<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Linguistic creativity is a manifestation of communities’ and cultures’ innovativeness. The initial results will be presented of an empirical project analysing the character and speed of the social spread of winged words and neologisms in a microblogging site, using the tools of social network analysis applied to big-scale data. Investigating the diffusion of linguistic innovation requires an approach pooling competences from human, social, and computational sciences. Such a complex systems perspective can lead to a deeper understanding of how mutual relations and communication between Internet users impact the cultural evolution of language in time and space, and the shape and dynamics of the interactions themselves, delivering quantitative estimates on the expansion of linguistic expressions and allowing the prediction of future trends and their scale.</p></abstract>

Linguistic creativity is a manifestation of communities’ and cultures’ innovativeness. The initial results will be presented of an empirical project analysing the character and speed of the social spread of winged words and neologisms in a microblogging site, using the tools of social network analysis applied to big-scale data. Investigating the diffusion of linguistic innovation requires an approach pooling competences from human, social, and computational sciences. Such a complex systems perspective can lead to a deeper understanding of how mutual relations and communication between Internet users impact the cultural evolution of language in time and space, and the shape and dynamics of the interactions themselves, delivering quantitative estimates on the expansion of linguistic expressions and allowing the prediction of future trends and their scale.

Diffusion of Linguistic Innovation as Social Coordination

University of Warsaw, Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dobra 55, 00-312 Warsaw, Poland

Psychology of Language and Communication

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Diffusion of Linguistic Innovation as Social Coordination"}

Linguistic creativity is a manifestation of communities’ and cultures’ innovativeness. The initial results will be presented of an empirical project analysing...

Diffusion of Linguistic Innovation as Social Coordination

Published Online: Dec 28, 2012

Page range: 131 - 142

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/v10057-012-0010-z

© 2013

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.