From Insanely Jealous to Insanely Delicious: Computational Models for the Semantic Bleaching of English Intensifiers

Yiwei Luo, Dan Jurafsky, Beth Levin


Abstract
We introduce novel computational models for modeling semantic bleaching, a widespread category of change in which words become more abstract or lose elements of meaning, like the development of “arrive” from its earlier meaning ‘become at shore.’ We validate our methods on a widespread case of bleaching in English: de-adjectival adverbs that originate as manner adverbs (as in “awfully behaved”) and later become intensifying adverbs (as in “awfully nice”). Our methods formally quantify three reflexes of bleaching: decreasing similarity to the source meaning (e.g., “awful”), increasing similarity to a fully bleached prototype (e.g., “very”), and increasing productivity (e.g., the breadth of adjectives that an adverb modifies). We also test a new causal model and find evidence that bleaching is initially triggered in contexts such as “conspicuously evident” and “insanely jealous”, where an adverb premodifies a semantically similar adjective. These contexts provide a form of “bridging context” (Evans and Wilkins, 2000) that allow a manner adverb to be reinterpreted as an intensifying adverb similar to “very”.
Anthology ID:
W19-4701
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4701
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4701
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiwei Luo, Dan Jurafsky, and Beth Levin. 2019. From Insanely Jealous to Insanely Delicious: Computational Models for the Semantic Bleaching of English Intensifiers. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 1–13, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Insanely Jealous to Insanely Delicious: Computational Models for the Semantic Bleaching of English Intensifiers (Luo et al., LChange 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4701.pdf