The evolution of LGBT labelling words

Abstract

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.