Coupled Usage-Sense Processes: Temporal and Attributable Lexical Semantic Change

Abstract

Lexical semantic change is usually summarized by a scalar distance between independently sampled period distributions. This measures how much a word changed, but does not reveal when it changed, which mechanisms and component movements carried the change, or which usages support the attribution. We introduce Coupled Usage--Sense Processes (CUSP), which derives these answers from a single marginal preserving temporal process. A hierarchical coupling relates contextual distributions through latent usage components, while Markov composition makes adjacent and longer span correspondences compatible. Displacement operators quantify change magnitude and timing, split variation exactly between movement of component centers and reorganization within components, and attribute it to transported component pairs. Word-local modes resolve distinct directions of change and their activity over time, while representative passages from attributed components ground the analysis in text. Under a Gaussian mixture specialization, we prove parametric recovery of the operators and squared distances. Synthetic experiments support the predicted rate. CUSP remains competitive on English and German DWUG and recovers controlled Janus profiles while maintaining compositionally coherent transport. A large corpus of US court opinions demonstrates transition, mode, and passage attribution in unlabeled natural text. CUSP thus makes magnitude, timing, mechanism, movement, modes, and textual evidence compatible views of one lexical history.