SAGE Journals
Browse

The Evolutionary Pattern of Language in English Fiction Over the Last Two Centuries: Insights From Linguistic Concreteness and Imageability

Posted on 2022-01-26 - 13:12

Fiction has come to play an essential part in human culture and life in recent centuries. Because of its importance, the language or discourse of fiction has been widely studied. Discerning the evolutionary pattern of language in fiction is greatly helpful in understanding the changes in human culture and society. However, most previous studies on literary language that made use of quantitative or computational methods restricted themselves to a few authors or groups and only took into account a relative short span of time. Furthermore, most of the quantitative analysis therein was based on a primary and rather primitive algorithm that summarizes the frequencies of linguistic units in corpora. To overcome these limitations, this study uses semantic similarity as computed by semi-supervised methods to examine diachronic changes. In this study, the three large-scale corpora representing the English language and English fiction were used to investigate the evolutionary patterns concerning diachronic concreteness/imageability. The data from the two measures are well mapped and shown to support the argument that English fiction, as a special genre, exhibits an evolutionary tendency toward increasing concreteness/imageability. This indicates that modern fiction may have become increasingly important in human society, but easier to read and process in words than 19th century English fiction. This study proposed that learnability, genre difference, the changes of population size, and the other factors might have caused the systemic change. The current study is thus an important contribution to understanding the evolutionary trend of language in fiction as well as understanding the development of the English language as a whole. This study creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes of language in literary works.

CITE THIS COLLECTION

DataCite
3 Biotech
3D Printing in Medicine
3D Research
3D-Printed Materials and Systems
4OR
AAPG Bulletin
AAPS Open
AAPS PharmSciTech
Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Universität Hamburg
ABI Technik (German)
Academic Medicine
Academic Pediatrics
Academic Psychiatry
Academic Questions
Academy of Management Discoveries
Academy of Management Journal
Academy of Management Learning and Education
Academy of Management Perspectives
Academy of Management Proceedings
Academy of Management Review
or
Select your citation style and then place your mouse over the citation text to select it.

SHARE

email
need help?