Remodelling Verbal Synonymy for the History of English: Sources and Methods

A synonymous placement of words in present-day thesauri can be reconstructed to become a relevant object of diachronic onomasiology. In a historical sense present-day synonyms were attested at specified moments in the string’s diachrony and at a given succession over time on the imposed condition of inventory sameness. A possible method of studying this problem may lie in the sum total of deductions between the ordinal positions of elements in the contemporary string and its historical counterpart. As English provides a dated diachronic textual prototype for any lexical item in its first attested, as well as other, meaning(s), owing to the textual corpus of the OED, a better fitting model for this task is a vector space model. It distinguishes the relative and absolute chronologies of diachronically reshuffled present-day strings. The similarity measure between the present-day string and its diachronic permutation then consists in the difference between the lengths of the obtained vec-tors. These reflect contemporary (fragmentary, or, eventually, all) and the corresponding period, if set so, we-ight placements of the given constituents. The developed framework allows for data-driven exemplification as well as distributional visualization. The methodology is deemed to be applicable to multiple lexicographic sources of verbal synonymy. The data is combined with the OED-obtained composition of de-verbal families.