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首页> 外文期刊>Journal of computational science >Is language evolution grinding to a halt? The scaling of lexical turbulence in English fiction suggests it is not
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Is language evolution grinding to a halt? The scaling of lexical turbulence in English fiction suggests it is not

机译：语言发展是否停滞不前？英语小说中词汇动荡的扩展表明并非如此

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摘要

Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in the English language as reflected by the Google Books 2012 English Fiction corpus. We critique an earlier method that found decreasing birth and increasing death rates of words over the second half of the 20th Century, showing death rates to be strongly affected by the imposed time cutoff of the arbitrary present and not increasing dramatically. We provide a robust, principled approach to examining lexical evolution by tracking the volume of word flux across various relative frequency thresholds. We show that while the overall statistical structure of the English language remains stable over time in terms of its raw Zipf distribution, we find evidence of an enduring 'lexical turbulence': The flux of words across frequency thresholds from decade to decade scales superlinearly with word rank and exhibits a scaling break we connect to that of Zipfs law. To better understand the changing lexicon, we examine the contributions to the Jensen-Shannon divergence of individual words crossing frequency thresholds. We also find indications that scholarly works about fiction are strongly represented in the 2012 English Fiction corpus, and suggest that a future revision of the corpus should attempt to separate critical works from fiction itself. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
机译：基本的兴趣在于量化语言词典的长期增长，因为它可以更全面地涵盖文化的交流要求和知识空间。在这里，我们探讨了Google图书2012年英语小说语料库反映的英语单词使用动态。我们批评了一种较早的方法，该方法发现了20世纪下半叶单词的出生率下降和死亡率上升，这表明死亡率受到任意存在时间的强加影响，并且并未急剧增加。通过跟踪跨各种相对频率阈值的单词通量，我们提供了一种鲁棒的，有原则的方法来检查词汇演变。我们发现，尽管英语的整体统计结构在其原始Zipf分布方面随时间推移保持稳定，但我们发现了持久的“词汇动荡”的证据：跨十个十年的频率阈值的单词通量与单词成线性比例关系并显示出与Zipfs定律相关的定标突破。为了更好地理解不断变化的词典，我们研究了跨频率阈值的单个单词对Jensen-Shannon散度的贡献。我们还发现有迹象表明，有关小说的学术作品在2012年英语小说语料库中有很强的代表性，并建议对该语料库的未来版本应尝试将批判作品与小说本身区分开。 （C）2017 Elsevier B.V.保留所有权利。

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