Semantic change has attracted academic discussions since ancient times, although the first major works emerged in the 19th century with Reisig (1839), Paul (1880), and Darmesteter (1887).
More recent works including pragmatic and cognitive theories are those in Warren (1992), Dirk Geeraerts,[6] Traugott (1990) and Blank (1997).
is from Bloomfield (1933): Ullmann distinguishes between nature and consequences of semantic change: However, the categorization of Blank (1999) has gained increasing acceptance:[8] Blank considered it problematic to include amelioration and pejoration of meaning (as in Ullman) as well as strengthening and weakening of meaning (as in Bloomfield).
A recent survey lists practical tools and online systems for investigating semantic change of words over time.
[12] WordEvolutionStudy is an academic platform that takes arbitrary words as input to generate summary views of their evolution based on Google Books ngram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English.