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Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics: New approaches to variability and change
Edited by Susanne Flach and Martin Hilpert
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 105] 2022
► pp. 284–317

A data-driven approach to finding significant changes in language use through time series analysis

| Birmingham City University
| Birmingham City University
| Birmingham City University

This paper conducts a diachronic study of language change in a corpus covering almost 30 years of mainstream UK news text. In our previous studies, several databases were compiled from the corpus, including diachronic records of word frequency, collocation and morphological analysis. Upon user enquiry, our WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine produced tailored output from these resources. The system was therefore passive, requiring a word or phrase to be specified before querying the databases. The aim now is to extend the data-driven functionality to track the frequency of words in the corpus across time automatically and alert users to statistically significant change patterns. Three tests are employed to find upward and downward trends, sudden jumps in frequency, and seasonal variation.

Keywords: diachrony, language change, variation, statistics, methods
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Trends
    • 2.2Seasonality
    • 2.3Sudden jumps (for otherwise rare words)
    • 2.4Seasonal and trend decomposition using Loess (STL)
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Seasonality test
    • 3.2Trend test
    • 3.3Sudden jumps test
  • 4.Conclusions and future work
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.105.10keh
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