Figure 1 shows the visual output of transforming the quantitative information presented in Table 1 into the so-called bubble plot, which is essentially a special version of a scatterplot (Kabacoff 2011, p.278f.). The graph in Figure 1 visualises co-occurring nominal collocates of hot and warm in the COHA decade of the 1860s. The x-axis designates the co-occurrence frequency per million words of collocates with hot whereas the y-axis portrays their co-occurrence frequency per million words with warm. Each bubble symbolises the nominal collocate whose coordinate position is determined from its respective co-occurrence frequency with hot and warm. Moreover, the different sizes of the bubbles, which are derived from the combined frequencies, indicate …show more content…
Figure 2) for each subsequent decade starting from the 1860s onwards. Identical information as in Figure 1 is mirrored in the x- and y-axes of the graphs in Figure 2. There are total 265 nominal collocate types over the span of one and a half centuries, but only nine items are highlighted and hence labelled: bath, day, dog, heart, pursuit, smile, spot, water, and welcome. They have been selected since they provide cases of variation and stability to be discussed in the remainder of this …show more content…
lexical near-synonyms. In particular, this study explores diachronic change in the nominal collocational profiles of loosely synonymous pair of temperature adjectives, i.e. hot and warm. The application of motion charts analysis in this study has allowed effective identification of different patterns of changes in particular collocates with respect to their usage distributions with hot and warm. The noticeable changes include changes in usage ratio of particular collocates of a word as well as inter-synonyms shift in collocational preferences. Changes in the collocational profiles can inform not only the historical study of the semantics of hot and warm in this case (e.g. hot pursuit, warm smile), but they can also shed light on the cultural association of certain collocations (e.g.