At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Gaurav Kamath will present “When Words Change Meaning, Age (Almost) Doesn’t Matter”
We will be meeting this Wednesday, September 18, at noon. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department
Abstract: A central question in the study of how language changes over lifetimes is whether or not such change is generational. If language change is an iterative process between generations, we would expect to see age-based differences between generational cohorts, and to see these differences persist between the cohorts even as they grow older. Conversely, if language change is a more purely time-based phenomenon, we would expect to see ongoing language changes adopted more universally by speakers at a given point in time, across different ages and generational cohorts. We ask this question in the context of word meaning change. We analyze meaning change in over 100 words across more than 7.7 million U.S. congressional speeches, to observe whether, when a word gains or loses a meaning, people of all generations uniformly adopt it, or speakers from older generations conserve their prior usage patterns. We use language-model based word sense induction methods to classify the different senses of each word, and then model the prevalence of each of these word senses as a function of time and speaker age. We find that most words do show an effect of speaker age, but one that is small — and that changes in word meaning are adopted by speakers of different generations at roughly similar rates. Our findings suggest that word meaning change is not a predominantly generational process, and that older speakers of a language readily adopt new usage patterns of a word.