Contextual Diachronic Semantic Framework: Advancing Literary Analysis and Pedagogy through the Semantic Study of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Background/purpose. The persistent risk of semantic anachronism challenges both literary interpretation and pedagogy, as modern readers frequently impose contemporary meanings onto historically charged vocabulary. This study introduces the Contextual Diachronic Semantic Framework (CDSF), a five-layered analytical model designed to trace the evolution of word meaning over time. The primary aim is to demonstrate how CDSF uncovers semantic complexity and prevents misreading in canonical literature, while offering practical applications in literature instruction and critical reading.

Materials/methods. The study employs a qualitative, text-centered methodology, applying the CDSF to five lexical items in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: “lottery,” “village,” “tradition,” “black box,” and “stones.” The five analytic layers—Etymological Trajectory Analysis, Diachronic Semantic Mapping, Contextual Literary Function, Cultural-Hermeneutic Embedding, and Interpretive Reconstruction—draw from historical dictionaries, linguistic corpora, literary criticism, and classroom pedagogy. Educational implications were derived by aligning findings with strategies for teaching vocabulary and symbolic language.

Results. Findings reveal that each term operates as a site of historical memory, cultural critique, and thematic irony. The CDSF allows for context-sensitive interpretation, helping both scholars and students decode deeper meanings. In pedagogical terms, the framework provides a replicable tool for guiding learners beyond surface-level readings toward historically grounded literary analysis.

Conclusion. The CDSF is a rigorous, interdisciplinary model that enhances scholarly interpretation and supports literature instruction. It promotes critical reading, prevents semantic misinterpretation, and equips teachers with a research-informed strategy for fostering historical empathy and interpretive depth in the classroom.

Keywords: Contextual Diachronic Semantic Framework, literature instruction, critical reading, pedagogical strategy, semantic anachronism.

References

Aizaz, G., & Mujahid, M. Y. (2021). Intersecting oppressions: A Marxist-feminist critique of class struggle and gender subjugation in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Global Language Review, 6(2), 334–344. https://doi.org/10.31703/glr.2021(vi-i).36

Andersen, E. (2013). Distorted transmissions: Towards a material reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Orbis Litterarum, 68(2), 110–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12007

Anvari, A., & Blumberg, K. (2021). Subclausal local contexts. Journal of Semantics, 38(3), 393–414. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab004

Asztalos, B., Palla, G., & Czégel, D. (2024). Anomalous diffusion analysis of semantic evolution in major Indo-European languages. PLOS ONE, 19(3), e0298650. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298650

Belas, O., & Hopkins, N. (2019). Subject: English as citizenship education. British Educational Research Journal, 45(2), 320–339. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3500

Biber, D. (2011). Corpus linguistics and the study of literature. Scientific Study of Literature, 1(1), 15–23. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.1.1.02bib

Blank, A. (1999). Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology of the motivations for lexical semantic change. In A. Blank & P. Koch (Eds.), Historical semantics and cognition (pp. 61–90). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804195.61

Bronstein, M. (2014). Ngũgĩ’s use of Conrad: A case for literary transhistory. Modern Language Quarterly, 75(3), 411–437. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2690091

Dahl, E. (2015). Toward a formal model of semantic change: A neo-Reichenbachian approach to the development of the Vedic past tense system. Lingua Posnaniensis, 57(1), 41–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/linpo-2015-0003

Dewan, S. (2023). Semantic volte face of English words in Nepal. KMC Journal, 5(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.3126/kmcj.v5i1.52449

Durant, A., & Davis, J. (2018). Linguistic analysis in trademark law: Current approaches and new challenges. In R. Kremer (Ed.), Research handbook on trademark law reform (pp. 287–320). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614514664-014

Ermilov, T., Khalili, A., & Auer, S. (2014). Ubiquitous semantic applications. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 10(1), 66–99. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijswis.2014010103

Evans, N. (2012). Semantic typology. In J. J. Song (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology (online ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0024

Freeman, M. H. (2010). Cognitive linguistic approaches to literary studies: State of the art in cognitive poetics. In D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738632.013.0045

Gadamer, H.-G. (2013). Truth and method (rev. ed.). A&C Black. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/truth-and-method-9781780936000/

Geeraerts, D. (2009). Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198700302.001.0001

Hadigheh, S., & Khaghaninezhad, M. (2013). How to apply critical linguistics in English/Persian literary works’ criticism. International Journal of Linguistics, 5(4), 90–101. https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v5i4.3794

Hamilton, W. L., Leskovec, J., & Jurafsky, D. (2016). Diachronic word embeddings reveal statistical laws of semantic change. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 1489–1501). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P16-1141

Hilpert, M., & Perek, F. (2015). Meaning change in a petri dish: Constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 339–350. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2015-0013

Hoffman, P., & Woollams, A. (2015). Opposing effects of semantic diversity in lexical and semantic relatedness decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(2), 385–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038995

Hoffman, P., Ralph, M., & Rogers, T. (2012). Semantic diversity: A measure of semantic ambiguity based on variability in the contextual usage of words. Behavior Research Methods, 45(3), 718–730. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0278-x

Hu, R., Li, S., & Liang, S. (2019). Diachronic sense modeling with deep contextualized word embeddings: An ecological view. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 3899–3909). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1379

Johns, C., Campanelli, L., Kush, D., Landi, N., & Dyke, J. (2019). Individual differences in combinatorial semantic processing: Skilled comprehension facilitates complement coercion during sentence comprehension. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/zn2mf

Kutuzov, A., Velldal, E., & Øvrelid, L. (2022). Contextualized embeddings for semantic change detection: Lessons learned. Northern European Journal of Language Technology, 8(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.3384/nejlt.2000-1533.2022.3478

Levshina, N., Koptjevskaja‐Tamm, M., & Östling, R. (2024). Revered and reviled: A sentiment analysis of female and male referents in three languages. Frontiers in Communication, 9, Article 1266407. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1266407

Liu, Z., & Dou, J. (2023). Lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication in simultaneously interpreted texts: A cognitive perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1276705. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1276705

Lootens, T. (2012). Jackson, Shirley. In C. E. Sasser, R. E. Brown, & H. M. Milne (Eds.), The encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118398500.wbeotgj001

Marelli, M., Amenta, S., & Crepaldi, D. (2015). Semantic transparency in free stems: The effect of orthography-semantics consistency on word recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(8), 1571–1583. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.959709

McIntyre, D. (2015). Towards an integrated corpus stylistics. Topics in Linguistics, 16(1), 59–68. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2015-0011

Mitra, S., Mitra, R., Maity, S. K., Riedl, M., Biemann, C., Goyal, P., & Mukherjee, A. (2015). An automatic approach to identify word sense changes in text media across timescales. Natural Language Engineering, 21(5), 773–798. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135132491500011X

Munteanu-Iorga, I. (2022). Perspectives on a philologic and academic canon on Virgil Nemoianu’s theories. Filologia Modernă: Realizări Şi Perspective În Context European, 16(7), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.52505/filomod.2022.16.07

Nardi, J., Falbo, R., & Almeida, J. (2013). Foundational ontologies for semantic integration in EAI: A systematic literature review. In A. Cuzzocrea, C. Leung, D. Slezak, & J. Lin (Eds.), Advances in conceptual modeling (pp. 238–249). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37437-1_20

Navarrete, E., Mahon, B., Lorenzoni, A., & Peressotti, F. (2016). What can written-words tell us about lexical retrieval in speech production? Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1982. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01982

Neumann, D., Gilbertson, N., & Hutton, L. (2014). Context: The foundation of close reading of primary source texts. Social Studies Research and Practice, 9(2), 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1108/SSRP-02-2014-B0005

Nugraha, I. S., & Mahdi, S. (2020). Transitivity system on building the character of Mr. Summers in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Celtic: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching, Literature and Linguistics, 7(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.22219/celtic.v7i1.11980

Osman, R. A. H. (2016). Understanding the classical Malay literary framework: A reappraisal of the poetic theories of Vladimir Braginsky and Muhammad Haji Salleh. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v10i2.866

Oxford English Dictionary. (2024). Definitions for “lottery,” “village,” “tradition,” “black box,” and “stones.” https://www.oed.com

Robinson, M. (2019). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Holocaust literature. Humanities, 8(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010035

Rodina, J., & Kutuzov, A. (2020). RuSemShift: A dataset of historical lexical semantic change in Russian. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 1037–1047). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.90

Rudolph, M., & Blei, D. M. (2018). Dynamic embeddings for language evolution. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 1003–1011). https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3185999

Silva, S., Reis, L., Fernandes, J., & Pereira, A. (2019). A multi-layer framework for semantic modeling. Journal of Documentation, 76(2), 502–530. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-03-2019-0042

Suwardi, A. (2016). A Marxist interpretation of Shirley Jackson's ‘The Lottery’. Journal of English and Education, 4(2), 91–98. https://doi.org/10.20885/jee.vol4.iss2.art8

Swaitti, T., & Yeshoda, K. (2022). Semantic shift of Hebrew words borrowed into Palestinian Arabic in Hebron City. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 12(5), 578–587. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2022.125043

Tahmasebi, N., Borin, L., & Jatowt, A. (2018). Survey of computational approaches to lexical semantic change. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06278. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.06278

Timmermans, M., Vanmassenhove, E., & Shterionov, D. (2022). “Vaderland,” “volk,” and “natie”: Semantic change related to nationalism in Dutch literature between 1700 and 1880 captured with dynamic Bernoulli word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (pp. 106–112). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.lchange-1.13

Traugott, E. C., & Dasher, R. B. (2009). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486500

Utami, E., & Candria, M. (2021). Registers in beauty v-logs. Culturalistics: Journal of Cultural, Literary and Linguistic Studies, 5(2), 34–41. https://doi.org/10.14710/culturalistics.v5i2.12478

Wardani, A., & Adityo, A. (2021). Investigating literary terminologies to accomplish literary research and enjoyment: A corpus study. JETL (Journal of Education, Teaching and Learning), 6(1), 24–30. https://doi.org/10.26737/jetl.v6i1.2317

Wellek, R., & Warren, A. (1956). Theory of literature (Vol. 15). Harcourt, Brace & World.

Wijaya, D. T., & Yeniterzi, R. (2011). Understanding semantic change of words over centuries. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Workshop on DETecting and Exploiting Cultural Diversity on the Social Web (pp. 35–40). https://doi.org/10.1145/2064448.2064475

Wihadi, M., & Fauziah, S. (2019). Pinpointing semantic shifts in three diverse generations of Kuningan region. English Journal Literacy Utama, 3(2), 89–94. https://doi.org/10.33197/ejlutama.vol3.iss2.2019.262

Williams, K. (2022). Cognitive gain and the close reading of literature. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 56(2), 371–376. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12665

Wrisley, D. (2016). Modeling the transmission of al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-ḥikam in medieval Europe: Some initial data-driven explorations. Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 5(1), 228–257. https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000076

Xu, S., & Xu, H. (2024). Advances in corpus applications in literary and translation studies. The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research, 16(1), 166–168. https://doi.org/10.12807/ti.116201.2024.r01

Zipoli, R., Coyne, M., & McCoach, D. (2010). Enhancing vocabulary intervention for kindergarten students: Strategic integration of semantically related and embedded word review. Remedial and Special Education, 32(2), 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932510361262

Zhou, Y. (2024). A coherent analysis of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson using segmented discourse representation theory. Communications in Humanities Research, 39(1), 156–165. https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7064/39/20242205

Announcement

EDUPIJ Citation Metrics

EDUPIJ News!