Lexical change and stability in 100 years of English in US newspapers

Abstract

This study explores diachronic variation across approximately one hundred years of the newspaper register in US American English from 1920 to 2019 as captured in the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). Informed by a similar study of lexical change in British English (Baker, 2011), the analysis identified high-frequency words exhibiting the greatest increases and decreases in use as well as those words demonstrating stability across the four sampling periods: 1920–29, 1950–59, 1980–89, 2010–19. The process to identify words of change and stability began first with the application of a cumulative frequency threshold; coefficient of variance and Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient were then calculated to aid in identification. In other words, the process targeted high-frequency words whose use has demonstrated the greatest change or stability. The discussion presents the three resulting word lists (increasing, decreasing, stable) and reports concordance and collocation analysis of select words from each list to gain insight into the underlying factors informing lexical change and stability.