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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body bgcolor=white lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoPlainText>Hello Angus,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Erm, if at the 100% level “all sentences are just the word ‘sustainable’ repeated over and over”, could these still be defined as ‘sentences’?! Mark Liberman mentioned on this graph yesterday on the UPenn blog http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3723#more-3723 with some comparisons from Google Books. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Just a comment – what do we usefully learn about usage from graphs of single wordform frequencies? To me, a single wordform frequency-focused approach doesn’t show much more than whether a wordform becomes more or less frequently used. A design engineer once asked me “how long have people been using <i>green</i> and <i>sustainable</i> with an environmental meaning?” and wasn’t too impressed with the plain frequency results. The OED (historically crowd-sourced, currently corpus-based) told us that the emergence of the “environmentally sustainable” meaning of <i>sustainable</i> to around 1980, but I also found the search interface for COCA/COHA useful for providing more semantic information. e.g. once the notion that an activity is <i>sustainable</i> takes on a positive evaluation, different nouns come to be pre-modified by <i>sustainable</i> (not just <i>development</i>, <i>agriculture</i>, and <i>growth</i>, but <i>business</i>, <i>production</i>, <i>tourism</i> and <i>policies</i>). COCA also lets you explore syntactic shifts e.g. changes in how often <i>sustainable</i> is used attributively rather than predicatively. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Graphs of single wordform frequencies also ignore polarity: Jasienski (2006), for example, searched for “words indicating surprise” among 30 million abstracts of English-language scientific papers. He compared the frequencies of words appearing in these abstracts with their frequencies in the Brown corpus (!) and found that “the word ‘surprising’ appears 12 times more frequently in the natural sciences than in standard English,” and concludes from this observation (p1112) that “the study of nature does indeed seem to surprise us. The odds of finding in abstracts of scientific research papers a result or conclusion described as ‘surprising’ ... are an order of magnitude greater than in standard language.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>My examples below (from Electrical and Mechanical Engineering) also use the word <i>surprising</i>, and would thus be counted in Jasienski’s results, but they’re actually expressing a lack of surprise:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>“The experimentally determined losses have relatively large error bars at the highest T, so it would not be surprising if the nominal result for int (300 K) is somewhat too high.” (Electrical Engineering)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>“Considering gravitational effects, the larger is d, the more efficient are gravity effects to deform the interface. It is thus not surprising that inertia l effects have to be increased to compensate for it.” (Mechanical Engineering)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>So if you make generalizations from the frequency of an adjective in a corpus then it would also be a good idea to check what’s going on in its environment – polarity, pre-modification, complementation, collocation etc. To me, simply looking at frequency graphs for <i>sustainable</i> obscures the interesting stuff. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Best wishes,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>David<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Reference<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Jasienski, M. (2006). It's incredible how often we're surprised by findings. Nature, 440, 1112.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:windowtext'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:windowtext'> corpora-bounces@uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces@uib.no] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Angus Grieve-Smith<br><b>Sent:</b> Monday, January 23, 2012 4:55 PM<br><b>To:</b> corpora@uib.no<br><b>Subject:</b> [Corpora-List] Fwd: increasing use of "sustainable"<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> Can you find something wrong with this picture?<br><br>-------- Original Message -------- <o:p></o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr><td nowrap valign=top style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><b>Subject: <o:p></o:p></b></p></td><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal>increasing use of "sustainable"<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr><tr><td nowrap valign=top style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><b>Date: <o:p></o:p></b></p></td><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal>Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:01:35 +0000<o:p></o:p></p></td></tr><tr><td nowrap valign=top style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><b>From: <o:p></o:p></b></p></td><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal>Dave Sayers <a href="mailto:D.Sayers@SWANSEA.AC.UK"><D.Sayers@SWANSEA.AC.UK></a><o:p></o:p></p></td></tr><tr><td nowrap valign=top style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><b>To: <o:p></o:p></b></p></td><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><a href="mailto:VAR-L@JISCMAIL.AC.UK">VAR-L@JISCMAIL.AC.UK</a><o:p></o:p></p></td></tr></table><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></p><pre>Happy Monday everyone.<o:p></o:p></pre><pre><o:p> </o:p></pre><pre><a href="https://xkcd.com/1007/">https://xkcd.com/1007/</a><o:p></o:p></pre><pre><o:p> </o:p></pre><pre>Dave<o:p></o:p></pre><pre><o:p> </o:p></pre><p class=MsoNormal><br><br><o:p></o:p></p><pre>-- <o:p></o:p></pre><pre> -Angus B. Grieve-Smith<o:p></o:p></pre><pre> <a href="mailto:grvsmth@panix.com">grvsmth@panix.com</a><o:p></o:p></pre><pre><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></pre><p class=MsoPlainText>------------------------------<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>David J. Oakey, BA, MEd, PhD<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Assistant Professor<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Applied Linguistics Program<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Iowa State University<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>317 Ross Hall<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Ames, Iowa 50011-1201, USA<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Email: djoakey@iastate.edu<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>Office: 515-294-7521<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>http://engl.iastate.edu/directory/doakey<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText>------------------------------<o:p></o:p></p><pre><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></pre></div></body></html>