Establishing a ‘new normal’: detecting fluctuating trends in word frequency over time

Gee, Matt and Kehoe, Andrew and Renouf, Antoinette (2024) Establishing a ‘new normal’: detecting fluctuating trends in word frequency over time. In: Crossing Boundaries through Corpora. Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 119 . John Benjamins, pp. 125-152. ISBN 9789027215949

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Abstract

In this chapter we introduce statistical methods and associated visualisations for the analysis of lexical change on a monthly basis in a 1.8-billion word news corpus spanning over 30 years. In previous work (Kehoe et al. 2022) we found examples of word frequency change in a data-driven manner by applying existing statistical tests. An ongoing limitation is that, as our diachronic corpus grows, so too does the possibility of a word exhibiting multiple frequency changes in different directions. This chapter reframes the problem as one of time-series segmentation, dividing the frequency history of a word into timespans exhibiting consistent upward or downward change. We then determine reasons for such changes by applying horizon graph visualisations to collocates.

Item Type:	Book Section
Identification Number:	10.1075/scl.119
Dates:	Date Event 17 October 2024 Published
Subjects:	CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-02 - English language CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media
Depositing User:	Matthew Gee
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2024 13:00
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2024 13:00
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/15911

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