Sampling is a labor-saving device

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Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant. I wanted to convey the importance of this.

I was thinking about Laplace finding the populations of districts ?distributed evenly throughout the Empire,? and Student inventing his t-test to help workers at the Guinness plants determine the statistical significance of their results. Laplace was not after accuracy, he was going for speed. Student was similarly looking for the minimum amount of effort required to produce an acceptable level of accuracy. The whole point was to free resources up for the next task.

I attended one paper at the conference that gave p-values for all its variables, and they were all 0.000. After that talk, I told the student who presented that those values indicated he had oversampled, and he should have stopped collecting data much sooner. ?That?s what my advisor said too,? he said, ?but this way we?re likely to get statistical significance for other variables we might want to study.?

The student had a point, but it doesn?t seem very – well, ?agile? is a word I?ve been hearing a lot lately. In any case, as the conference was wrapping up, it occurred to me that I might have several hours free – on my flight home and before – to work on my research.

My initial impulse was to keep doing what I?ve been doing for the past couple of years: clean up OCRed text and tag it for negation. Then it occurred to me that I really ought to take my own advice. I had achieved statistical significance. That meant it was time to move on!

I have started working on the next chunk of the nineteenth century, from 1816 through 1830. I have also been looking into other variables to examine. I?ve got some ideas, but I?m open to suggestions. Send them if you have them!

Shelter from the tweetstorm

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It’s happened to me too: I’m angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I’ve got stuff to say. It’s more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don’t have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another.

I?ve seen other people doing this, and I?m fine with it. But for a while now I’ve seen people doing something more planned, numbering their tweets. Many people try to predict how many tweets are going to be in a particular rant, and often fail spectacularly along the lines of Monty Python’ Spanish Inquisition sketch. Some people are clearly composing the whole thing ahead of time, as a unit. Sometimes they?re not even excited, just telling a story. It’s developing into a genre: the tweetstorm.

I get why people are reluctant to blog in these cases. If you?re already in Twitter and you want to write something longer, you have to switch to a different window, maybe log in, come up with a picture to grab people?s attention. Assuming you already have an account on a blogging platform. It doesn?t help that Twitter sees some of these as competitors and drags its feet on integrating them. And yes, mobile blogging apps still leave a lot to be desired, especially if you?ve got an intermittent connection like on the train.

People also tend to be drawn in easier one tweet at a time, like Beorn meeting the dwarves in the Hobbit. Maybe they don?t feel in the mood for reading something longer, or opening a web browser.

There may also be an aspect of live performance for the tweetstormer and the people who happen to be on Twitter while the storm is passing over, and the thread functions as an inferior archive of the performance, like concert videos. I can understand that too, but it?s a pain for the rest of us.

The problem is that Twitter sucks as a platform for reading longform pieces, or even medium-form ones. Yes, I know they?ve introduced ?threading? features to make it easier to follow conversations. That doesn?t mean it?s easy to follow a single person?s multi-tweet rant. Combine that with other people replying in the middle of the ?storm? and the original tweeter taking time in the middle to respond to them, and people using the quote feature and replying to quotes and quoting replies, and it gets really chaotic. If I bother to take the time, usually at the end it turns out it?s not worth it.

In terms of Bad Things on Twitter this is nowhere near the level of harassment and death threats, or even people livetweeting Netflix videos. But please, just go write a blog post and post a link. I promise I?ll read it.

What’s worse is that people are encouraging each other to do it. It’s one thing to get outraged on Twitter, or even to see someone else get outraged on Twitter and tell your followers to go check it out. It’s another when you know the whole thing is planned and you tell everyone to Read This. Now.

I get that you think it?s interesting, but that?s not enough for me. Tell me why, and let me decide if it?s worth my time to go reading through all those tweets in reverse chronological order. Better yet, storify that shit and tweet me the URL.

You know what would be even better? Tell that other tweeter, ?What an awesome thread! It would make an even better blog post. Do you have a blog??

“Said” for 2016 Word of the Year

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I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I?m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be said.

You may think you know said. It?s the past participle of say. You?ve said it yourself many times. What?s so special about it?

What?s special was revealed by Jordan Smith, a graduate student at Iowa State, in his presentation on Saturday afternoon. said is becoming a determiner. It is grammaticizing.

In addition to its participial use (?once the words were said?) you?ve probably seen said used as an attributive adjective (?the said property?). It indicates that the noun it modifies refers to a person, place or thing that has been mentioned recently, with the same noun, and that the speaker/writer expects it to be active in the hearer/reader?s memory.

Attributive said is strongly associated with legal documents, as in its first recorded use in the English Parliament in 1327. The Oxford English Dictionary reports that said was used outside of legal contexts as early as 1973, in the English sitcom Steptoe and Son. In this context it was clearly a joke: a word that evoked law courts used in a lower-class colloquial context.

Jordan Smith examined uses of said in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and found that attributive said has increasingly been used without the for several years now, and outside the legal domain. He observes that syntactic changes and increased frequency have been named by linguists like Joan Bybee as harbingers of grammaticization.

Grammaticization (also known as grammaticalization; search for both) is when an ordinary lexical item (like a noun, verb or adjective, or even a phrase) becomes a grammatical item (like a pronoun, preposition or auxiliary verb). For example, while is a noun meaning a period of time, but it was grammaticized to a conjunction indicating simultaneity. Used is an adjective meaning accustomed, as in ?I was used to being lonely,? but has also become part of an auxiliary indicating habitual aspect as in ?I used to be lonely.?

Jordan is suggesting that said is no longer just a verb or even an adjective, it?s our newest determiner in English. Determiners are an exclusive club of short words that modify nouns. They include articles like an and the, but also demonstratives like these and quantifiers like several.

Noun phrases without a determiner tend to refer to generic categories, as I have been doing with phrases like legal documents and grammaticization. That is clearly not what is going on with said girlfriend. Noun phrases with said refer to a specific item or group of items, in some sense even more so than noun phrases with the.

Thanks to the wireless Internet at the AACL, I began searching for of said on Twitter, and found a ton of examples. There are plenty for in said examples as well.

It?s not just happening in English. The analogous French ledit is also used outside the legal domain. Its reanalysis is a bit different, since it incorporates the article rather than replacing it. Like most noun modifiers in French it is inflected for gender and number. I haven?t found anything similar for Spanish.

In 2013 the American Dialect Society chose because as its Word of the Year. Because is already a conjunction, having grammaticized from the noun cause, but it has been reanalyzed again into a preposition, as in because science. Some theorists consider this to be a further step in grammaticization. And here is a twenty-first century prepositional phrase for you, folks: because (P) said (Det) relationship (N).

After Jordan?s presentation it struck me that said is an excellent candidate for the 2016 Word of the year. And if the ADS isn?t interested, maybe another organization like the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, can sponsor a Grammaticization of the Year.