I don't think I understand what your end goal is.
what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time?
Which complex relationships are you talking about here?
Edit:
I think I understand what you're asking. Maybe one good way of doing this would be to cluster word groups for different periods of time. You could then perhaps look at where a word is now, where it was at the beginning of "time" and take the delta to examine words whose meaning has changed the most.
Another approach might be to do apriori over time. Take a text from 1600 and lhs is "some manly action" and rhs is "he". Take a text from 2000 and lhs is "some formerly manly action" and rhs is still "he" but with much lower levels of support.