The application of growth curve modeling for the analysis of diachronic corpora

Andrea Nini, Carlo Corradini, Diansheng Guo, Jack Grieve

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This paper introduces growth curve modeling for the analysis of language change in corpus linguistics. In addition to describing growth curve modeling, which is a regression-based method for studying the dynamics of a set of variables measured over time, we demonstrate the technique through an analysis of the relative frequencies of words that are increasing or decreasing over time in a multi-billion word diachronic corpus of Twitter. This analysis finds that increasing words tend to follow a trajectory similar to the s-curve of language change, whereas decreasing words tend to follow a decelerated trajectory, thereby showing how growth curve modeling can be used to uncover and describe underlying patterns of language change in diachronic corpora.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)102-125
Number of pages24
JournalLanguage Dynamics and Change
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2017

Keywords

  • growth curve modeling
  • time series
  • language change
  • word frequency
  • corpus linguistics
  • regression
  • s-curve of language change
  • diachronic corpus

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