Trends

[Ron Smyth]

This is FUN!  I have looked at so many things already, trying to keep them 
unambiguous (which is the hard part). So far the most interesting to me is 
the parallel rise of "psycholinguistics" and "sociolinguistics" until the 
late 1970s. After that, psycholinguistics took a dive, and 
sociolinguistics has held steady or risen a bit (I don't know the sample 
size, but assume it's big enough that any apparent difference is likely to 
be statistically significant). The crossover for psycho/sociolinguistics 
came around 1982.

This link will make a great Christmas "present" for just about anyone! 
Hours of fun guaranteed!
ron

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Ron Smyth, Associate Professor
Psychology and Linguistics
University of Toronto
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On Mon, 23 Dec 2013, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>