Is Change the Only Constant? An Inquiry Into Diachronic Semantic Shifts in Italian and Spanish

An increasingly prevalent approach to studying the gradual change of word meanings over time involves using distributional semantics, which is based on neighboring words. This study combines methods from Hamilton et al. (2016) [ 1 ] and Uban et al. (2019) [ 2] to analyze deceptive cognate pairs in historical and contemporary Italian and Spanish corpora. By employing fastText word embeddings and various similarity measures, it aims to investigate the change of word meanings and test two laws of regularity proposed by Hamilton et al. (2016) [ 1], along with a new hypothesized regularity in language change regarding analogy. The findings show a coherent evolution of deceptive cognates across the two languages. However, no meaningful correlation is found regarding the two aforementioned laws. Nevertheless, the results of the hypothesized regularity offer valuable insight into how the context of word usage shifts along with the word.