Cover not available

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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Usage Fluctuation Analysis

A new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse

 | Lancaster University
 | Lancaster University
 | Lancaster University
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18096.mce
Abstract
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.
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
References (58)
References
Primary sources
Annand, W. (1661). Panem quotidianum, or, A short discourse tending to prove the legality, decency, and expediency of set forms of prayer in the churches of Christ with a particular defence of the book of common prayer of the Church of England. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corbet, J. (1646). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuff, H. (1607). The differences of the ages of mans life together with the originall causes, progresse, and end thereof. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Everard, J. (1618). The arriereban a sermon preached to the company of the military yarde, at St. Andrewes Church in Holborne at St. Iames his day last. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Humfrey, R. (1607). The conflict of Job. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hurst, H. (1678). The revival of grace in the vigour and fragrancy of it by a due application of the blood of Christ to the root thereof. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Latimer, H. (1661). The preaching bishop reproving unpreaching prelates. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Norden, J. (1619). An eye to heaven in earth. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Penington, I. (1659). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pollock, R., & Holland, H. (1603). Lectures upon the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sala, A. (1619). Opiologia: or, A treatise concerning the nature, properties, true preparation and safe use and administration of opium. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savage, H. (1663). The dew of Hermon which fell upon the hill of Sion, or, An answer to a book entituled, Sions groans for her distressed, &c. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sclater, W. (1619). Exposition with notes upon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Secker, W. (1660). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tavernier, J. (1677). The six voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Topsell, E. (1658). The history of four-footed beasts and serpents describing at large their true and lively figure, their several names, conditions, kinds, virtues… London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trapp, J. (1649). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vilvain, R. (1654). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
William, J. (1659). [no title]. London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Baker, H., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). Ireland in parliamentary debates. In T. Säily, A. Nurmi, M. Palander-Collin & A. Auer (Eds.). Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics (pp. 83–107). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, H., McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2017). A corpus-based investigation into English representations of Turks and Ottomans in the early modern period. In M. Pace-Sigge & K. Patterson (Eds.), Lexical Priming: Applications and Advances (pp. 42–66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, P. (2004). Querying keywords: Questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 32(4), 346–359. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman: London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in Corpus Linguistics: A Practical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015). Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(2), 139–173. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). (2007). Distributed by Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Available from [URL] (last accessed August 2019).
Cha, S. H. (2007). Comprehensive survey on distance similarity measures between probability density functions. International Journal of Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences, 1(4), 300–307.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Choi, S. S., Cha, S. H., & Tappert, C. C. (2010). A survey of binary similarity and distance measures. Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 8(1), 43–48.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, S. (2015). Vector space models of lexical meaning. In Lappin, S., & Fox, C. (Eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory (pp. 493–522). John Wiley & Sons: Oxford. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. & Kytö, M. (2010). Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eger, S., & Mehler, A. (2016). On the linearity of semantic change: Investigating meaning variation via dynamic graph models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02497.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evert, S. (2008). Corpora and collocations. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook (pp. 1212–1248). Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Firth, J. R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis (pp. 1–32). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friedman, J. H., & Stuetzle, W. (1982). Smoothing of Scatterplots. Technical Report ORION006. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Dept. of Statistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gablasova, D., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). Collocations in corpus-based language learning research: Identifying, comparing, and interpreting the evidence. Language Learning, 67(S1), 155–179. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gabrielatos, C., McEnery, T., Diggle, P. & Baker, P. (2012). The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 37(2), 151–175. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. T., & Hilpert, M. (2010). Modeling diachronic change in the third person singular: A multifactorial, verb-and author-specific exploratory approach. English Language & Linguistics, 14(3), 293–320. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gwet, K. L. (2008). Computing inter-rater reliability and its variance in the presence of high agreement. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 611, 29–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Z. (1954). Distributional structure. Word, 10(23), 146–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hastie, T. J. (1990). Generalized Additive Models. Boca Raton, FL: CRC.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, M. & Perek, F. (2015). Meaning change in a petri dish: Constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 339–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. Routledge: London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kelsall, J. E., & Diggle, P. J. (1998). Spatial variation in risk of disease: A nonparametric binary regression approach. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), 47(4), 559–573. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kutuzov, A., Øvrelid, L., Szymanski, T., & Velldal, E. (2018). Diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts: A survey. In E. M. Bender, L. Derczynski & P. Isabelle (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 1384–1397). Santa Fe, NM: Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed August 2019).
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319–344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, C. (1997). Corpora and the study of the major varieties of English: Issues and results. In H. Lindquist, S. Klintborg, M. Levin & M. Estling (Eds.). Papers from MAVEN 97 (pp. 139–158). Växjo: Växjo Universitet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, T. (2006). Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. London and New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, T., & Baker, H. (2017a). Corpus Linguistics and 17th-century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History. Bloomsbury: London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, T., & Baker, H. S. (2017b). The poor in seventeenth-century England: A corpus based analysis. Token: A Journal for English Linguistics, 61, 51–83.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nevalainen, T. (1999). Making the best use of ‘bad’ data: Evidence for sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 100(4), 499–533.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Descriptive adequacy of the S-curve in diachronic studies of language change. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, 161. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed August 2019).
Nevalainen, T. & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1994). Its beauty and the beauty of it: The standardization of the third person neuter possessive in Early Modern English. In D. Stein & I. Tienen-Boob van Ostade (Eds.), Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800 (pp. 171–216), Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2003). Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sauerbrei, W., Meier-Hirmer, C., Benner, A., & Royston, P. (2006). Multivariable regression model building by using fractional polynomials: Description of SAS, STATA and R programs. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 50(12), 3464–3485. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, J., Jones, S., & Daley, R. (2004). English Collocation Studies: The OSTI Report. London: Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wood, S. N. (2017). Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (10)

Cited by ten other publications

Liu, Yuqi, Jianbin Zhu, Xinxin Zhou & Wenjie Zhang
2025. A Diachronic Comparative Study of Climate Change Discourse in China Daily and the New York Times: Analyzing the Evolution of Discursive Strategies. Sociology Compass 19:11 DOI logo
Candarli, Duygu & Steven Jones
2024. The representation of students in undergraduate prospectuses between 1998 and 2021: a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study. Critical Discourse Studies 21:3 ► pp. 254 ff. DOI logo
Gee, Matt, Andrew Kehoe & Antoinette Renouf
2024. Establishing a ‘new normal’. In Crossing Boundaries through Corpora [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 119], ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
Guardamagna, Caterina
2024. A corpus-based analysis of ‘vernacular synonyms’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 562 ff. DOI logo
Hilpert, Martin
2024. Corpus linguistics meets historical linguistics and construction grammar: how far have we come, and where do we go from here?. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:3 ► pp. 481 ff. DOI logo
Fernández-Cruz, Javier, Antonio Moreno-Ortiz & Michael Flor
2023. Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: Connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discourse. PLOS ONE 18:11 ► pp. e0287688 ff. DOI logo
Posch, Claudia
2023. Women, Who Climb - A Corpus Linguistic Tour Description with Potential Danger Zones. Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 23:2 ► pp. 82 ff. DOI logo
Taylor, Charlotte
2022. The affordances of metaphor for diachronic corpora & discourse analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 451 ff. DOI logo
McEnery, Tony, Helen Baker & Vaclav Brezina
2021. Slavery and Britain in the 19th century. In Time in Languages, Languages in Time [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 101], ► pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
Čermáková, Anna, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård & Sylvi Rørvik
2021. Time in languages, languages in time. In Time in Languages, Languages in Time [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 101], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue