Do New Words Propagate Like Memes? An Internet Usage Based Two-Stage Model of the Life Cycle of Neologisms

Chapter 1

DO NEW WORDS PROPAGATE LIKE MEMES? AN INTERNET USAGE BASED TWO-STAGE MODEL OF THE LIFE CYCLE OF NEOLOGISMS Menghan Jiang, Kathleen Ahrens, Xiangying Shen, Sophia Yat Mei Lee, Chu-Ren Huang

ABSTRACT

Neologisms reflect new ideas or new concepts in our life and play an important role in cultural transmission and the vitality of human language. The explosion of neologisms, especially in the past two decades, can also be ascribed to the popularity and accessibility of digital content and social media. In this paper, we focus on the issue of how neologisms arise by looking at the trajectory of developments in terms of their usage over time, i.e., their life cycle. By studying neologisms in vivo, instead of as fait accompli, we hope to better understand the nature of neologisms and to enable better prediction and earlier inclusion of neologisms. To achieve this goal, we examine the memetic model for the life cycle of neologisms and compare it with a recently studied epidemic model. We present a longitudinal modeling of the development of neologisms based on internet usage data aggregated from Google Trends, covering the ninety most influential Chinese neologisms from two thousand eight to two thousand sixteen. Our study verifies that the memetic model can describe and predict the life cycle of the neologisms robustly for the early stages (i.e., the ascending stages) of its cycle, but not for its full life cycle, and crucially cannot predict the inflection point. We conclude that two models are needed for word propagation: a memetic model for the initial stages and an epidemic model for the latter stage, particularly the inflection point. This two-stage/two-model approach allows for neologisms to be more easily identified as potentially new words, as it is easier to write a program to automatically filter for emerging terms using a memetic model.

One. Neologisms as Markers of Human Language Evolution

Advances in science and technology in the first decade of the twenty-first century have changed our way of life profoundly. The world evolves, knowledge increases and is redefined, and language expresses this renewal, which has resulted in the emergence of new linguistics units to describe a new concept or a new reality. The most representative and significant linguistic units of this change are lexical units, as advances of all kinds, especially technological and scientific innovations are expressed through new terms. Thus, neologisms are useful markers of language change over time, and a clear indication of the vitality of a language. The contribution to cultural transmission and linguistic vitality and the typically rapid development of neologisms in a relatively short time make them both accessible and intriguing in the study of the quantitative modeling potential of human language evolution.

Memes, a neologism proposed as the cultural counterparts of genes by Dawkins, provides the conceptual foundation for some of the most influential theories of cultural evolution. More recently, with the rapidly growing popularity and impact of internet memes, not just on social media but in all aspects of our society, the memetic model has been invoked to describe not only the spread of internet memes but also the changes in society. Subsequently, neologisms are frequently treated as memes, both as a simile (i.e., the linguistic memes) and in association with the most dominant media for the creation and spread of neologisms (i.e., social media and internet). The memetic model has often been adopted to account for internet neologisms. On the other hand, it has also been pointed out that a simple memetic model may not be adequate to account for the complex behaviors of neologisms. However, to the best of our knowledge, no detailed studies of neologisms based on the quantitative memetic model have been implemented or evaluated. The current study aims to address this gap in order to better understand the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of a memetic model for neologisms and the spread of lexical changes.