Trends

Brian MacWhinney macw at cmu.edu
Tue Dec 24 02:36:44 UTC 2013


Both slope and the scale on the ordinate are important.  If you contrast “Chomskyan linguistics” and “corpus linguistics” you get a similar rising slope but the latter is 10 times more frequent than the former.  Interestingly, the sharply rising profiles for “cognitive linguistics” and “corpus linguistics” are very similar.  The steepest and most recent rise I found was for “embodied cognition” but its raw frequency is still low.  Too bad we can’t see the last 5 years for that one.

One worries that some crucial pair could be missing.  So, you can see a clear decline in “generative grammar” but maybe that was because terminology shifted to “Universal grammar”, but that was also in decline and “transformational grammar” is nearing extinction.  But, still, maybe there is some term in the formalist literature that is on the rise and we are just missing it.

Best wishes,

—Brian MacWhinney

On Dec 23, 2013, at 9:14 PM, William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu> 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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