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Diachrone Wortschatzveränderungen werden in der Regel exemplarisch anhand bestimmter Phänomene oder Phänomenbereiche untersucht. Wir widmen uns der Frage, ob und wie Wandelprozesse auch auf globaler Ebene, also ohne sich auf bestimmte Wortschatzausschnitte festzulegen, messbar sind. Zur Untersuchung dieser Frage nutzen wir das Spiegel-Korpus, in dem alle Ausgaben der Wochenzeitschrift seit 1947 enthalten sind. Dabei gehen wir auf grundlegende Herausforderungen ein, die es dabei zu lösen gilt, wie die Verteilung sprachlicher Daten und die Folgen unterschiedlicher Subkorpusgrößen, d.h. im konkreten Fall die variierende Größe des Spiegelkorpus über die Zeit hinweg. Wir stellen ein Verfahren vor, mit dem wir in der Lage sind, flankiert von einem „Lackmustest“ zur Überprüfung der Ergebnisse, Wortschatzwandelprozesse bis auf die Mikroebene, d.h. zwischen zwei Monaten oder gar Wochen, quantitativ nachzuvollziehen.
In this paper, an exploratory data-driven method is presented that extracts word-types from diachronic corpora that have undergone the most pronounced change in frequency of occurrence in a given period of time. Combined with statistical methods from time series analysis, the method is able to find meaningful patterns and relationships in diachronic corpora, an idea that is still uncommon in linguistics. This indicates that the approach can facilitate an improved understanding of diachronic processes.
The Google Ngram Corpora seem to offer a unique opportunity to study linguistic and cultural change in quantitative terms. To avoid breaking any copyright laws, the data sets are not accompanied by any metadata regarding the texts the corpora consist of. Some of the consequences of this strategy are analyzed in this article. I chose the example of measuring censorship in Nazi Germany, which received widespread attention and was published in a paper that accompanied the release of the Google Ngram data (Michel et al. (2010): Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014): 176–82). I show that without proper metadata, it is unclear whether the results actually reflect any kind of censorship at all. Collectively, the findings imply that observed changes in this period of time can only be linked directly to World War II to a certain extent. Therefore, instead of speaking about general linguistic or cultural change, it seems to be preferable to explicitly restrict the results to linguistic or cultural change ‘as it is represented in the Google Ngram data’. On a more general level, the analysis demonstrates the importance of metadata, the availability of which is not just a nice add-on, but a powerful source of information for the digital humanities.