  I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon,
particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an
evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent
approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word
embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate models in Pama-Nyungan to
identify meaning classes most appropriate for lexical phylogenetic inference,
particularly highlighting the importance of variation in studying change over
time.
