Preprint
The History of Question Marks and Exclamation Marks across Languages: Punctuation Culturomics
Default journal, pp.1-6
Feb/2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34933/wis.000523
Abstract
What can punctuation tell us about cultural historical trends? Here I analyze the change in frequency of the punctuation marks '?' and '!' in six languages over the last two centuries by a cultromics study of the Google Books online repository. I found that in German, Italian and Spanish the ratio of usage of question marks to exclamation marks sharply declines towards the Second World War, and steadily increases thereafter, whereas in English '?' was always more heavily used. A common trend in all languages is a rise in '?' compared to '!' in the second half on the 20th century. Furthermore, over the last decades, the usage in English of 'Why', 'How' and 'What'-open ended questions, with often no definitive answer-has tended to increase in frequency more sharply than 'Where', 'When', and 'Who'. I propose that the relative usage of question marks and the type of questions asked may serve as a meaningful dynamic measure of the cultural state of societies. Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior, language, cultural and historical trends through the quantitative analysis of texts (Michel et al., 2011). A major source of culturomics data has been Google Books, a Google service that allows to search the full texts of books and magazines scanned and converted to digitized text and stored in a database. This database contains books printed in nine different languages from the year 1500, though predominantly from 1800 until 2009. The main output of an inquiry is a temporal representation profile of each word (the so-called " n-gram "), depicting the number of its appearances in the corpus of scanned books in any given year, normalized to the total number of words (or n-grams) scanned during that year. The Ngram Viewer enables browsing of the data online.
Details
- Title
- The History of Question Marks and Exclamation Marks across Languages; Punctuation Culturomics
- Creators
- Yitzhak Pilpel (Corresponding Author) - 972WIS_INST___111
- Resource Type
- Preprint
- Publication Details
- Default journal, pp.1-6
- Number of pages
- 6
- Publisher
- The Weizmann Institute of Science
- Language
- English
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.34933/wis.000523
- Grant note
- I thank the Braginski Center for the Interface between the Sciences and the Humanities, and the Minerva Center on Live Emulation of Evolution in the Lab, both at the Weizmann Institute of Science, for grant support, and Ghil'ad Zuckermann and Brian Towers for helpful discussions.
- Record Identifier
- 993347967403596
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