Semantic changes: diversity of approaches

  Contact person

Jean-Philippe MAGUE

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Scientific framework and objectives

After 200 years of studies, historical linguistics can now provide us with a theory of phonological changes, still unfinished and unperfected, but nevertheless useful. In contrast, semantic aspects of language change has for a long time been limited to descriptive works, many classifications having been proposed without any strong and powerful theory.

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For the last 20 years, in the framework of the development of a cognitive semantics and representationalist theory, original works have enlightened processes occurring in the semantic evolution of languages. The research we lead is in line with those recent developments. In particular, we exploit the possibilities provided by computers, either with models or through corpus analysis, and we try to justify our result via empiric results.

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  Financial support

• Bourses de thèse
  
  Ministère de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche
  2001-2004
• Bourse Eurodoc
  
  Région Rhône-Alpes
  2003

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  Publications

• Magué, J.P., 2002, "Emergence in a population of agents of a lexicon based on an individual conceptualization", Annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Lyon, France, 10-13 juillet 2002
• Magué, J.P., 2005, "From Changes in the World to Changes in the Language: Multi-agents simulations", in Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture : A non-adaptationist, systems theoretical approach, Gontier, N., van Bendegem, J.P., Aerts, D. (eds), Springer, Theory and Decision Library A