  We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by
which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of
English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and
frequency growth rates of semantic neighbors, formalized in the distributional
semantics paradigm. We show that both factors are predictive of word emergence
although we find more support for the latter hypothesis. Besides presenting a
new linguistic application of distributional semantics, this study tackles the
linguistic question of the role of language-internal factors (in our case,
sparsity) in language change motivated by language-external factors (reflected
in frequency growth).
