The lexicons of language change over time. We posit that this change is best viewed in evolutionary terms (as part of a general evolutionary program in historical linguistics). In this view, the etyma that survive are those that are perpetuated in use. Use is subject to a variety of factors, both cognitive and social, some of which are in conflict. Lexicons emerge in the interaction of these factors with language use.

We have published two papers on the evolution of the lexicon. First, on the emergence of new words in the lexicon Where New Words Are Born: Distributional Semantic Analysis of Neologisms and Their Semantic Neighborhoods, which was presented at SCiL 2020:

@InProceedings{ryskina2020where,
  author = 	 {Ryskina, Maria and Rabinovich, Ella and Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor and Mortensen, David R.  and Tsvetkov, Yulia},
  title = 	 {Where New Words Are Born: Distributional Semantic Analysis of Neologisms and Their Semantic Neighborhoods},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics},
  year =	 {2020},
  volume =	 {3}
}

Recently, coauthors and I have published another paper looking at an opposite phenomenon, lexical decline, in TACL: “Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline”. BibTeX for this paper is as follows:

@article{francis2021quantifying,
    author = {Francis, David and Rabinovich, Ella and Samir, Farhan and Mortensen, David and Stevenson, Suzanne},
    title = "{Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline}",
    journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
    volume = {9},
    pages = {1529-1545},
    year = {2021},
    month = {12},
    issn = {2307-387X},
    doi = {10.1162/tacl_a_00441},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl\_a\_00441},
    eprint = {https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/tacl\_a\_00441/1979747/tacl\_a\_00441.pdf},
}

For more context, see my slides from a presentation I gave at ETH Zürich.