In:Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics:
Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 82] 2018
► pp. 81–104
Chapter 4Lexical obsolescence and loss in English: 1700–2000
Published online: 13 March 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.04tic
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.04tic
Abstract
This paper explores a new methodology for extracting forms that were once common but are now obsolete, from large corpora. It proceeds from the relatively under-researched problem of lexical mortality, or obsolescence in general, to the formulation of two closely related procedures for querying the n-gram data of the Google Books project in order to identify the best word and lexical expression candidates that may have become lost or obsolete in the course of the last three centuries, from the Late Modern era to Present-day English (1700–2000). After describing the techniques used to process big uni- and trigram data, this chapter offers a selective analysis of the results and proposes ways the methodology may be of help to corpus linguists as well as historical lexicographers.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Research questions
- 1.2Theoretical problems and practical definitions
- 2.The corpus and its problems
- 2.1The n-grams
-
3.Methodology
- 3.1Data requirements
- 3.2Word obsolescence
- 3.3Pruning and sorting the results
- a.Proper names
- b.OCR errors
- c.Variety-specific forms
- 3.4Obsolescence of multi-word expressions
- 3.5Technicalities
- 4.Analysis and discussion of the results
- 4.1Unigrams
- 4.2Trigrams
- 4.3Future research
- 5.Conclusions
Acknowledgements Notes References
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