Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A fundamental goal in cognitive and historical linguistic research on semantic change is to characterize the regularity in how word meanings change over time. We examine a common belief that has not yet been evaluated comprehensively, which asserts that gender of a word influences its direction of semantic change. By this account, female terms like mistress should undergo pejorative change in meaning systematically more so than male terms like master. We evaluate this claim in gender-marked word pairs in English and French respectively as languages without and with grammatical gender. Our results provide supporting evidence for gender asymmetry in semantic change of English words but not French words. Our study raises questions about the generality of the claim about gender asymmetry in semantic change and provides a scalable computational framework for understanding the social roots of word meaning change.