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Article In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

The crystallization of language over time

ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven
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Abstract
In this article, we investigate (2013). Taal op drift: Lange-termijnontwikkelingen in taal en samenleving. Meulenhoff.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar hypothesis that Dutch (like other European languages) underwent a diachronic process of ‘crystallization’, i.e. tighter lexical organization, at the expense of freely combinatorial syntax, in the last centuries. Analysing the collocational-association strength in lemma and part-of-speech trigrams using the ΔP measure and entropy (H), we find quantitative support for the idea that Dutch has crystallized in the period under investigation (1850–1999). Further enquiry into the diachrony of the lexicon by means of Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) suggests that the reason might be what Baayen, R. H., Tomaschek, F., Gahl, S., & Ramscar, M. (2017). The Ecclesiastes Principle in language change. In M. Hundt, S. Mollin, & S. Pfenninger (Eds.) The changing English language: Psycholinguistic perspectives (pp. 21–48). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar have called the ‘Ecclesiastes Principle’, namely a lexical expansion that puts a cap on the combinatorial syntax. This lexical expansion is probably a response to the increasing specialization and cultural turnover in late modern times. The slow change in the syntax of Dutch shows how languages adapt to their cultural niche.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1The C-CLAMP corpus
    • 2.2Extracting and counting n-grams
    • 2.3Calculating association strength
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Trigram-internal coherence
    • 3.2Entropy
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (69)
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