Corpus Of Historical American English Research Articles

Evaluation of word embedding models used for diachronic semantic change analysis

In the last decade, the quantitative analysis of diachronic changes in language and lexical semantic changes have become the subject of active research. A significant role was played by the development of new effective techniques of word embedding. This direction has been effectively demonstrated in a number of studies. Some of them have focused on the analysis of the optimal type of word2vec models, hyperparameters for training, and evaluation techniques. In this research, we used Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The paper demonstrates the results of multiple training runs and the comparison of word2vec models with different variations of hyperparameters used for lexical semantic change detection. In addition to traditional word similarities and analogical reasoning tests, we used testing on an extended set of synonyms. We have evaluated word2vec models on the set of more than 100,000 English synsets that were randomly selected from the WordNet database. We have shown that changing the word2vec model parameters (such as a dimension of word embedding, a size of context window, a type of model, a word discard rate etc.) can significantly impact on the resulting word embedding vector space and the detected lexical semantic changes. Additionally, the results strongly depended on properties of the corpus, such as word frequency distribution.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before”: how iconic is the Star Trek split infinitive?

Abstract “To boldly go where no man has gone before”, popularized by the science fiction series Star Trek, has provided an iconic example for the use of split infinitives. From its introduction, the series may have paved the way for the broader use of split infinitives in contemporary, informal English in spite of prescriptive grammars shunning the structure. The current qualitative and quantitative study is based on the general diachronic Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and a specific telecinematic corpus (TV Corpus). It aims to trace genre influence in the use of split infinitives in sci-fi and television discourses. It asks whether the use of split infinitives in informal genres can be correlated with its prominent use in the Star Trek series. The current study finds that both raw and relative frequencies increase in the wake of Star Trek, as well as the probability of choice. Yet the clearest influence from Star Trek stems from the spread of the iconic to boldly go phrase.

Have media texts become more humorous?

As a research topic, humour has drawn much attention from multiple disciplines including linguistics. Based on Engelthaler & Hills’ (2018) humour scale, this study developed a measure named Humour Index (HMI) to quantify the degree of humour of texts. This measure was applied to examine the diachronic changes in the degree of humour of American newspapers and magazines across a time span of 118 years (1900-2017) with the use of texts from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Besides, the study also discussed the contributions of different types of words to the degree of humour in the two genres. The results show significant uptrends in the degree of humour of both newspapers and magazines in the examined period. Moreover, derogatory and offensive words are found to be less frequently used than other categories of words in both genres. This study provides both theoretical and methodological implications for humour studies and claims or hypotheses of previous research, such as infotainment and linguistic positivity bias.

Lexical change and stability in 100 years of English in US newspapers

This study explores diachronic variation across approximately one hundred years of the newspaper register in US American English from 1920 to 2019 as captured in the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). Informed by a similar study of lexical change in British English (Baker, 2011), the analysis identified high-frequency words exhibiting the greatest increases and decreases in use as well as those words demonstrating stability across the four sampling periods: 1920–29, 1950–59, 1980–89, 2010–19. The process to identify words of change and stability began first with the application of a cumulative frequency threshold; coefficient of variance and Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient were then calculated to aid in identification. In other words, the process targeted high-frequency words whose use has demonstrated the greatest change or stability. The discussion presents the three resulting word lists (increasing, decreasing, stable) and reports concordance and collocation analysis of select words from each list to gain insight into the underlying factors informing lexical change and stability.

Development of the Subject of BE going to in Grammaticalisation from the 1820s to 2010s in Comparison with BE about to

ABSTRACT This study clarifies the relaxation of selectional restrictions imposed on the subject of BE going to in relation to its increase in frequency from the 1820s to the 2010s by analysing the Corpus of Historical American English. To this end, BE about to is also analysed. Whilst the use of BE going to in the passive and there constructions is attested in the early stage of its grammaticalisation towards becoming a semi-auxiliary by previous studies, this study suggests that its use with the pronoun what in subject position was also a sign of an initial stage of grammaticalisation. It will be also shown that subjects composed of grammatical components with simple content appeared earlier than those with content-rich ones. This study also demonstrates that the frequency order of these subjects in current English corresponds to their chronological order of when the earliest token appeared in the corpus.

Detecting directional forces in the evolution of grammar: A case study of the English perfect with intransitives across EEBO, COHA, and Google Books

Languages have diverse characteristics that have emerged through evolution. In modern English grammar, the perfect is formed with have+PP (past participle), but in earlier English, the be+PP form also existed. It is widely recognised that the auxiliary verb BE was replaced by HAVE throughout evolution, except for some special cases. However, whether this evolution was caused by natural selection or random drift is still unclear. Here we examined directional forces in the evolution of the English perfect with intransitive by combining three large-scale data sources: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and Google Books. We found that most intransitive verbs exhibited an apparent transition from be+PP to have+PP, most of which were classified as ‘selection’ by a deep neural network-based model. These results suggest that the English perfect could have evolved through natural selection rather than random drift, and provide insights into the cultural evolution of grammar.

A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the representations of tree/s and forest/s in US discourse from 1820-2019

This study presents a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the evolving discursive representations of tree/s and forest/s in US American discourse from 1820-2019 in the approximately 475-million word Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). To explore these entities and their depictions in prevailing discourse, this study performs a diachronic collocation analysis of adjectives occurring with the terms across the span of the corpus. The analysis identified the 100 most frequent adjective collocates appearing with the singular and plural forms of tree/s and forest/s and calculated Kendall's tau correlation coefficient scores using decade-by-decade per million use rates in order to empirically assess the strength of trends in language use. The findings indicate a divergence in broadly positive and negative representations over the time span as adjectives construing poor health and lack of vitality are rising while adjectives conveying positive attributes of size, beauty, and wellbeing are declining. In addition, adjectives reflecting experiential engagement with tree/s and forest/s have progressively been replaced by a discourse of scientific identification and governmental dominion.

From space to time and beyond: A corpus inquiry into the grammaticalization patterns of a/one step away from

ABSTRACT Cross-linguistically, spatial expressions display a propensity to undergo semantic extensions, thus frequently giving rise to grammatical markers. Drawing on diachronic material derived from the Corpus of Historical American English and synchronic data extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study reports on a hitherto unexplored, incipient change of this kind, namely that affecting the multiword string a/one step away from. It is shown that with the conventionalization of the invited inference of closeness, the construction at issue was reanalyzed as a complex preposition, functioning initially as an exponent of prospective aspect, then additionally as a similitude marker, and finally also as an approximator. This chronology further finds reflection in the current functional gradience of a/one step away from, in that among its grammatical instances, which amount to slightly more than half the tokens in the sample, aspectual uses constitute the largest proportion, followed by similative occurrences and degree modifier attestations. At the distributional level, the investigated case of grammaticalization manifests itself in the highly confined determination and modification patterns of the form step, counterbalanced by the entire expression’s compatibility with inanimate subjects as well as host-class expansion to abstract NPs, verbal gerunds, and adjectives.

Ongoing semantic change in a modernising society: a look at some adjectives from the olfactory domain in the Corpus of Historical American English

As a diachronic corpus-based investigation into onomasiological variation, this study has two main objectives. First, the paper analyses the evolution of the concept of sweet-smelling as a whole – that is, as instantiated by the three near-synonymous adjectives, fragrant, perfumed and scented, with a focus on language-external pressures for distributional changes. There seems to exist variation over time in the nouns that the concept typically collocates with, going from nouns referring to entities with a natural, pleasant smell to entities with an artificial agreeable aroma. It is here argued that this change is motivated by the social and technological transformations experienced by American society after the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, a claim that finds preliminary empirical support in the distribution from 1820 to 2009 of a series of lexical indicators from the semantic domains of cleaning, cosmetics and textile & clothing. Second, the distribution over time of the three adjectives is examined. The data point to a reorganisation concerning the internal semantic structure of the synonym set, with scented gaining ground at the expense of fragrant and perfumed in several contexts of use. Furthermore, the adjectives exhibit highly idiosyncratic collocational preferences, which go a long way towards explaining the alternation between them.

Systematically Detecting Patterns of Social, Historical and Linguistic Change: The Framing of Poverty in Times of Poverty

AbstractThe linguistic DNA project seeks to understand the evolution of philosophy, society and language during the Modern English period. Corpora like Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allow us to apply statistical data‐driven models extracting patterns to confirm our expectations. As systems biology has revolutionised biology by systematically searching for all patterns, we detect patterns in our data systematically with contextual and distributional semantic approaches, an approach that could be called systems history. We uncover semantic patterns with methods from text mining, computational linguistics and digital humanities. We normalise the spelling automatically to present‐day variants and use bottom‐up analyses to step from words to concepts: collocations, topic modelling and distributional semantics. We illustrate the approaches with two case studies: associations of poverty changing across time, and Charles Dickens social criticism, his vision of helping to improve the situation of the poor. As no gold standard for our task exists, our approaches are exploratory, which entails considerable manual intervention, e.g. sifting candidate lists, reading excerpts and interpreting topic models. A fully automatic approach is currently neither feasible nor envisaged: semi‐automatic approaches give researchers the inspiring opportunity to interact with the texts in a constant move between distant and close reading. The different characteristics of the various statistical methods offer complementary perspectives.

AJust SoStory: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinatorjust so

This article identifiesjust soas a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from theCorpus of Contemporary American Englishand theCorpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day.Just sois shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning wins out over the conditional meaning, thus filling the niche of an informal purpose subordinator and providing an alternative to its multifunctional and semantically ambiguous competitorsso thatandso. With increasing grammaticalization thejust sopurpose subordinator also exhibits signs of intersubjectification, being coopted for syntactically independent, interpersonal uses (e.g.just so we're clear) and culminating in the emergence of a new discourse marker in the form ofjust so you knowin the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To account for the emergence of purposejust so, a constructional network approach is adopted, which considers the network links to other purpose subordinators, notablyso thatandso.

Epistemological stance and passive reporting verbs in judicial opinions: the case of BE expected to and BE supposed to

Abstract This study examines the discourse functions of BE expected to and BE supposed to in the genre of judicial opinion, providing insights into discipline-specific practices of epistemological positioning. Drawing on the 130 million words Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions, it looks at how the two mindsay constructions were deployed in judicial writing over a period of more than 200 years, and identifies divergent frequency patterns associated with their use. As the findings reveal, in the opinions, on the one hand, BE expected to tends to co-occur with reasonably (can/could (not) reasonably be expected to) and is used to create a semblance of objectivity. BE supposed to, on the other hand, favors the present tense and third-person reference (which/it is supposed to) and serves as a distancing device. The paper also compares the frequency patterns involving BE expected to and BE supposed to found in the opinions with those attested in the Corpus of Historical American English, and it demonstrates that judicial writing exhibits trends which clearly differ from trends noted in non-judicial registers.

“I never get a thing that ain’t been used”: A diachronic corpus-based study of second-hand consumption

Abstract Second-hand consumption is often seen as a way of reducing one’s ecological footprint. In an attempt to find out how the representations of second-hand consumption in discourse have evolved over time, a corpus study of the word second-hand is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1820–2019). Frequency is considered, as well as collocates, which show the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in different time periods and which indicate how positively or negatively connoted second-hand consumption is. Together with a more qualitative approach, this analysis reveals variation in the frequency and connotations of the word second-hand, and some long-lasting stigma which survives for example through comparisons. The article ends with some suggestions as to how the image of second-hand consumption could be improved.

On Speak With and Talk With: A Corpora-Based Analysis

The main purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis of speak with and talk with in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary Namkil Kang American English (COCA). With respect to the COHA, it is interesting to note that talk with was always preferred over speak with by Americans except 1820, 1830, and 1840. A further point to note is that speak with had the highest frequency (271 tokens) in 2010, whereas talk with had the highest frequency (633 tokens) in 1950. With respect to the COCA, it is worth pointing out that speak with and talk with show the same property in four genres, whereas they show a different property in the other four genres. Simply put, in the eight genres of the COCA, speak with is 50% the same as talk with. Talking about the distance between speak with and talk with, the former is the nearest to the latter in the web genre. Quite interestingly, the COCA shows that talk with people and speak with authority are the most widely used (126 tokens vs. 56 tokens) in America. Finally, this paper argues that 26.08% of forty six nouns are the collocations of speak with and talk with, thus revealing a low degree of similarity.

Functional Transposition of ‘ON’ from a Diachronic Perspective

The paper represents a distinctive attempt to trace the development of the preposition and the adverb ‘on’ as the initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on their evolution throughout 16 historical time spans – since 850 and up to the present time. The research is based on 7 954 Old English, 2 368 Middle English, 4 251 Early Modern English examples, which have been obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and analyzed without applying any corpus software; 174 581 examples of Late Modern English from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, which have been processed by means of the Lancsbox software tool; and the statistical data on 7 118 454 examples of Present-Day English retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The paper attests that ‘on’ is formed at the first stage (before 850) of the Old English period as the preposition and at the next stage (850–950) is transposed into the category of the adverb, which is characterized by a further slight increase in the statistics and stabilization of its correlation with the preposition ‘on’. Correlation between the categories had remained stable up to the Early Modern English period, when the category of the adverb has started its sustainable growth, which is currently being observed in the English language. The paper proves that in Early Modern English the process of functional transposition is superseded by an utterly new stage of lexicalization which leads to formation of phrasal verbs.

An improved test of the constant rate hypothesis: late Modern American English possessive have

Abstract The Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH) predicts that a linguistic innovation should spread at identical rates of change in all grammatical contexts in which it is used (Kroch 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244). Weaknesses in previous tests of the CRH are identified. A new study is conducted that improves upon them. It utilizes a syntactic change in late Modern American English possessive have, which altered its realization in the grammar-theoretically related contexts negation, inversion, VP-adjunction and VP-ellipsis. Data sets are collected from the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010. The corpus of historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed 10 September 2016)) and analyzed with mixed-effects logistic regression models. The statistical analysis reveals that it is indeed plausible to assume that each of the contexts innovates the use of possessive have at the same speed. Implications of the findings for the CRH are discussed.

Investigating diachronic change in dependency distance of Modern English: A genre-specific perspective

Dependency distance is regarded as an index of working memory load and an indicator of syntactic difficulty. Previous studies have shown that natural languages tend to minimize the dependency distance due to the limited cognitive resources of language users, a phenomenon termed as Dependency Distance Minimization (DDM). More recent research approached DDM from a diachronic perspective, and found a temporal trend towards decreased dependency distance in an English corpus of political speeches. However, it remains unanswered whether the diachronic minimization of dependency distance could be generalized to other genres and how genre differences affect the diachronic development of dependency distance. To address these issues, the present study aims to explore the diachronic change of dependency distance in Modern English with a genre-specific perspective. Based on the large-scale Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the dependency distance of the four genres (Fiction, News, Magazine, and Non-Fiction) in the corpus were calculated and compared across a time span of roughly 100 years (1900–2009). Results of the study showed that the changing patterns of dependency distance vary among the examined genres. Such differences suggest that multiple and complex factors may be at work behind the diverging temporal trends of dependency distance in different genres of Modern English.

Peeking into the socio-historical background and current use of ‘me (no)likey’

The verbto likehas fallen repeatedly under the gaze of scholars. One aspect which has stimulated vigorous discussion is its original use in impersonal constructions and its later change of argument structure along with the disappearance of impersonals from English. Nonetheless, evidence from current informal English shows thatlikeis now used in constructions which bear a close resemblance to the older impersonals, although always displaying alternative spelling variants, especiallylikey. This paper seeks to further our understanding of the verbto like, focusing specifically on these new constructions. To this end I will uselikeyas a generic label to refer to such new uses and constructions, regardless of variations in spelling (unless otherwise stated). Using data from theCorpus of Historical American EnglishandiWeb Corpus, the study will seek to answer the following research questions:RQ1.What are the morpho-syntactic features of the expression ‘me (no) likey’ in Present-Day English?RQ2.What is the origin of the sequence ‘me (no) likey’?RQ3.Where do phrasal patterns withlikeyfall on the continuum of idiomaticity (Michaelis, 2017)?

Application of the technologies of corpus linguistics in the study of collocations

The subject of this research is the polysemous borrowed noun “credit” in the Russian language and noun “credit” in the Anglo-American language. The goal lies in determination of the national-specific and universal collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian discourse and their translated equivalents in the Anglo-American discourse of the XIX and XXI centuries. Analysis is conducted on the collocations of "credit" formed in accordance with the pattern adjective + noun revealed by statistical methods that calculate the frequency of joint use in the dictionaries and linguistic corpora of the Russian and Anglo-American texts. The use of contrastive analysis allowed establishing the linear and vector correspondences between the lexeme "credit" and national-specific lacunae. The article provides the examples of the national-specific collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian and Anglo-American discourse. The research employs the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English in the diachronic aspect within the time span of 1800 – 1900 and 2015 – 2019. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that the knowledge of collocations and formation of collocation competence are the essential requirements in modern communicative approach towards learning a foreign language.

A corpus-based study of the ADJ-looking adjectivization in English

Abstract This article aims to conduct a corpus-based study of the diachronic and synchronic distributions of a special type of participle adjectivization, the ADJ-looking adjectivization. The study based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) finds that this process of adjectivization consists of two phases: (1) The downward rank-shift from the look ADJ construction to the ADJ looking adjectivization is a process of metaphorization; (2) The transcategorization from the ADJ looking adjectivization to the ADJ-looking adjectivization is a process of lexicalization. The study based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) finds that ADJ-looking adjectivizations are mode and register sensitive but not discipline sensitive. The modifier use prefers to occur more in hard science texts to increase the complexity of nominal groups and the predicative use prefers to occur more in soft science texts to increase the grammatical intricacy of sentences. The reason for the non-sensitivity across disciplines is that evaluative adjectives tend to occur in neither soft nor hard science texts.