Diachronic changes in word probability distributions in daily press

Abstract

Changes in probability distributions of individual words and word types were investigated within two samples of daily press in the span of fifty years. Two samples of daily press were used in this study. The one derived from the Corpus of Serbian Language (CSL) /Kostić, Đ., 2001/ that covers period between 1945. and 1957. and the other derived from the Ebart Media Documentation (EBR) that was complied from seven daily news and five weekly magazines from 2002. and 2003. Each sample consisted of about 1 million words. The obtained results indicate that nouns and adjectives were more frequent in the CSL, while verbs and prepositions are more frequent in the EBR sample, suggesting a decrease of sentence length in the last five decades. Conspicuous changes in probability distribution of individual words were observed for nouns and adjectives, while minimal or no changes were observed for verbs and prepositions. Such an outcome suggests that nouns and adjectives are most susceptible to diachronic changes, while verbs and prepositions appear to be resistant to such changes.

Keywords

• Corpus linguistics
• diachronic changes