Acercamiento a las partículas adversativas medievales

This study uses word embeddings to investigate the semantic changes underlying the creation of two adversative connectives in Portuguese, porém and mas ‘but, however’. For porém, we chart its development from an original PP formed by a preposition with a causal meaning (por) and a demonstrative pronoun that referred anaphorically to a previous proposition (en(de)). For mas, we trace its change from an adverb meaning ‘more’. Adopting a distributional semantics approach, we use word embedding models trained on two corpora, the CIPM (Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval, containing texts from the 12th–16th centuries) and COLONIA (containing texts from the 16th–20th centuries). We produce a measure of change based on the similarity scores of porém and mas with respect to words in relevant semantic categories in each corpus, representing the source and the target meanings. This paper, which constitutes the first computational study of semantic change in Portuguese, also discusses challenges and outlines steps to be taken into consideration when choosing embedding algorithms for small historical corpora.

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Causality and the PA/SN distinction

Amaral

Jarrett

2022

Linguistics

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We analyze two constructions expressing the negation of a causal relation in contemporary European Portuguese, nem por isso (lit. ‘not for this [reason]’) and não porque…mas porque (‘not because…but rather because’). We propose that the PA/SN distinction, established for adversative connectives (e.g., Spanish pero and German aber as PA, Spanish sino and German sondern as SN), can be extended to the domain of causality and provides insight on the properties of these two causal constructions. We show that their sensitivity to different types of conversational implicature as well as their interaction with negation are reminiscent of the distinction between restrictive and exclusive adversatives. Our investigation, which is the first semantic-pragmatic analysis of negated causality in European Portuguese, allows us to formulate historical predictions concerning the relation between types of negated causality and the possible development of adversative markers. Our findings provide synchronic evidence for a diachronic semantic path from negated causality to adversative meaning that has been posited for several Romance languages (e.g., Italian però, Spanish pero). Specifically, using contemporary corpus data, we show that the properties of nem por isso provide insight into the bridging contexts for semantic change from causal to adversative meanings. In addition, we identify a type of negated causality that fits within strategies of corrective contrast not exclusive to the domain of causal relations.

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Acercamiento a las partículas adversativas medievales

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Usage‐Based Approaches to Semantic Change

Usage‐Based Approaches to Semantic Change

Tracing semantic change in Portuguese

Causality and the PA/SN distinction

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