Vector spaces for historical linguistics : using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony

This paper describes an application of dis- tributional semantics to the study of syn- tactic productivity in diachrony, i.e., the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical items over time. By providing an empirical measure of seman- tic similarity between words derived from lexical co-occurrences, distributional se- mantics not only reliably captures how the verbs in the distribution of a construc- tion are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic develop- ment of a construction over time and iden- tify the semantic determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data.