From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters

Abstract

We study neologism use in two samples of early English correspon- dence, from 1640–1660 and 1760–1780. Of especial interest are the early adopters of new vocabulary, the social groups they represent, and the types and functions of their neologisms. We describe our computer­assisted approach and note the difficulties associated with massive variation in the corpus. Our findings include that while male letter­writers tend to use neologisms more frequently than women, the eighteenth century seems to have provided more opportunities for women and the lower ranks to participate in neologism use as well. In both samples, neologisms most frequently occur in letters written between close friends, which could be due to this less stable relationship triggering more creative language use. In the seventeenth­century sample, we observe the influence of the English Civil War, while the eighteenth­century sample appears to reflect the changing functions of letter­writing, as correspondence is increasingly being used as a tool for building and maintaining social relationships in addition to exchanging information.

diachrony of the new political terrorism. Neologisms as discursive framing in Swedish parliamentary data 1971–2018

“…In the 2000s, we can also see a growth in neologisms for roles, functions and stakeholders related to terrorism. Above, we noted that 'terrorist network' and 'terror network' entered the debate in 2001, and we can see other more specialized functions, such as terrorfinansiering ('terror funding') (12) in 2004 and terrorismfinansiering ('terrorism funding') (9) in 2008. One can also compare with the phenomenon of so-called foreign fighters.…”

“…In recent years, considerable research interest has been invested in LT-driven studies of semantic change, both concerning historical and present-day data. Internationally, much of the research has concerned word embeddings, normalization and BERT models [10] [11] [12]. At the same time, there is a growing focus on parliamentary data and the development of concepts, not least among Nordic historically-oriented scholars [13] [14] [15] [16].…”

Help from the Neighbors: Estonian Dialect Normalization Using a Finnish Dialect Generator

“…If a model can normalize dialectal text to a standard norm, then all normative language NLP models can be applied on that data. Normalization has been shown to improve results in a variety of tasks such as parsing (van der Goot et al, 2020) and neologism retrieval (Säily et al, 2021).…”

Processing M.A. Castrén's Materials: Multilingual Typed and Handwritten Manuscripts

“…As a research domain, the Natural Language Processing has regularly focused on the formal written varieties of the most widely used languages of the world. At the same time there has been a growing interest in both non-standard and informal language Partanen et al, 2019), and their historical varieties (Säily et al, 2021;. The research potential of historical language varieties is clearly on the upbound, and one can argue that the need is already quite evident, as digitization processes in libraries and archives around the world have reached relatively mature stages and already have large digital collections available.…”