We propose a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which combines both epistemic modality and constraints on discourse structure. We argue that the felicitous use of these modal particles requires that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, where p* is incompatible with the proposition modified by afinal/alla fine, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases, that of plan-related propositions and that of propositions without plans. We also discuss the connections between truth unpersistence and evidentiality.

Word embeddings have recently been applied to detect and explore changes in word meaning on large historical corpora. While word embeddings are useful in many Natural Language Processing tasks, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed concerning accuracy and applicability of these methods for historical data. There is a scarce literature on the stability and replicability of these embeddings, especially on small corpora, which are common in historical work. It also remains unclear whether methods used to evaluate embeddings in contemporary data can also be used for historical data sets. Our overarching goal is to use word embeddings for investigating semantic shifts in the history of Spanish. In the work presented here, we focus on methodological questions that arise. We first examine the stability and applicability of three commonly used word embeddings models on a small corpus of medieval and classical Spanish. Comparing our results with a study on the word algo as a test case, we show that a rank-averaging method can produce more stable results from the embeddings. We corroborate previous theoretical work while demonstrating the applicability of our method when training word embeddings on small corpora for the analysis of semantic change. Second, we investigate how best to evaluate different embeddings models. We show that an existing analogy test cannot be used without modification. Our new analogy test, consisting of roughly 10,000 questions for medieval and classical Spanish, will be released with the article.

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 33-45

High quality distributional models can capture lexical and semantic relations between words. Hence, researchers design various intrinsic tasks to test whether such relations are captured. However, most of the intrinsic tasks are designed for modern languages, and there is a lack of evaluation methods for distributional models of historical corpora. In this paper, we conducted BAHP: a benchmark of assessing word embeddings in Historical Portuguese, which contains four types of tests: analogy, similarity, outlier detection, and coherence. We examined word2vec models generated from two historical Portuguese corpora in these four test sets. The results demonstrate that our test sets are capable of measuring the quality of vector space models and can provide a holistic view of the model's ability to capture syntactic and semantic information. Furthermore, the methodology for the creation of our test sets can be easily extended to other historical languages.

This chapter focuses on a light verb construction (LVC) from both Portuguese and Spanish, dar conselho/consejo (“to give advice”). The chapter provides an overview of the literature both on the concept of light verbs and, in particular, on the syntactic and semantic analyses put forward by previous literature on Portuguese and Spanish. This literature on LVCs has focused on their syntactic analyzability, predicational nature, argument structure, and semantic compositionality. These topics are discussed and illustrated further in the section on present-day Portuguese and Spanish. The diachronic section tracks the evolution of the LVC. It concludes that dar conselho/consejo underwent no semantic change and only limited syntactic changes linked to their clause-taking abilities, mostly in Spanish rather than in Portuguese. This chapter explores a noun-based construction with limited changes, as opposed to the other constructions in this book, and one which reveals syntactic differences between both languages.