Subdiffusive semantic evolution in Indo-European languages. (arXiv:2209.04701v1 [physics.soc-ph])

How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a
variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological
ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major
Indo-European languages: that semantic evolution is strongly subdiffusive.
Using an automated pipeline of diachronic distributional semantic embedding
that controls for underlying symmetries, we show that words follow stochastic
trajectories in meaning space with an anomalous diffusion exponent $\alpha=
0.45\pm 0.05$ across languages, in contrast …

arxiv evolution physics semantic soc