Abstract
This paper introduces a novel method to track collocational variations in diachronic corpora that can identify several changes undergone by these phraseological combinations and to propose alternative solutions found in later periods. The strategy consists of extracting syntactically-related candidates of collocations and ranking them using statistical association measures.
Then, starting from the first period of the corpus, the system tracks each combination over time, verifying different types of historical variation such as the loss of one or both lemmas, the disappearance of the collocation, or its diachronic frequency trend. Using a distributional semantics strategy, it also proposes other linguistic structures which convey similar meanings to those extinct collocations.
A case study on historical corpora of Portuguese and Spanish shows that the system speeds up and facilitates the finding of some diachronic changes and phraseological shifts that are harder to identify without using automated methods.