Words that Have Made History, or Modeling the Dynamics of Linguistic Changes

Aim of the study

• Introducing a method to trace changes in language
• No a priori assumptions as to the change-makers
• Identifying the impactful words over time
• Application on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)

The dynamics of language change

• Purely linear trends – not very probable.
• Rather, epochs of substantial stylistic drift follow periods of stagnation.
• The goal: observing the accelleration of language change.

What is responsible for a change?

• A relatively small number of words that reflect changes in societies?
  • (e.g. horse > automobile > car)
• A aggregation of numerous features of individually weak discrimination power?
  • (e.g. the signal of authorship)

Data and methods

• Corpus of American Historical English (COHA)
  • ca. 400 million words
  • different genres (fic, mag, news, nf)
  • covering the years 1810-2009
• A supervised classification
  • Nearest Shrunken Centroids classifier
  • 1,000 most frequent words

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Procedure

Accuracy

Why does the change periodically accelerate?

• A naive assumption that the change can be linked to particular events in history and/or culture.
• However, the impact of major historical breakthroughs on language cannot be rulled out.

Accuracy

Distinctive features

Distinctive features: the biggest variation

So, which words are they?

##  [1] "the"       "and"       "week"      "that"      "'s"       
##  [6] "last"      "is"        "be"        "of"        "it"       
## [11] "we"        "i"         "to"        "was"       "mr."      
## [16] "our"       "my"        "been"      "not"       "u.s."     
## [21] "you"       "new"       "upon"      "there"     "has"      
## [26] "says"      "war"       "york"      "this"      "n't"      
## [31] "will"      "s"         "which"     "for"       "had"      
## [36] "very"      "have"      "said"      "are"       "in"       
## [41] "city"      "made"      "me"        "a"         "president"
## [46] "her"       "us"        "she"       "his"       "by"       
## [51] "united"    "or"        "at"        "but"       "q!"       
## [56] "party"     "committee" "your"      "so"        "as"       
## [61] "street"    "today"     "men"       "would"     "with"     
## [66] "about"     "heart"     "do"        "any"       "'d"       
## [71] "out"       "all"       "if"        "great"     "army"     
## [76] "up"

Words that matter

Words that matter

Words that matter

Words that matter

Function words

Words cannot simply “disappear”

Personal pronouns (“social” words)

Conclusions

• The language change seems to be a fluctuation of rapid and slow changes.
• Numerous features responsible for the change, rather than few strong predictors.
  • unexpectedly many function words among the predictors
  • increasing power of “social” function words (personal pronouns)
• Grand question: do we observe a language change, or a change in style? (e.g. a general taste of an epoch)

Thank you!

• maciejeder@gmail.com
• @MaciejEder
• https://github.com/computationalstylistics

This research is part of project UMO-2013/11/B/HS2/02795, supported by Poland’s National Science Centre.