This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic corpus data, combining variability-based neighbour clustering, which offers objective and reproducible criteria for periodization, and distributional semantics as a representation of lexical meaning. This method partitions the history of a grammatical construction according to qualitative stages of productivity corresponding to different semantic sets of lexical items attested in it. Two case studies are presented. The first case study on the hell-construction (“Verb the hell out of NP”) shows that the semantic development of a construction does not always match that of its quantitative aspects, like token or type frequency. The second case study on the way-construction compares the results of the present method with those of collostructional analysis. It is shown that the former measures semantic changes and their chronology with greater precision. In sum, this method offers a promising approach to exploring semantic variation in the lexical fillers of constructions and to modelling constructional change.

中文翻译：

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构建生产力变化周期的分布式语义方法

本文描述了一种自动识别历时语料库数据中语言变化阶段的方法，结合基于可变性的邻居聚类，它为周期化提供客观和可重复的标准，以及作为词汇意义表示的分布语义。该方法根据与其中所证明的词汇项的不同语义集相对应的生产力的定性阶段来划分语法结构的历史。介绍了两个案例研究。关于地狱结构的第一个案例研究（“NP 的地狱中的动词”）表明，结构的语义发展并不总是与其定量方面的发展相匹配，例如标记或类型频率。道路构造的第二个案例研究将本方法的结果与构造分析的结果进行比较。结果表明，前者更准确地测量语义变化及其时间顺序。总之，该方法为探索构式的词汇填充中的语义变化和建模构式变化提供了一种有前途的方法。