses will be carried out in four dedicated case studies on a historical corpus of Dutch newspapers of the 19th and 20th century.