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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11549/) (2024)
- [Computational modeling of semantic change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06337/) (2023)
- [From sunblock to softblock: Analyzing the correlates of neology in published writing and on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.