Language Change Can Be Traced Using Gigantic Text Archives

SOURCE: ScienceDaily (June 26, 2009)

— Historical collections that include everything ever written in a dozen American and British newspapers since they started are now available electronically. Donald MacQueen from Uppsala University, Sweden, has carried out the first comprehensive study that makes use of this resource in order to track changes in language usage, a method that makes it possible to attain an entirely new degree of precision in dating.

The gigantic newspaper archives contain news and feature articles as well as editorials and commercial and classified advertisements. Together they comprise tens of billions of words. In his dissertation in English linguistics, Donald MacQueen has examined the word million in English, especially how language usage shifted from the previously nearly totally dominant “five millions of inhabitants” to today’s “five million inhabitants.” With the help of these electronic collections of texts that only recently became available, he has succeeded in pinning down when and where the modern expression began to take over.

“When you study the occurrence of uncommon words in smaller corpora (text archives) of one or a few million words, you only get a few examples to analyze. These collections are much larger, and they have enabled me to obtain extremely reliable historical data for one year at a time. In this way I have been able to trace the shift with a precision that was not previously possible in linguistic studies,” he explains.

It turns out that the modern construction took over in the American newspapers in the middle of the 1880s and in the British The Times only in the mid 1910s. What’s more, it became apparent that the transitional period was shorter in The Times. These circumstances indicate that usage in American newspapers influenced and accelerated the shift in the British newspaper.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626140126.htm

I have used Early English Books Online and Early American Imprints through our University library's electronic archives; fascinating stuff in there.

the dejanews usenet archives are accessible here: http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&q=&hl=en&

made no grsmmatical sense at first. One example is the way "fun" is used. In my era it was a noun and sometimes an adjective. Now it is also a verb. I wonder if the researcher and the tools being used can trace that kind if shift.

Don't know if it applies in other languages but it's rampant in ours.

Probably since the early 80s, and I'm 40 now. I don't know how much further back that particular expression goes, probably not very.

But as for the fact that it is being used as a verb sometimes now, I'm willing to bet this database could give you an almost exact time it became common to do.

My kids, born late 70's, used it as a straight verb, like "fun him" or "fun me."

From the Oxford English Dictionary (the first entry for 'fun as a verb' is an even older transitive use meaning 'to hoax'):