Usage Fluctuation Analysis
Open Access
- 5 July 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Corpus Studies of Language Through Time
- Vol. 24 (4), 413-444
- https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18096.mce
Abstract
This article introduces a methodology for the diachronic analysis of large historical corpora, Usage Fluctuation Analysis (UFA). UFA looks at the fluctuation of the usage of a word as observed through collocation. It presupposes neither a commitment to a specific semantic theory, nor that the results will focus solely on semantics. We focus, rather, upon a word’s usage. UFA considers large amounts of evidence about usage, through time, as made available by historical corpora, displaying fluctuation in word usage in the form of a graph. The paper provides guidelines for the interpretation of UFA graphs and provides three short case studies applying the technique to (i) the analysis of the word its and (ii) two words related to social actors, whore and harlot. These case studies relate UFA to prior, labour intensive, corpus and historical analyses. They also highlight the novel observations that the technique affords.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- Meaning change in a petri dish: constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion chartsLinguistics Vanguard, 2015
- Vector Space Models of Lexical MeaningPublished by Wiley ,2015
- Collocations in contextCorpus Studies of Language Through Time, 2015
- The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysisCorpus Studies of Language Through Time, 2012
- Modeling diachronic change in the third person singular: a multifactorial, verb- and author-specific exploratory approachEnglish Language and Linguistics, 2010
- Computing inter‐rater reliability and its variance in the presence of high agreementBritish Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 2008
- Multivariable regression model building by using fractional polynomials: Description of SAS, STATA and R programsComputational Statistics & Data Analysis, 2006
- Querying KeywordsJournal of English Linguistics, 2004
- Spatial Variation in Risk of Disease: A Nonparametric Binary Regression ApproachJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics, 1998
- Distributional StructureWORD, 1954