What makes the clock tick? Concept characteristics and the speed of lexical change

Why are different words replaced by new synonyms at different rates? Sometimes, new variants frequently pop up (e.g. ‘awesome’ or ‘lit’ to refer to something cool), while in other cases, a single word has been used for centuries (e.g. ‘ear’). According to contemporary approaches, word-related features, like frequency, word class, length, or age of acquisition, influence the speed of lexical change (Bochkarev et al. 2014; Monaghan 2014; Pagel et al. 2007; Wichmann & Holman 2013). This project aims to show that characteristics of concepts play a role as well. More specifically, I build on recent studies that have proven the importance of concept characteristics for synchronic variation (Franco et al. 2019). I apply these novel insights to diachronic change, thereby bridging the gap between synchronic and diachronic variability. Using data from digitized historical dictionaries of Dutch and English and from a recently compiled diachronic corpus of written Dutch, the project contributes to linguistic research both methodologically and theoretically. Methodologically, I introduce quantitative methods that can be employed for large-scale onomasiological research in the field of diachronic linguistics. Theoretically, I combine ideas from (historical) sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, thereby offering a novel perspective on language change.