Abstract
In an online community, new words come and go: today’s “haha” may be replaced by tomorrow’s “lol.” Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the grammatical system in which it takes part. To investigate the role of social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of the frequencies of non-standard words in Reddit. Dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a predictor of success: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. Furthermore, social dissemination plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized.- Anthology ID:
- D18-1467
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- October-November
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Editors:
- Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4360–4370
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D18-1467
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D18-1467
- Cite (ACL):
- Ian Stewart and Jacob Eisenstein. 2018. Making “fetch” happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4360–4370, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Making “fetch” happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline (Stewart & Eisenstein, EMNLP 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/D18-1467.pdf