Trends

[William Croft]

Dear Funknetters,

   Last week Terry Regier and I were playing around with the Google Books Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams). For those of you who have not yet become addicted to the Ngram Viewer, it plots the token frequency of words and word strings over time in the books in Google Books. If you separate words by commas, you can plot the token frequencies of multiple strings on a single graph. 
    We set the time window as 1950 to 2008 (the latest year available); some of the more interesting plots we tried were:

linguistics, Chomsky [NB: search terms are case sensitive]
generative grammar, cognitive linguistics
formal linguistics, functional linguistics

   Of course, there are many caveats that must be added to these raw token frequencies (for instance, we dropped the case sensitivity of "cognitive linguistics", but the results were distorted by the many references to articles in "Cognitive Linguistics"). But the apparent trends are interesting to consider.

Happy Holidays,
Bill Croft