Tracing the semantic change of socio-political terms from Classical to early Medieval Latin with computational methods

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The availability of large digital corpora for Latin has significantly increased in the last couple of decades. In parallel, over the past few years an increasing number of studies have proposed various computational methods for the detection of semantic change using the distributional properties of words in corpora, which enable new perspectives on lexical semantic change. We propose a new large-scale computational analysis of the sense evolution of a number of Latin lemmas. We draw on the LatinISE corpus, covering the period from the fifth century bce to the ninth century ce. We select polysemous socio-political terms (e.g., ciuitas, populus) that are amply attested in Latin texts through time and refer to changing institutions of ancient and early mediaeval society. Their high frequency poses major challenges for manual analyses. This, along with their cultural significance, makes them perfect candidates for semi-automatic analysis.We evaluate the results of various distributional methods, including collocation analysis, word space models, and word embeddings, against previous research and lexicographic accounts. We also show the extent to which the results can support Latin historical semantics and lexicography. We discuss the need for an integrated approach that combines computational methods and close linguistic analysis.