语言的进化正在慢慢停止吗？英语小说中词汇混乱的规模表明它不是
Is language evolution grinding to a halt? The scaling of lexical turbulence in English fiction suggests it is not
摘要：
基本的兴趣是量化的长期增长的语言的词汇，因为它的发展，以更完全地涵盖了文化的交流需求和知识空间。在这里，我们探讨了谷歌图书2012年英语小说语料库所反映的英语单词的使用动态。我们批评了一种早期的方法，该方法发现在20世纪下半叶，单词的出生率下降，死亡率上升，死亡率受到任意现在的时间截止的强烈影响，并且没有急剧增加。我们提供了一个强大的，原则性的方法来检查词汇的演变，通过跟踪量的字流量在不同的相对频率阈值。我们发现，虽然英语语言的整体统计结构随着时间的推移保持稳定的原始Zipf分布，我们发现一个持久的“词汇一致性”的证据：从十年到十年的频率阈值的单词流量与单词排名超线性，并表现出缩放突破，我们连接到Zipf定律。为了更好地理解不断变化的词汇，我们研究了单个单词跨越频率阈值的詹森-香农分歧的贡献。我们还发现，有关小说的学术著作在2012年英语小说语料库中有很强的代表性，并建议语料库的未来修订应尝试将小说本身的批评作品分开。
英文摘要：
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in the English language as reflected by the Google Books 2012 English Fiction corpus. We critique an earlier method that found decreasing birth and increasing death rates of words over the second half of the 20th Century, showing death rates to be strongly affected by the imposed time cutoff of the arbitrary present and not increasing dramatically. We provide a robust, principled approach to examining lexical evolution by tracking the volume of word flux across various relative frequency thresholds. We show that while the overall statistical structure of the English language remains stable over time in terms of its raw Zipf distribution, we find evidence of an enduring `lexical turbulence': The flux of words across frequency thresholds from decade to decade scales superlinearly with word rank and exhibits a scaling break we connect to that of Zipf's law. To better understand the changing lexicon, we examine the contributions to the Jensen-Shannon divergence of individual words crossing frequency thresholds. We also find indications that scholarly works about fiction are strongly represented in the 2012 English Fiction corpus, and suggest that a future revision of the corpus should attempt to separate critical works from fiction itself.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
