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The evolution of LGBT labelling words

Tracking 150 years of the interaction of semantics with social and cultural changes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2019

Extract

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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