Neologisms are epidemic: Modeling the life cycle of neologisms in China 2008-2016

Menghan Jiang; Xiang Ying Shen; Kathleen Ahrens; Chu-Ren Huang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0245984

Neologisms are epidemic: Modeling the life cycle of neologisms in China 2008-2016

PLoS One. 2021 Feb 3;16(2):e0245984. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245984. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Menghan Jiang^{1

2}, Xiang Ying Shen^{3

4}, Kathleen Ahrens^{5

6}, Chu-Ren Huang^{2

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, Beijing, China.
² Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
³ Department of Physics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
⁴ Shenzhen JL Computational Science And Applied Research Institute, Shenzhen, China.
⁵ Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
⁶ Research Centre for Professional Communication in English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
⁷ HK PolyU-PKU Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, Hong Kong, China.

Abstract

This paper adopts models from epidemiology to account for the development and decline of neologisms based on internet usage. The research design focuses on the issue of whether a host-driven epidemic model is well-suited to explain human behavior regarding neologisms. We extracted the search frequency data from Google Trends that covers the ninety most influential Chinese neologisms from 2008-2016 and found that the majority of them possess a similar rapidly rising-decaying pattern. The epidemic model is utilized to fit the evolution of these internet-based neologisms. The epidemic model not only has good fitting performance to model the pattern of rapid growth, but also is able to predict the peak point in the neologism's life cycle. This result underlines the role of human agents in the life cycle of neologisms and supports the macro-theory that the evolution of human languages mirrors the biological evolution of human beings.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

China
Epidemics
Internet*
Language*
Models, Theoretical*
Time Factors

Grants and funding

The research was supported by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network project titled “Conversational Brains: A Multidisciplinary Approach” (grant agreement n°859588) as well as its matching grant from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (#ZG9X). The research is also supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Peking University Joint Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics (RP2U2). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.