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Language evolution and the spread of ideas on the Web: A procedure for identifying emergent hybrid word family members

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  • Mike Thelwall
  • Liz Price

Abstract

Word usage is of interest to linguists for its own sake as well as to social scientists and others who seek to track the spread of ideas, for example, in public debates over political decisions. The historical evolution of language can be analyzed with the tools of corpus linguistics through evolving corpora and the Web. But word usage statistics can only be gathered for known words. In this article, techniques are described and tested for identifying new words from the Web, focusing on the case when the words are related to a topic and have a hybrid form with a common sequence of letters. The results highlight the need to employ a combination of search techniques and show the wide potential of hybrid word family investigations in linguistics and social science.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall & Liz Price, 2006. "Language evolution and the spread of ideas on the Web: A procedure for identifying emergent hybrid word family members," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(10), pages 1326-1337, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:57:y:2006:i:10:p:1326-1337
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.20437
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    Cited by:

    1. Liwen Vaughan & Justin You, 2008. "Content assisted web co-link analysis for competitive intelligence," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(3), pages 433-444, December.
    2. Tomaz Bartol & Karmen Stopar, 2015. "Nano language and distribution of article title terms according to power laws," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(2), pages 435-451, May.

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