Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2011 / Diachronic Stylistic Changes in British and American Varieties of 20th Century Written English Language

Diachronic Stylistic Changes in British and American Varieties of 20th Century Written English Language

Paper · 2011 · Sanja Štajner and Ruslan Mitkov

Summary

The paper asks whether broad shifts in writing style can be measured across decades even though individual authors differ widely. Across 20th century written English, the authors follow four markers of style: how long sentences are on average (ASL), readability as scored by the Automated Readability Index (ARI), lexical density (LD) and lexical richness (LR). The data are the Brown "family" corpora, which pair British texts (LOB 1961, FLOB 1991) with American texts (Brown 1961, Frown 1992). The provided tagged versions had inconsistent sentence boundaries, so the authors re-processed the raw texts with the Connexor Machinese Syntax parser. This gave uniform sentence splitting, tokenisation and lemmatisation. Each marker was then compared across time within each of four broad genre groups, using t-tests for significance. The two varieties did not change in the same way. ASL fell in some American genres, ARI rose in some British genres, and vocabulary in the Prose group became richer in both varieties. The study shows that automatic NLP processing of raw corpora can replace much costly manual annotation in diachronic stylistics.

Key points

  • The Brown family consists of four comparable corpora built on the same sampling frame. Each has about one million words, split into 500 samples of roughly 2,000 words drawn from 15 genres. The genres are grouped into Press, General Prose, Learned and Fiction.
  • Connexor Machinese Syntax is reported to reach 99.3% POS accuracy on a standard written English benchmark. Its handling of contractions, genitive 's, derived adverbs and EN/ING forms is described because these choices affect the counts.
  • ARI is computed as 4.71·(characters/words) + 0.5·(words/sentences) − 21.43. ASL excludes tokens that consist only of punctuation.
  • In American Prose, LD rose by 4.06% (p≈0.000) and LR by 3.85% (p=0.004). ASL dropped significantly in American Press and Learned but did not change significantly in any British genre.
  • A synchronic comparison of the Press genre found higher ARI, LD and LR in American English in 1961. Together with the later British increases, the authors read this as support for an Americanisation hypothesis.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors discarded pre-existing annotations of uneven quality and re-ran all corpora through a single pipeline, so that segmentation differences could not masquerade as linguistic change.
  • I2. Results are reported per genre group rather than pooled, because different genres moved in different or even opposite directions that an average would hide.
  • I3. The paper spells out exactly how the tool splits contractions, treats 's and lemmatises derived adverbs and -ing nouns, since such conventions directly shift lexical statistics.
  • I4. The study relies on corpora with matched sampling frames, so that differences between varieties are not artefacts of how the texts were selected.
  • I5. Cheap surface markers (sentence length, ARI, share of content words, type richness) combined with a simple significance test can detect real stylistic differences.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Before comparing treebanks or silver sets from different sources, re-segment and re-tokenise everything with one tokenizer so that metric gaps reflect the parsers and not the boundary conventions.
  • I2 (learn): Break evaluation down by text type (fables, word problems, school tests, news), so that a gain on one type cannot conceal a regression on another.
  • I3 (tokens): Write down and version the en crate's tokenisation and lemma conventions, and flag any change to them as one that can move downstream counts and scores.
  • I4 (learn): Build paired evaluation sets with identical composition when comparing dialects or UD conversions, which acts as a structural control against sampling bias.
  • I5 (back): Use these markers to check that text regenerated from the meaning graph stays close to the source's style and readability, and flag outputs that drift beyond a tested threshold.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of WolverhamptonWolverhampton · United Kingdom35 works · 6,331 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Sanja Štajner and Ruslan Mitkov. 2011. Diachronic Stylistic Changes in British and American Varieties of 20th Century Written English Language. Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technologies for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{stajner2011diachronic,
  title = {{Diachronic Stylistic Changes in British and American Varieties of 20th Century Written English Language}},
  author = {Sanja Štajner and Ruslan Mitkov},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technologies for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W11-4112/}
}

References

35 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Adolph Robert. 1966. The Rise of Modern Prose Style. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. find
  2. Bauer Laurie. 1994. Watching English change: and introduction to the study of linguistic change in standard English in the twentieth century. London: Longman. find
  3. Bennett R. James. 1971. Prose Style: A Historical Approach through Studies. San Francisco: Chandler. find
  4. Biber Douglas. 1985. Investigating Macroscopic Textual Variation through Multifeature / Multidimensional Analyses. Linguistics, 23: 337–360. ↗
  5. Biber Douglas and Finegan Edward. 1986. An Initial Typology of English Text Types. In: J. Aarts and W. Meijs, eds. Corpus Linguistics H: New Studies in the Analysis and Exploitation of Computer Corpora. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 19–46. ↗
  6. Biber Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  7. Biber Douglas and Finegan Edward. 1988. Drift in three English genres from the 18th to the 20th century: A multi-dimensional approach. In: M. Kyt, O. Ihalainen, and M. Rissanen, eds. Corpus linguistics, hard and soft. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora: 83–101. Amsterdam: Rodopi. find
  8. Biber Douglas and Finegan Edward. 1989. Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language, 65: 487–517. ↗
  9. Connexor Oy. 2006a. Machinese Language Model. find
  10. Connexor Oy. 2006b. Machinese Language Analysers. find
  11. Corpas Pastor Gloria, Mitkov Ruslan, Afzal Navid and Pekar Viktor. 2008. Translation Universals: Do they exist? A corpus-based NLP study of convergence and simplification. In Proceedings of the AMTA. Waikiki, Hawaii. find
  12. Gordon A. Ian. 1966. The Movement of English Prose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. find
  13. Holmes I. David. 1994. Authorship Attribution. Computers and the Humanities, 28(2): 87–106. Springer Netherlands. find
  14. Kroch Anthony. 2001. Syntactic change. In: M. Baltin and C. Collins, eds. The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwells, 699–730. find
  15. Leech Geoffrey. 2003. Modality on the move: the English modal auxiliaries 1961-1992. In: R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. Palmer, eds. Modality in contemporary English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 223–240. ↗
  16. Leech Geoffrey. 2004. Recent grammatical change in English: data, description, theory. In: K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg, eds. Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23) Gteborg 22-26 May 2002. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 61–81. ↗
  17. Leech Geoffrey and Smith Nicholas. 2005. Extending the possibilities of corpus-based research on English in the twentieth century: a prequel to LOB and FLOB. ICAME Journal, 29: 83–98. find
  18. Leech Geoffrey and Smith Nicholas. 2006. Recent grammatical change in written English 1961–1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English. In: A. Renouf and A. Kehoe, eds. The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 186–204. ↗
  19. Mair Christian and Hundt Marianne. 1995. Why is the progressive becoming more frequent in English? A corpus-based investigation of language change in progress. Zeitschrift fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 43: 111–122. find
  20. Mair Christian. 1997. The spread of the going-tofuture in written English: a corpus-based investigation into language change in progress. In: R. Hickey and St. Puppel, eds. Language history and linguistic modelling: a festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th birthday. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1536–1543. find
  21. Mair Christian. 2002. Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora. English Language and Linguistics, 6: 105–131. ↗
  22. Mair Christian, Hundt Marianne, Leech Geoffrey and Smith Nicholas. 2002. Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: a comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 7: 245–264. ↗
  23. Mair Christian and Leech Geoffrey. 2006. Current change in English syntax. In: B. Aarts and A. MacMahon, eds. The Handbook of English Linguistics, Ch.14. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  24. McCallum R. Douglas and Peterson L. James. 1982. Computer-based readability indexes. In Proceedings of the ACM ’82 Conference: 44–48. New York, NY. find
  25. Samuelsson Christer and Voutilainen Atro. 1997. Comparing a linguistic and a stochastic tagger. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL ’98): 246–253. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA. ↗
  26. Senter, R. J. and Smith E. A. 1967. Automated readability index. Technical Report (AMRLTR-66-220). University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati: Ohio. find
  27. Smith A. Edgar and Kincaid J. Peter. 1970. Derivation and Validation of the Automated Readability Index for Use with Technical Materials. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 12(5): 457–464. ↗
  28. Smith A. Joseph and Kelly Colleen. 2002. Stylistic Constancy and Change Across Literary Corpora: Using Measures of Lexical Richness to Date Works. Computers & the Humanities, 36(4): 411–431. ↗
  29. Smith Nicholas. 2002. Ever moving on? The progressive in recent British English. In: P. Peters, P. Collins and A. Smith, eds. New frontiers of corpus research: papers from the twenty first International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora, Sydney 2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 317–330. find
  30. Smith Nicholas. 2003a. A quirky progressive? A corpus-based exploration of the will + be + -ing construction in recent and present day British English. In: D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson and T. McEnery, eds. Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference: 714–723. Lancaster University: UCREL Technical Papers. find
  31. Smith Nicholas. 2003b. Changes in the modals and semi-modals of strong obligation and epistemic necessity in recent British English. In: R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. Palmer, eds. Modality in contemporary English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 241–266. ↗
  32. Stamou Constantina. 2008. Stylochronometry: Stylistic Development, Sequence of Composition, and Relative Dating. Literary & Linguistic Computing, 23(2): 181–199. ↗
  33. Ule Louis. 1982. Recent progress in computer methods of authorship determination. Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing Bulletin, 10(3): 73– 89. find
  34. Westin Ingrid and Geisler Christer. 2002. A multidimensional study of diachronic variation in British newspaper editorials. ICAME Journal, 26: 133– 152. find
  35. Westin Ingrid. 2002. Language Change in English Newspaper Editorials. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/stajner-2011-diachronic-stylistic-changes-british-american/