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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:4 (2019) ► pp.413–444

Usage Fluctuation Analysis

A new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse

 | Lancaster University
 | Lancaster University
 | Lancaster University
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: collocation, time series data, usage change, Early Modern English, non-parametric regression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language change over time
  • 3.Usage fluctuation analysis (UFA)
    • 3.1Identification of collocates
    • 3.2Overlapping sliding window
    • 3.3Estimation of similarity between collocates
    • 3.4Non-parametric regression model
    • 3.5Reading a UFA graph
  • 4.Case studies
    • 4.1UFA analysis of its
    • 4.2UFA analysis of whore
    • 4.3UFA analysis of harlot
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18096.mce
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