Diachronic Analysis of a Word Concreteness Rating: Impact of Semantic Change

Abstract

The paper analyses the correlation of change in word concreteness ratings with semantic change. To perform the analysis, we apply a neural network to diachronic data to obtain concreteness ratings of English words. As input to the model, we use co-occurrence statistics with the most frequent words extracted from the Google Books Ngram diachronic corpus. It is shown that the model, initially trained on data averaged over a long time interval, predicts the concreteness ratings with high accuracy (based on the word co-occurrence data in a particular year). The impact of lexical semantic change on the change in the concreteness rating is analyzed using 69 words borrowed from previous works. As the considered cases show, the neural network estimate of the word concreteness rating is very sensitive to changes in semantics. Among the factors that influence changes in the concreteness rating, we reveal the emergence of new meanings of a word, the competition of word meanings related to different parts of speech, the use of a word as a proper name, and the use of the word as a part of collocations. It is shown in the paper that changes in the concreteness rating can (along with changes in other word properties) serve as a marker of semantic change.