Role of neutral evolution in word turnover during centuries of english word popularity

DAMIAN RUCK, R. ALEXANDER BENTLEY, ALBERTO ACERBI, PHILIP GARNETT, Daniel Hruschka

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Here, we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the corpus scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we Find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static and dynamic properties of the corpus data. This two-stage model is meant to represent a relatively small corpus of English books, analogous to a canon', sampled by an exponentially increasing corpus of books among the wider population of authors. More broadly, this model a smaller neutral model within a larger neutral model could represent more broadly those situations where mass attention is focused on a small subset of the cultural variants.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number1750012
JournalAdvances in Complex Systems
Volume20
Issue number6-7
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2017

Keywords

  • Books
  • Cultural evolution
  • Heaps law
  • Language evolution
  • N grams
  • Zipf's law

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering

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