Trends

Cameron, Richard rcameron at uic.edu
Tue Dec 24 02:17:30 UTC 2013


So, Bill, what trends did you see?  - Richard Cameron

On Mon, December 23, 2013 8:14 pm, William Croft wrote:
> 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
>
>



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