New horizons in word sense analysis
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Mouseover title: IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more."
Like all aspects of word meaning, such metaphors come and go. For example, batshit (in the metaphorical meaning "nonsense" or "crazy") came into use in the middle of the 20th century, presumably via confluence of the older "bats in the belfry" phrase and the proliferation of other (and older) metaphorical "fecal compounds". And medicine has long since left the science of humorism behind, but we've inherited a metaphorical residue when we use phlegmatic to mean "calm, sluggish", or bilious to mean "irascible".
Recent applications of "deep learning" to the analysis of semantic change will open another chapter in the adventure that I described in my 2011 Henry Sweet Lecture, "Towards the Golden Age of Speech and Language Science":
For the sciences of speech and language, the 21st century promises to bring the kind of progress that the 17th century brought to the physical sciences.
Our telescopes and microscopes, our alembics and Pneumatical Engines, are today's vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive networked computation.
However, the scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly exploratory and potential. There are several critical problems for which we have at best partial solutions; and like our 17th-century predecessors, we need to unlearn some old ideas on the way to learning new ones.
Focusing especially on Henry Sweet's own interests in phonetics and in the history of English, this talk will discuss some of the barriers to be overcome, present some successful examples, and speculate about future directions.
Some recent papers (and code) on corpus-based semantic change analysis:
Dominick Schlechtweg et al., "SemEval-2020 task 1: Unsupervised lexical semantic change detection", 2020.
Sinan Kurtyigit et al., "Lexical Semantic Change Discovery", 2021.
Francesco Periti and Stefano Montanelli, "Lexical Semantic Change through Large Language Models: a Survey", 2024.
cameron said,
July 18, 2024 @ 9:15 pm
of course, if we did use "thymus" or "thumos" metaphorically, it'd be seen as a borrowing of the ancient Greek concept of thymos, especially its use in Plato's description of the tripartite soul, and hence not really a metaphor at all
Pedro said,
July 19, 2024 @ 3:03 am
A clever diagram, as always. Odd, though, that Randall has put TONGUE so low on the Y axis – I'd have thought its metaphorical meaning is fairly clear: it usually relates to language or specialised ways of communication.
David L said,
July 19, 2024 @ 9:25 am
What would be a metaphorical use of 'appendix'? The bonus bit at the end of a book is a literal thing-that-is-appended.
Rod Johnson said,
July 19, 2024 @ 1:37 pm
I feel like I've heard "appendix" used in the sense of a vestigial "organ" in some organization, but I can't call an example to mind.
(While I'm thinking about "organ"ization though, there's also "organ" used to mean a periodical publication.)