Frequency patterns of semantic change: corpus-based evidence of a near-critical dynamics in language change

Feltgen, Quentin; Fagard, Benjamin; Nadal, Jean-Pierre

doi:10.1098/rsos.170830

Cited by 24 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, in recent years, a growing group of historical (socio-)linguists has placed more explicit emphasis on using corpus data to study individual language use (e. g., papers in this issue; Schmid and Mantlik 2015;Feltgen et al 2017;Hundt et al 2017;Petré 2017;Petré and Van de Velde 2018). In two notable studies, Nevalainen et al (2011) and Baxter and Croft (2016) set out to investigate how individuals behave with respect to morphological and syntactic variation that is diachronically unstable at the population level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Fonteyn

Nini

2020

Cognitive Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

AbstractThis study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there can still be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Fonteyn

Nini

2020

Cognitive Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Of greatest utility from the perspective of understanding language change are large diachronic collections of language use, as from these one can extract trajectories of change and dynamics of competition between communicative variants. One body of research aims to quantify statistical laws of language change over time, those of word growth and decline, and relationships between word frequencies and lexical evolution (Cuskley et al, 2014;Feltgen et al, 2017;Keller and Schultz, 2013;Keller and Schultz, 2014;Lieberman et al, 2007;Newberry et al, 2017;Pagel et al, 2007). This has also involved claims of the effects of real-world events (like wars) on these processes (Bochkarev et al, 2014;Petersen et al, 2012;Wijaya and Yeniterzi, 2011).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling effects, or because corpora are composed of contemporary media and fiction texts within which the underlying topics ebb and flow with cultural and socio-political trends. In this work, we introduce a simple model for controlling for topical fluctuations in corpora—the topical-cultural advection model—and demonstrate how it provides a robust baseline of variability in word frequency changes over time. We validate the model on a diachronic corpus spanning two centuries, and a carefully-controlled artificial language change scenario, and then use it to correct for topical fluctuations in historical time series. Finally, we use the model to show that the emergence of new words typically corresponds with the rise of a trending topic. This suggests that some lexical innovations occur due to growing communicative need in a subspace of the lexicon, and that the topical-cultural advection model can be used to quantify this.

show abstract

“…The study of frequency has been recognized in linguistics, such as in studying the relation of frequency and language typology (Bentz, Alikaniotis, Samardžić, & Buttery, 2017), the importance of lexical frequency for designing teaching materials (Criado & Sánchez, 2012), and the relation between frequency and language change (Feltgen, Fagard, & Nadal, 2017). In text analysis, frequency holds a salient role because each text might have its own lexical choice that results in different frequency of use (Biber, 2012).…”

Section: A R T I C L E I N F O Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Oktavianti

Adnan

2020

Engl. Lang. Teach. Educational. Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency of verb choice.

show abstract

Frequency patterns of semantic change: corpus-based evidence of a near-critical dynamics in language change

Cited by 24 publications

References 36 publications

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation

Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About