P. Juola
Language, being a product of human culture, can be one of the best
indicators of human culture for historical analysis. It can show not only
what a person things, but how she thinks, and what the tools are that she
uses in her thinking. Unfortunately, language produced by one person shows
only what a single person thinks, making it difficult to draw broad
conclusions. I present some methods, drawn from quantitative studies of
language, for investigating large-scale historical questions based on
language modelling.
This presentation focuses on the question of language change and its causes.
After some methodological preliminaries, I investigate the relationship between
technological change and language change. Naively, one expects that
rapid changes in technology will drive (or be driven by) broad social change,
which will in turn be reflected in language change. This can be confirmed
by a close analysis of the language used to write the _National Geographic_
magazine, and of its relationship to USPTO patent data. The data confirms
this relationship and further suggests that technology drives social change
instead of reverse.
This method can also be applied to the investigation of large-scale events, or
of significant personal events within the writings of a single person. This
type of quantitative linguistics can provide a useful adjunct to the more
traditional historical method of close reading as an analysis technique.
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