Dynamics of core of language vocabulary

Studies of the overall structure of vocabulary and its dynamics became possible due to creation of diachronic text corpora, especially Google Books Ngram. This article discusses the question of core change rate and the degree to which the core words cover the texts. Different periods of the last three centuries and six main European languages presented in Google Books Ngram are compared. The main result is high stability of core change rate, which is analogous to stability of the Swadesh list.

Generating abbreviations using Google Books library

The article describes the original method of creating a dictionary of abbreviations based on the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dictionary of abbreviations is designed for Russian, yet as its methodology is universal it can be applied to any language. The dictionary can be used to define the function of the period during text segmentation in various applied systems of text processing. The article describes difficulties encountered in the process of its construction as well as the ways to overcome them. A model of evaluating a probability of first and second type errors (extraction accuracy and fullness) is constructed. Certain statistical data for the use of abbreviations are provided.

Average word length dynamics as indicator of cultural changes in society

Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word length slightly increased in the 19th century, and then it was growing rapidly most of the 20th century and started decreasing over the period from the end of the 20th - to the beginning of the 21th century. Words which contributed mostly to increase or decrease of word average length were identified. At that, content words and functional words are analysed separately. Long content words contribute mostly to word average length of word. As it was shown, these words reflect the main tendencies of social development and thus, are used frequently. Change of frequency of personal pronouns also contributes significantly to change of average word length. The other parameters connected with average length of word were also analysed.