Semantic Change and Emerging Tropes In a Large Corpus of New High German Poetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large German poetry corpus spanning several centuries and analyzes semantic change and trope emergence over time, revealing significant shifts during the Romantic period and supporting the law of linear semantic change.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive diachronic corpus of German poetry and applies novel methods to track semantic change and trope development across centuries.

Findings

Semantic change peaks during the German Romantic period

Reconstruction of literary periods using self-similarity measures

Evidence supporting the law of linear semantic change in poetry

Abstract

Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry which consists of about 75k poems with more than 11 million tokens, with poems ranging from the 16th to early 20th century. We then track semantic change in this corpus by investigating the rise of tropes (`love is magic') over time and detecting change points of meaning, which we find to occur particularly within the German Romantic period. Additionally, through self-similarity, we reconstruct literary periods and find evidence that the law of linear semantic change also applies to poetry.