Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key

Abstract: I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate models in Pama-Nyungan to identify meaning classes most appropriate for lexical phylogenetic inference, particularly highlighting the importance of variation in studying change over time.