Language Change Database: A new online resource

Nevalainen, Terttu; Vartiainen, Turo; Säily, Tanja; Kesäniemi, Joonas; Dominowska, Agata; Öhman, Emily

doi:10.1515/icame-2016-0006

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…The research design allowed us to put existing hypotheses concerning the rate of language change to the test and reach some preliminary conclusions about the way major historical punctuations accelerate change. We would like to emphasize, however, that while our data show clear trends both within the Middle English period and the longer diachrony, the results should be re-examined in future research against a more ample body of data: as one of the compilation principles of the LCD was to make earlier corpus-linguistic research better available to the research community (Nevalainen et al 2016), much of the data used in the present study was drawn from research done in the 1990s, and the most recent research is therefore somewhat underrepresented in our analysis.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…The LCD comes with a customized grammatical model, which is based both on the comprehensive grammatical descriptions found in the large reference grammars of Present-day English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002;Quirk et al 1985) and on our extensive reading of earlier research on the history of English (see Nevalainen et al 2016). This combinatory approach to building the grammar component was motivated by two reasons.…”

Section: Materials 41 Language Change Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This undertaking has become possible with the Language Change Database (LCD), a new online resource, which currently draws together the results of c. 300 corpusbased studies on the history of English and which in the future can be regularly updated by members of the research community. We envisage that the LCD can be used to carry out meta-analyses of a large number of linguistic processes with the aim of discovering whether and to what extent their rates of changeacceleration or decelerationconverge on certain external events or periods of time (Nevalainen et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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History of English as punctuated equilibria? A meta-analysis of the rate of linguistic change in Middle English

Nevalainen

Säily

Vartiainen

et al. 2020

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

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In this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time. Our study is based on a meta-analysis of existing corpus research, which is made available through a new linguistic resource, the Language Change Database (LCD). By aggregating the rates of 44 individual changes, we provide a critical assessment of how well the theory of punctuated equilibria (Dixon, Robert M. W. 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) fits with our results. More specifically, by comparing the rate of language change with major language-external events, such as the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, we provide the first corpus-based meta-analysis of whether these events, which had significant societal consequences, also had an impact on the rate of language change. Our results indicate that major changes in the rate of linguistic change in the late medieval period could indeed be connected to the social and cultural after-effects of the Norman Conquest. We also make a methodological contribution to the field of English historical linguistics: by re-using data from existing research, linguists can start to ask new, fundamental questions about the ways in which language change progresses.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Materials 41 Language Change Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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History of English as punctuated equilibria? A meta-analysis of the rate of linguistic change in Middle English

Nevalainen

Säily

Vartiainen

et al. 2020

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

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“…Preservation of knowledge and ease of access are at the heart of the project introduced in this paper. We are currently compiling a database of corpus-based research on the history of the English language, called the Language Change Database, or the LCD for short (Nevalainen et al 2016). On the one hand, the LCD will serve as a source of knowledge and a means of disseminating information and research findings within the linguistic community.…”

Section: Overview Of the Lcdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Meta-analysis for Historical Corpus Linguistics Based on Linked Data

Kesäniemi

Vartiainen

Säily

et al. 2019

Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Co

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Empirical work on English historical corpus linguistics is plentiful but fragmented, and some of it is hard to come by. This paper proposes a solution for making it more accessible and reusable for meta-analysis. We present an online Language Change Database (LCD), which provides comparative, real-time baseline data from earlier corpus-based studies. LCD entries summarize the findings and include numerical data from the articles. We discuss the LCD from the perspective of database design and linked data management. Furthermore, we illustrate the reuse of LCD data through a meta-analysis of the history of English connectives. For this purpose, we have developed an application called the LCD Aggregated Data Analysis workbench (LADA). We show how researchers can use LADA to filter, refine and visualize LCD data. Thus we are paving the way for a future where both research results and research data are regularly available for verification, validation and re-use. hundreds of individual studies. For instance, Reynolds et al. (2003) studied the association between alcohol consumption and risk of stroke by examining 122 reports and 35 observational studies published in 1966-2002. Renehan et al. (2008, on the other hand, studied the association between body mass index and cancer risk based on 221 data sets from 141 research articles, and Wang et al. (2016) based their metaanalysis of coffee and cancer risk on 105 articles selected from a total of 69,495 potential articles. These kinds of large-scale analyses can be used to establish the current state-of-the-art in the field studied, and they also have the potential to result in new and significant findings: the results of meta-analyses are often more than just the sum of their parts. Importantly, it would have been impossible to carry out such analyses without access to the results gained in earlier research as well as to the actual research data.Similarly to medicine, meta-analyses in linguistics are based on a large body of quantitative results obtained in earlier research. However, not all fields of linguistics have traditionally made use of quantitative data, and even in some of the more quantitatively-oriented fields, such as historical corpus linguistics, the research results may be reported by way of illustrative examples instead of frequency tables. Consequently, meta-analyses in many fields of linguistics have been relatively uncommon. A notable exception is applied linguistics, which has a long tradition in quantitative methods. Here, the beginnings of research synthesis and meta-analysis extend back to the 1970s (Chaudron 2006). The articles in Norris and Ortega (2000) provide examples of meta-analyses on effective teaching practices, effectiveness of corrective feedback, and adult second-language learners' access to Universal Grammar. Durrant (2014), on the other hand, studied the use of corpora in test design by carrying out a meta-analysis based on 19 different tests with 1,568 individual test takers. His goal was to determine the correlation between second-l...

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“…But the fact that historical linguistics research is, at least on a quantitative level, largely not cumulative (Nevalainen et al, 2014(Nevalainen et al, , 2016 means that the empirical basis of the logistic growth assumption has rarely been challenged. The lack of systematic and detailed study Figure 2.4: Ellegård (1953)'s data set on the rise of periphrastic 'do' which formed the basis of the Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch, 1989b).…”

Section: S-shaped Curves In Language Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Momentum in Language Change

Stadler

Blythe²,

Smith

et al. 2016

Lang Dyn Change

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Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics observed in language change, the source of this bias is still debated. In this paper we compare previous accounts with a momentum-based selection account of language change, a replicator-neutral model where the popularity of a variant is modulated by its momentum, i.e. its change in frequency of use in the recent past. We present results from a multi-agent model that are characteristic of language change, in particular by exhibiting spontaneously generated s-shaped transitions that do not require externally triggered actuation. We discuss several empirical questions raised by our model, pertaining to both momentum-based selection as well as other biases and pressures which have been suggested to influence language change.

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Language Change Database: A new online resource

Abstract: We introduce the Language Change Database (LCD)

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

History of English as punctuated equilibria? A meta-analysis of the rate of linguistic change in Middle English

History of English as punctuated equilibria? A meta-analysis of the rate of linguistic change in Middle English

Exploring Meta-analysis for Historical Corpus Linguistics Based on Linked Data

Momentum in Language Change

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