ROLE OF NEUTRAL EVOLUTION IN WORD TURNOVER DURING CENTURIES OF ENGLISH WORD POPULARITY

Damian Ruck, R. Alexander Bentley, Alberto Acerbi, Philip Garnett and Daniel J. Hruschka
Additional contact information
Damian Ruck: School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, UK‡Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston, USA
R. Alexander Bentley: #x2020;Anthropology Department, University of Tennessee, USA‡Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston, USA
Alberto Acerbi: #xA7;Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Philip Garnett: #xB6;York Management School, University of York, UK
Daniel J. Hruschka: #x2225;School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2017, vol. 20, issue 06n07, 1-16

Abstract: Here, we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the corpus scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static and dynamic properties of the corpus data. This two-stage model is meant to represent a relatively small corpus of English books, analogous to a ‘canon’, sampled by an exponentially increasing corpus of books among the wider population of authors. More broadly, this model — a smaller neutral model within a larger neutral model — could represent more broadly those situations where mass attention is focused on a small subset of the cultural variants.

Keywords: Cultural evolution; language evolution; Zipf’s law; Heaps law; n grams; books (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525917500126
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:20:y:2017:i:06n07:n:s0219525917500126

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525917500126

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is currently edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().