Diachronic Semantics and Lexical Variation

Dirk Geeraerts gave this course introducing diachronic (lexical) semantics to an international audience of PhD students. Descriptively speaking, the course integrated a semasiological and an onomasiological perspective and theoretically speaking, it explored the impact of cognitive linguistics on historical semantics. The framework was illustrated with case studies focusing on prototypicality effects, and on metonymical and metaphorical patterns. In addition, the course introduced current methodological developments that exploit computational distributional methods for modelling semantic change.