#google ngrams

[yurimaster413]

???? WHO WAS TALKING ABOUT SOLLUX IN 1740????

[siriusgator]

[allthingslinguistic]

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity.

A paper describing important limitations of the Google Books ngrams data. Abstract:  

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. 

However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. 

A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. 

Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. 

We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800–2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. 

Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.

Read the whole thing (open access).

[snowgall]

More discussion of the linguistics of Bucky’s assertion in Captain America:The First Avenger

Last night @dsudis and I got into a lively debate about the interpretation of Bucky’s line in TFA:  “Hell, no. That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight, I’m following him.”

@dsudis claimed this sentence was illogical, while I argued that it made perfect sense. While I still believe that Bucky’s line is unproblematic, I want to concede one point to her - the sentence actually allows for two diametrically opposed interpretations, and she was seeing one while I was seeing only the other.

This meant that we were largely talking past each other.

This is like an optical illusion. If you look at the picture below and see a young woman, it can be hard to adjust your perception to realize it could also be an old lady:

Likewise with @dsudis and myself.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was so fascinated by this discussion that I went and consulted two other linguists I know to get their opinions on it.

There are several questions at issue:

In what contexts is it OK to say “he is too dumb not to do the thing”?

What does that even mean? That he does do the thing or that he doesn’t?

Does it make any difference if it’s “to not” or “not to”?

How often do people actually say such things, and what interpretations do they usually have when they do?

This gets pretty long, so the rest of it is behind the read more.

First I consulted @ToddTheLinguist (twitter) who’s a semanticist. He initially agreed with me on the interpretation of Bucky's utterance (that it made sense as the movie intended it - Steve doesn’t run away from fights even though he should), but then we later determined that "too dumb to" could actually be interpreted in more than one way.

I came up with some preliminary examples, but he ran with it and came up with better ones. Here's a lightly edited version of Todd's response to me (I removed the technical jargon and tried to make it more accessible to a lay audience :)

Here are two scenarios which can both lead to someone saying "He's too dumb to pick mayonnaise":

(1) [We're watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Steve has picked ketchup, the obviously wrong answer, instead of the correct answer, mayonnaise.] 

A: Ugh, what is wrong with him? Why didn't he pick mayonnaise?

B: Of course he didn't pick mayonnaise! He's too dumb to pick mayonnaise.

Here we're taking for granted that Steve didn't pick mayo (because he's too dumb to have done so.)

(2) [We're watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Steve has picked mayonnaise, the correct but very challenging answer.]

A: How did he get that? He's too dumb to pick mayonnaise.

Here we're taking for granted that he did pick mayo, even though he should have been too dumb to do so.

In both scenarios, we can say, "He's too dumb to pick mayonnaise," even though it means something different in each case.

Note, however, that neither (1) nor (2) have negation. So let's change the situation a bit to include "not."

Here are two scenarios which can both lead to someone saying "He's too dumb not to pick mustard."

(3) [We're watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Steve has picked mustard, the misleading wrong answer.]

A: Ugh, of course he picked mustard. He's too dumb to not pick mustard.

A’: Ugh, of course he picked mustard. He's too dumb not to pick mustard. (For Todd and me, both answers mean the same thing, regardless of the ordering of to and not.) 

Here, in case (3) we presume that Steve didn't not pick mustard (i.e. he did pick mustard, because he's too dumb to do otherwise), 

In contrast, compare (4) [We're watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Steve has picked mayonnaise, the correct answer, avoiding mustard, the misleading wrong answer.]

A: How did he avoid the trap of mustard? He's too dumb not to pick mustard!

A’: How did he avoid the trap of mustard? He's too dumb to not pick mustard! (Again, for Todd and me, both answers mean the same thing, regardless of the ordering of to and not.) 

In case (4), we presume that he did not pick mustard (even though he should have been too dumb to avoid doing so).

So it seems that this sort of construction is felicitous with background assumptions either of the truth of the proposition or the falsity of the proposition, regardless of the presence or placement of negation. Not much of an analysis, just yet, but at least it's a comprehensive description! 

Next I consulted @nike-ravus, another colleague of mine (and also a fanfic writer!). She had the brilliant idea of consulting Google ngrams to see how common this expression actually is.

Here’s a lightly edited summary of her side of our conversation:

Linguist fights are fights I like! I think actually I have some good evidence against your interlocutor.

Google n-grams only has "too dumb not to" while "too dumb to not" is not found.

Data is always a good thing to keep it real, so here is a parallel example from a work in print: 

"Soon would come dusk-calls of birds too dumb not to leave a war zone. Or too weary of searching for places in Nam without war. He and the other four were missing chow now. But Honda or Philly would have got food from home, and besides ..."

Prism International 1991 - Volume 30 - Page 73

It’s clear from context that the intended meaning is that the birds should leave the war zone, but they are not doing so because they are too dumb.

This is just like: Steve should be running from a fight, but he's too dumb to do that, so he fights.

Here's another example:

"Our parents wouldn't let us get married in high school, and we were too young and too dumb not to know that that was excellent advice"

Kansas Quarterly 1987 - Volume 19 - Page 12

(me again)

So clearly people are using “too dumb not to” in print the same way that Bucky is using it in the movie, and with the same sort of intended interpretation. This seems to be pretty standard usage, and “too dumb to not” is much less common.

I also want to give a shout out to @laylainalaska who gave a nice example supporting my assertion that language isn’t always logical:

I wonder if the problem, or part of the problem, is that the sentence is being mentally parsed in the same way as we parse a double negative? No matter how “grammatically incorrect” double negatives in English supposedly are, no matter how many times we logically try to convince our brains that a double negative “should” be a positive, double negatives in English tend to parse not as a reversal of the negative, but as a negative intensifier. Like you said, language is not logical. “No, no” doesn’t mean “Yes”; it means “even more no.” We all understand what someone means when they say “I don’t want nothing,” and trying to logically convince our brains that it actually means “I want something” DOESN’T WORK. The grammar part of the brain is like “nope, that means what it means.”

In conclusion, different people can reasonably interpret Bucky’s utterance in more than one way. One of these ways is the way @dsudis was interpreting it, and that way makes it seem illogical in context. However, it is equally feasible to interpret Bucky’s statement in the opposite way, and this is what the movie obviously intends. Context drives interpretation!

It also happens to be the case that this sort of construction is also seen in print, and the examples we’ve found all have the sort of meaning that my interpretation of Bucky’s line does. So I’m not an outlier here :)

[ibtdi]

10 خدمات سرية لـ"جوجل" لا تعرف عنها شيئا

10 خدمات سرية لـ”جوجل” لا تعرف عنها شيئا

  تقدِّم “جوجل” مجموعة مختلفة من الخدمات ولا تقتصر على خدمة البحث وعرض مقاطع الفيديو والأخبار، إنما توفر لمستخدميها خدمات أخرى

تساعدهم في القيام بمختلف المهام اليومية، ومنها ما يلي ذكره.

.

1- توفر “جوجل” خدمة عداد للوقت لتنبيه المستخدم عند قيامه بمهمة ما يريد أن ينجزها في فترة محددة.

2- تتيح لك خدمة “Google.com/sky” استكشاف عالم الفضاء بعرض صور رائعة لأشهر المشاريع والوكالات الفضائية، وعلى رأسها

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[thedurvin]

Another peculiar piece of data from Google Ngrams, the use of the word “the” has been declining steadily since the 1840s and experienced an enhanced drop during the 1970s

[drryanboyd]

That brief period in leading up to and during World War II, when it was more common to call someone a "swine" than a "dog". Truly, they were the greatest generation.

[oupacademic]

Literary fates (according to Google)

Where would old literature professors be without energetic postgraduates? A recent human acquisition, working on the literary sociology of pulp science fiction, has introduced me to the intellectual equivalent of catnip: Google Ngrams.

Take those four dragon slayers of traditional thought — Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud — and plot those proper nouns since 1850 until Google’s current end-date, 2008....