Course:COGS200/2017W1/NGramAssignment/SydneyKaioraHampson
Compare Words-
a)
b) The code is: study,evaluate,examine c) The graph shows that the word 'study' grew fairly steadily over time, until the late 70s, where it experiences a decrease of 5% until 2000. Comparatively, 'examine' did not change much, but did experience a dip between the 1840s and the 1980s. On the other hand, 'evaluate' was barely used until the 1930s, but has experienced a fairly steady increase until 2000. d) There does not seem to be anything unexpected driving this change. e) 'Evaluate' and 'examine' will have experienced increases in the past few decades - an attractor space can be defined here to be from after the Second World War to 2000 - due to the increase in number of scientific studies being published and digitized.
Wildcard Search-
a)
b) The code is: favourite colour is * c) The graph shows that every colour has different changes over time. For instance, yellow is barely a hit until 1910 for about a decade, then is barely used again until the phrase experiences increase in the 1990s. d) An unexpected factor that radically changes the appearance of the graph is whether American or British spelling is employed. Prevalence of the phrase increases with American spelling, whereas with British spelling it decreases dramatically. e) It is not particularly clear why different colours would have different prevalences over time, and why these would fluctuate, but perhaps prevalence of the general phrase is decreasing due to the increasing proportion of scientific studies over personal writings or fiction in the corpus.
Inflection Search-
a)
b) The code is: The cat purred_INF c) The graph shows that 'the cat purred' is much more prevalent than 'the cat purrs' or 'the cat purring'. 'The cat purred' also experienced a dramatic increase from the 1970s to 2000. d) There does not seem to be an unexpected factor causing this to occur. e) 'The cat purrs' and 'the cat purring' probably decreased as they lend themselves more to use in an old-fashioned writing format.
Part-of-speech Tags-
a)
b) The code used was: boot catch_NOUN c) This graph shows that the use of 'boot' as a noun increased sharply by 600% almost no use in the 1880s-1890s. It then fluctuates for periods of almost no use to periods of greater adoption. d) There does seem to be an unexpected reason for this. e) Boot in the old fashioned sense is a type of shoe, whereas in the modern day it can be taken to mean the trunk of a car, or a shoe. The change in prevalence is probably related to the types and genres of texts being digitized into the corpus from the various time periods in question.
Parts of Speech-
a)
b) The code used was: *_VERB c) The graph shows that the most popular verb is 'is'. The general trend for all verbs is that prevalence remains fairly constant over time. d) There doesn't seem to be an unexpected reason for this trend. e) Verb usage probably remains constant due to equal usage in past texts compared with current texts. Furthermore, scientific texts and fiction texts, etc. (typically) all require the use of a wide range of verbs.