7.6 measuring language change

Diachronic Linguistics

Focuses on how language changes over time.

example girl in the 1300 meant any young person

Synchronic Linguistics

Focuses on language at a specific point in time.

Word Sketches and Collocation

A word sketch is a chart that shows how a word is used with other words.

Collocation refers to words that frequently appear together

n-Grams and Language Patterns

n-Grams are groups of words that appear next to each other in a sentence.

n-Gram Graph: A line graph that shows how often certain words or phrases are used over time.

Example: The word “watch” was equally used as a noun and verb in the 1900s, but today it’s more commonly used as a verb

concordance

 a list of all the times a word appears in texts, along with the surrounding words.

Concordancer

A program that helps analyze language patterns in a corpus.

What is a Corpus?

A corpus is a large collection of real texts (books, articles, websites) stored in a database for research.