British Cultural Complexity: An Entropy-based Approach

被引:12
作者
Zhu, Haoran [1 ]
Lei, Lei [1 ]
机构
[1] Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol, Sch Foreign Languages, Wuhan, Hubei, Peoples R China
关键词
D O I
10.1080/09296174.2017.1348014
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
The present study aimed to investigate the complexity of British culture across the twentieth century. Different from previous studies concerning cultural complexity that used written texts as the experimental data, the present study employed a large data-set of speeches and debates from the British parliament, with the intention of examining the change of British cultural complexity from the perspective of spoken texts. Interestingly, the findings of this study were largely in accordance with those of previous studies that were based on written texts. First, this study confirmed the argument that culture is cumulative in nature. In addition, this study showed that longer N-grams generate higher entropy values. Nonetheless, discrepancies were found in this study, such as the different impacts of crises on the growth of cultural complexity in Britain and America. Furthermore, comparisons with previous studies indicated a lower complexity of British spoken culture than its written counterpart. We have provided possible explanations as well as the implications for future research.
引用
收藏
页码:190 / 205
页数:16
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