Using the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law to measure diachronic lexical, syntactical and stylistic changes – a large-scale corpus analysis
- Using the Google Ngram Corpora for six different languages (including two varieties of English), a large-scale time series analysis is conducted. It is demonstrated that diachronic changes of the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law (and the parameter of the Zipf law, all estimated by maximum likelihood) can be used to quantify and visualize important aspects of linguistic change (as represented in the Google Ngram Corpora). The analysis also reveals that there are important cross-linguistic differences. It is argued that the Zipf–Mandelbrot parameters can be used as a first indicator of diachronic linguistic change, but more thorough analyses should make use of the full spectrum of different lexical, syntactical and stylometric measures to fully understand the factors that actually drive those changes.
Download full text files
Additional Services
Statistics
| Author: | Alexander KoplenigORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-42233 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2014-0049 |
| ISSN: | 1613-7035 |
| Parent Title (English): | Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2015 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2015/10/08 |
| Publicationstate: | Postprint |
| Reviewstate: | Peer-Review |
| Tag: | Google Ngram Corpora; Zipf’s law; diachronic corpus linguistics; lexical richness; noun–pronoun ratio; power law; syntactic complexity; time series analysis; type token ratio; vocabulary size |
| Volume: | 2015 |
| Issue: | Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory |
| Edition: | Ahead of print (April 2015) |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 34 |
| Note: | Veröffentlicht in: Corpus linguistic and linguistic theory 2018 14(1) pp. 1-35. DOI 10.1515/cllt-2014-0049 siehe auch: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-73491 |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 410 Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Leibniz-Classification: | Sprache, Linguistik |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Korpuslinguistik |
| Licence (German): |  Urheberrechtlich geschützt |