Related papers: Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Us…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
To uncover underlying mechanism of collective human dynamics, we survey more than 1.8 billion blog entries and observe the statistical properties of word appearances. We focus on words that show dynamic growth and decay with a tendency to…
Over the past two centuries, the frequency of word usage in major Western languages has exhibited small amplitude regular cycles, superimposed on larger background trends. We show that these cycles of word usage organize into semantically…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…
This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…
The availability of large linguistic data sets enables data-driven approaches to study linguistic change. The Google Books corpus unigram frequency data set is used to investigate the word rank dynamics in eight languages. We observed the…
The time variation of the rank $k$ of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for $k>50$ the law of large…
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…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
We introduce a dataset for studying the evolution of words, constructed from WordNet and the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dataset tracks the evolution of 4,000 synonym sets (synsets), containing 9,000 English words, from 1800 AD to 2000…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…