IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/sagope/v10y2020i3p2158244020951272.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Gambling and Gaming in the Past Centuries

Author

Listed:
  • Longxing Li
  • Chu-Ren Huang
  • Vincent Xian Wang

Abstract

This article investigates the interplay of lexical competition and socio-historical events through a close examination of the use of gambling and gaming based on large-scale synchronic and diachronic corpora. We first set the background for comparison through a synchronic study of the collocational patterns and grammatical relations of the two words using Sketch Engine. We show that gambling tends to be associated with negatively perceived activities and strong disapproval, whereas gaming tends to collocate with recreational activities, business, and technology. Using Google Books Ngram Viewer, we focus on the drastic diachronic changes in use of the two words, from competition to co-development. Based on corpora trends, we correlate the rise and fall of the two words and the change in their competition relation to particular socio-historical events: gold rushes, sports betting, the popularity of video games, and the gaming industry boom. The classical competition model of near synonyms remained valid until recent socio-economic events introduced additional and unique meanings for both words. The article thus shows that linguistic variations as collective human behavior changes can be leveraged to evidence other collective human behavior changes.

Suggested Citation

  • Longxing Li & Chu-Ren Huang & Vincent Xian Wang, 2020. "Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Gambling and Gaming in the Past Centuries," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(3), pages 21582440209, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:10:y:2020:i:3:p:2158244020951272
    DOI: 10.1177/2158244020951272
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244020951272
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/2158244020951272?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean M. Twenge & Hannah VanLandingham & W. Keith Campbell, 2017. "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television: Increases in the Use of Swear Words in American Books, 1950-2008," SAGE Open, , vol. 7(3), pages 21582440177, August.
    2. John Forster, 2016. "Global sports governance and corruption," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 2(1), pages 1-4, December.
    3. repec:pal:palcom:v:2016:y:2016:i:palcomms201548:p:15048- is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Muchamad Sholakhuddin Al Fajri & Victoria Okwar, 2020. "Exploring a Diachronic Change in the Use of English Relative Clauses: A Corpus-Based Study and Its Implication for Pedagogy," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(4), pages 21582440209, November.
    2. Chu-Ren Huang & Sicong Dong & Yike Yang & He Ren, 2021. "From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-13, December.
    3. Qi Su & Pengyuan Liu & Wei Wei & Shucheng Zhu & Chu-Ren Huang, 2021. "Occupational gender segregation and gendered language in a language without gender: trends, variations, implications for social development in China," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-10, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:10:y:2020:i:3:p:2158244020951272. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.