{"id":2269,"date":"2012-03-23T12:01:18","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T11:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?p=2269"},"modified":"2024-02-24T10:42:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T09:42:08","slug":"fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the “Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death<\/a>” by analysing the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800\u20132008. (The paper is published by Arxiv.org.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We quote at length from the concluding Discussion:<\/p>\n

“… words are competing actors in a system of \ufb01nite resources. Just as business \ufb01rms compete for market share, words demonstrate the same growth statistics because they are competing for the use of the writer\/speaker and for the attention of the corresponding reader\/listener . A prime example of \ufb01tness mediated evolutionary competition is the case of irregular and regular verb use in English. By analyzing the regularization rate of irregular verbs through the history of the English language, Lieberman et al. show that the irregular verbs that are used more frequently are less likely to be overcome by their regular verb counterparts. Speci\ufb01cally, they \ufb01nd that the irregular verb death rate scales as the inverse square root of the word\u2019s relative use. A study of word diffusion across IndoEuropean languages shows similar frequency-dependence of word replacement rates.”<\/p>\n

“We document the case example of ‘X-ray’, which shows how categorically related words can compete in a zero-sum game. Moreover, this competition does not occur in a vacuum. Instead, the dynamics are signi\ufb01cantly related to diffusion and technology. Lexical diffusion occurs at many scales, both within relatively small groups and across nations. The technological forces underlying word selection have changed signi\ufb01cantly over the last 20 years. With the advent of automatic spell-checkers in the digital era, words recognized by spell-checkers receive a signi\ufb01cant boost in their \u201creproductive \ufb01tness\u201d at the expense of their \u201cmisspelled\u201d or unstandardized counterparts.<\/span><\/p>\n

We \ufb01nd that the dynamics are in\ufb02uenced by historical context, trends in global communication, and the means for standardizing that communication. Analogous to recessions and booms in a global economy, the marketplace for words waxes and wanes with a global pulse as historical events unfold. And in analogy to \ufb01nancial regulations meant to limit risk and market domination, standardization technologies such as the dictionary and spell checkers serve as powerful arbiters in determining the characteristic properties of word evolution. Context matters, and so we anticipate that niches in various language ecosystems (ranging from spoken word to professionally published documents to various online forms such as chats, tweets and blogs) have heterogenous selection laws that may favor a given word in one arena but not another. Moreover, the birth and death rate of words and their close associates (misspellings, synonyms, abbreviations) depend on factors endogenous to the language domain such as correlations in word use to other partner words and polysemous contexts as well as exogenous socio-technological factors and demographic aspects of the writers, such as age and social niche.<\/span><\/p>\n

We \ufb01nd a pronounced peak in the \ufb02uctuations of word growth rates when a word has reached approximately 30-50 years of age. \u2026 Another important timescale in evolutionary systems is the reproduction age of the interacting gene or meme host. Interestingly, a 30-50 year timescale is roughly equal to the characteristic human generational time scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

The impact of historical context on language dynamics is not limited to emerging languages, but extends to languages that have been active and evolving continuously for a thousand years. We \ufb01nd that historical episodes can drastically perturb the properties of existing languages over large time scales. Moreover, recent studies show evidence for short-timescale cascading behavior in blog trends, analogous to the aftershocks following earthquakes and the cascades of market volatility following \ufb01nancial news announcements. The nontrivial autocorrelations and the leptokurtic growth distributions demonstrate the signi\ufb01cance of exogenous shocks which can result in growth rates that signi\ufb01cantly exceeding the frequencies that one would expect from non-interacting proportional growth models.<\/span><\/p>\n

A large number of the world\u2019s ethnic groups are separated along linguistic lines. A language barrier can isolate its speakers by serving as a screen to external events, which may further slow the rate of language evolution by stalling endogenous change. Nevertheless, we \ufb01nd that the distribution of word growth rates signi\ufb01cantly broadens during times of large scale con\ufb02ict\u2026. This can be understood as manifesting from the uni\ufb01cation of public consciousness that creates fertile breeding ground for new topics and ideas. During war, people may be more likely to have their attention drawn to global issues. Remarkably, the pronounced change during WWII was not observed for the Spanish corpus, documenting the relatively small roles that Spain and Latin American countries played in the war.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the “Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death” by analysing the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800\u20132008. (The paper is published by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death - International Cognition and Culture Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death - International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the “Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death” by analysing the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800\u20132008. (The paper is published by […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-03-23T11:01:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-02-24T09:42:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/xray.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The ICCI Team\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\">\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/\",\"name\":\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?s={search_term_string}\",\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/#primaryimage\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/xray.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/\",\"name\":\"Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death - International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/#primaryimage\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-03-23T11:01:18+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-02-24T09:42:08+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/fluctuations-in-word-use-from-word-birth-to-word-death\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\",\"name\":\"The ICCI Team\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#personlogo\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/cdc7166b2c4c44441b1c2c13cea716e8?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fcognitionandculture.local%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fbelle%2Fuser.png&r=g\",\"caption\":\"The ICCI Team\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18378,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions\/18378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}