Scientific techniques show promise for future linguistics research.
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The use of terrific (blue), exciting (red), and outstanding (gold) from 1858-2008.
Image credit: Google Ngram Viewer: http://bit.ly/VCFrnd
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(ISNS) -- Every year the Oxford English Dictionary expands, incorporating freshly coined terms such as "bromance," "staycation" or "frenemy." However, a recent analysis has found that as a language grows over time, it becomes more set in its ways. New words are always being added, according to this study, but few become widely used and part of the standard vocabulary.
"There are a lot of new hip words that are sort of popping out, but the popularity and the lifespan of these words are very short," said Matjaz Perc, a physics professor at the University of Maribor in Slovenia and one of the authors of the paper. "Our study shows that we don't really need them, so the mileage that we get out of them is very low compared to other words."
Google has scanned more than 20 million books, or approximately 4
percent of all books ever published in nine major languages, and made
them accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. It's this online
database that the researchers studied. The results were published in Nature Scientific Reports.
The Google database includes books written in the 1500s, but the
team limited its research to the last two centuries. They tracked the
proliferation of words throughout the library using Google's Ngram viewer to study the growth and usage patterns of words in a language.
"This Google Books Project has provided this huge platform to do
this all at once," said Alex Petersen, a physicist at the IMT Lucca
Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy, and lead author of the paper.
The team says that the "core lexicon" of the English language is
made up of about 30,000 words that show up more frequently than one word
in a million. There is also a body 100 times as large, of rarely used
words, which applies to the vast majority of new words. Some of the few
that jumped from the rarely used category into the core lexicon in
recent years have been words like "email" or "Google." However these are
the exception, not the rule.
"We're not coming up with new color names or descriptions for
things we've already established," Petersen said. "A lot of the new
words that we see are related to computers."
At the beginning of the 19th century, fewer new words were
introduced than now, but their popularity changed dramatically from year
to year. A word like "paper" might be in the top thousand most used
words one year, and then drop off in use for a while, only to return in
popularity years later.
"All things being equal, you would expect that each word would have
the same popularity from year to year," said Joel Tenenbaum, a
physicist at Boston University and a coauthor of the paper.
The scientists found that as the vocabulary of a language grew, a
word's popularity would change less and less, until the modern era where
the most popular words have remained constant for decades. It wasn't
just English that "cooled" as it grew.
"In the paper we find this overwhelming trend across all languages," Petersen said.
To linguists, many of the conclusions reached by the researchers were known within the community.
"They’ve done some of the largest scale work that anyone has ever
done," said Bill Kretzschmar, a linguist at the University of Georgia.
However he called their results underwhelming. "For every million words
you add after the first couple, you don't get much return from that, and
we knew that already."
Petersen responded that theirs was the first attempt to quantify exactly how much a language "cools" as it expands.
Kretzschmar said that he was glad that physicists and
mathematicians were starting to get interested in linguistics. He said
that the statistical techniques employed by the researchers could
potentially bring new insights to the field.
"They bring models and methods that I don’t have," Kretzschmar
said. "I think this is an important movement in the study of language."
He added that the vastness of the Google library means that
nonfiction books, fiction, poetry and journal articles were all brought
together into the same database. This poses a problem because these
different forms of written communication vary dramatically in their use
of language, such as in their level of formality, making direct
comparisons difficult.
"Because there is a similar mix from year to year, we're not
comparing apples to oranges. We're comparing a basket of apples and
oranges to another basket of comparable fractions of apples and
oranges," Petersen said. Google does break some of their English texts
into subcategories, like British English, American English and English
Fiction. "We found the same patterns independent of which Google dataset
we used."
Kretzschmar also faulted Google's metadata as sometimes inaccurate.
It includes information about the scanned books such as their
publication dates, author and publisher. In addition, computers often
misidentify letters when interpreting a scanned page. Google will read
it as a new word, though really it's just a misspelling.
Petersen said that was a known flaw in their work, and they were working on an improved way to prune out errors.
Mike Lucibella - Inside Science News Service
Mike Lucibella is a contributing writer to Inside Science News Service.
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