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Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English
Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 96] 2020
► pp. 3–28

The great temptation

What diachronic corpora do and do not reveal about social change

| University of Neuchâtel

This paper examines the potential large diachronic corpora hold for the study of social change. Resources such as COHA or Google Books allow us to detect shifts in the frequencies of linguistic elements, which can then be interpreted as reflections of developments in society. This paper addresses the practicalities of this question in two parts. The theoretical part surveys a series of problems that need to be controlled for in analyses of diachronic textual data. The second part implements these ideas in a study of the English make-causative over the past 150 years. Examining the variables of animacy and verb semantics, the study explores whether the diminishing social value of interpersonal authority is reflected in changing patterns of language use.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Five pitfalls in the analysis of diachronic corpus data
    • 2.1Corpus frequencies (semasiological frequencies) are not always equivalent to frequencies of entities and events in the real world (onomasiological frequencies)
    • 2.2Corpus frequencies of polysemous words need to be broken down into sense-specific and construction-specific frequencies
    • 2.3Correlations in large datasets may be spurious
    • 2.4Comparisons of frequency trends in diachronic corpora require adequate statistical treatment
    • 2.5It is not always easy to disentangle social change and linguistic change
  • 3.Giving in to temptation: A case study of the English make-causative
    • 3.1The English make-causative construction
    • 3.2Corpus data and descriptive statistics
    • 3.3Using distributional semantics to study the development of the make-causative
    • 3.4Discussion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.96.01hil
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COHA = Davies, Mark
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NOW = Davies, Mark
2013  Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 3+ billion words from 20 countries, updated every day. [URL]

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