{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/neutral-evolution-and-turnover-over-centuries","title":"Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity","arxiv_id":"1703.10698","date":"2017-03-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Damian Ruck","R. Alexander Bentley","Alberto Acerbi","Philip Garnett","Daniel J. Hruschka"],"abstract":"Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency\nand vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies\nfrom three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test\nboth static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the\nrelation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and\nturnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral\nmodel fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that\nmodified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static and dynamic\nproperties of the corpus data. This two-stage model is meant to represent a\nrelatively small corpus (population) of English books, analogous to a `canon',\nsampled by an exponentially increasing corpus of books in the wider population\nof authors. More broadly, this mode -- a smaller neutral model within a larger\nneutral model -- could represent more broadly those situations where mass\nattention is focused on a small subset of the cultural variants.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10698v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.10698v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"neutral-evolution-and-turnover-over-centuries","repo_url":"https://github.com/dr2g08/Neutral-evolution-and-turnover-over-centuries-of-English-word-popularity","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}