Original Research Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of GAMBLING and GAMING in the Past Centuries

Original Research Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of GAMBLING and GAMING in the Past Centuries

Abstract

This article investigates the interplay of lexical competition and socio-historical events through a close examination of the use of GAMBLING and GAMING based on large-scale synchronic and diachronic corpora. We first set the background for comparison through a synchronic study of the collocational patterns and grammatical relations of the two words using Sketch Engine. We show that GAMBLING tends to be associated with negatively perceived activities and strong disapproval, whereas GAMING tends to collocate with recreational activities, business, and technology. Using Google Books Ngram Viewer, we focus on the drastic diachronic changes in use of the two words, from competition to co-development. Based on corpora trends, we correlate the rise and fall of the two words and the change in their competition relation to particular socio-historical events: gold rushes, sports betting, the popularity of video games, and the gaming industry boom. The classical competition model of near synonyms remained valid until recent socio-economic events introduced additional and unique meanings for both words. The article thus shows that linguistic variations as collective human behavior changes can be leveraged to evidence other collective human behavior changes.

Introduction

This study aims to show that important changes in patterns of collective human behavior can be corroborated and/or discovered by leveraging mature tools to analyze linguistic big data. In particular, we demonstrate that the largest accessible English corpora-enTenTen thirteen (nineteen billion words) and Google Books Corpus (three hundred sixty-one billion words)-are not unyielding but are instead powerful tools for knowledge discovery and linguistic analysis. With the right tools, the linguistic big data will yield information not readily accessible through other approaches. The approach we propose could be characterized as "Big Data Aided Armchair Linguistics" in the spirit of Fillmore.

GAMBLING and GAMING, two words with a close connection and rich implications for socio-economic life and human behavior, have long been the focus of social science research. In addition to the study of gambling- and gaming-related human behaviors, especially in terms of addiction, GAMBLING and GAMING expressions are also studied in discourse studies, conceptual metaphor theory, sociolinguistics, translation studies, localization, and language sources in different discourse types. The lexical choices in relation to gambling and gaming activities are among the foci of studies. McGowan et al. compiled an annotated bibliography of the literature in the socio-cultural domain of gaming and gambling, bringing behavioral, text-based, and policy-driven research together to underline the complex links between gaming and gambling. Intriguing questions thus arise: what is the nature of the competition between these two concepts, and are such competition and usage changes reflected in and evidenced by linguistic usage?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines GAMING and GAMBLING with the same sense of "the action or practice of playing games, as cards, dice, etc., for stakes." Yet, GAMING has some other senses that GAMBLING does not have, such as "the action of engaging in games or entertainments; merrymaking; sport" and "the playing of computer (video, etc.) games." This "partial synonyms" account that restricts the similarity of the two words to one of the senses of GAMING seems straightforward, but does not predict the difference in their usage, such as the use of GAMING to convey positive polarity. Yoong et al. conducted critical discourse analysis using Fairclough's three-dimensional framework to deconstruct a Malaysian lottery company's strategy of promoting lottery activities as "not gambling but gaming." Pan and Zhang's diachronic studies discovered that the Macao government reframed the gambling business from social problem to entertainment industry through discursive processes in both Chinese and English. Dale studied the ambiguity of GAMBLING and GAMING in legal discourses using corpus linguistics methods to help lawyers improve their awareness of term ambiguity vis-a-vis their audiences to avoid miscommunication. However, these studies were rather restricted in terms of scope of data and time span. To the best of our knowledge, Li and Huang is the only large-scale quantitative study on the use of GAMBLING and GAMING, but it relies only on the single synchronic enTenTen thirteen corpus and its conclusion does not go beyond the distinction of semantic prosody-that is, GAMBLING being more negative while GAMING being more neutral.

In this article, we will investigate three research questions based on the synchronic and diachronic distributional patterns of GAMBLING and GAMING extracted from linguistic big data:

Research Question one: What is the nature of the co-variation of the meanings of GAMBLING and GAMING?

Research Question two: What are the co-variation patterns of GAMBLING and GAMING in terms of the changes in collective human behavior?

Research Question three: Are there regional differences in the co-variation of GAMBLING and GAMING (between American English and British English)?