Chapter 7 considers how language change over short timespans can be examined using corpus-assisted methods. We present three case studies. The first study involves a corpus of patient feedback relating to cancer care, collected for four consecutive years. A technique called the coefficient of variation was used to identify lexical items that had increased or decreased over time. The second study considered UK newspaper articles about obesity. To examine changing themes over time, we employed a combination of keyness and concordance analyses to identify which themes in the corpus were becoming more or less popular over time. Additionally, the analysis considered time in a different way, by using the concept of the annual news cycle. To this end, the corpus was divided into 12 parts, consisting of articles published according to a particular month, and the same type of analysis was applied to each part. The third case study involves an analysis of a corpus of forum posts about anxiety. Time was considered in terms of the age of the poster and in terms of the number of contributions that a poster had made to the forum, and differences were found depending on both approaches to time.

Jan Bremmer’s contribution returns to the thorny issue of divine identities. Bremmer offers a case-study that shows the interplay between local and universal forces that characterises most recent works on localism, religious and otherwise. His study of the presence of the goddess Hera on the Greek island of Samos during the Archaic and Classical periods integrates myth, ritual, and cult, and brings them together in a comprehensive account of the same divine persona. The chapter confirms that one and the same divine presence might combine both local and universal elements. Visible throughout is a distinct tendency to localise elements of the divine persona by attributing Hera with particular local connections. Through an erudite study of the larger contexts in which the worship of Hera took place on Samos, Bremmer teases out some of the forces at work in this localising process: among them are the move to integrate aspects of the local landscape or environment into the cultic practice.

Jan Bremmer’s contribution returns to the thorny issue of divine identities. Bremmer offers a case-study that shows the interplay between local and universal forces that characterises most recent works on localism, religious and otherwise. His study of the presence of the goddess Hera on the Greek island of Samos during the Archaic and Classical periods integrates myth, ritual, and cult, and brings them together in a comprehensive account of the same divine persona. The chapter confirms that one and the same divine presence might combine both local and universal elements. Visible throughout is a distinct tendency to localise elements of the divine persona by attributing Hera with particular local connections. Through an erudite study of the larger contexts in which the worship of Hera took place on Samos, Bremmer teases out some of the forces at work in this localising process: among them are the move to integrate aspects of the local landscape or environment into the cultic practice.

In this chapter, we consider children's early language acquisition as it develops alongside three other core cognitive competencies: children's understanding of objects, children's understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others (i.e. their theory of mind), and children's knowledge of numbers and mathematical principles. We argue that while early language acquisition is initially supported by these three other competencies, the acquisition of words transforms them by providing a method for children to communicate and organise the information obtained through them. We do this by describing the key milestones occurring within each of the competencies and the genetic and environmental factors which place them at risk, with findings derived from a systematic review of cohort studies in English-speaking countries. A key message is that genetic and environmental circumstances are inextricably linked in predicting early cognitive development, and that some factors are reliably stronger in predicting poor outcomes than others. Additionally, there is clear evidence that income-related disparities are reliably measurable from the age of 3 and then steadily increase throughout the remainder of childhood.

Whilst child language research has a long history of the examination of developmental change, it is only relatively recently that research methods have been employed that allow us to understand the nature and drivers of individual differences in child language development across a population. This chapter presents findings from studies examining children’s language trajectories from early childhood to adolescence using data from epidemiological studies in which large, population-ascertained samples are followed prospectively. Findings from studies using epidemiological methods to examine individual differences in child language trajectories are identified, and how these findings can inform public health models of intervention, considering primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, is considered. First, the implications for the design of services for pre-school children (0–4 years) is considered. Key learning points to methods for targeting interventions and the identification of potential levers for language growth which could be harnessed for preventative intervention. The chapter then turns to language trajectories in school-age children (here 4–11 years) and discusses the identification of those most in need of additional support and examines what intervention and trajectory research together tell us about the best targets for interventions. Recommendations for services and priorities for research are then identified.

Language development in young children is clearly associated with the context in which children grow up. Of course, it has a strong biological developmental element but it is the interaction between the social and the developmental that is the focus of this book. Children’s language skills vary considerably at any one point in their development but especially over time. This chapter introduces the reader to some of the key concepts in the book and, in particular, focuses on how this interaction works for children with skills at the lower end of the language distribution, namely children with developmental language disorders, and how the patterns of these skills change over time. Key to understanding these issues is the need to follow large representative national samples of children for extended periods of time and assessing their performance at regular intervals, a feature of many chapters in the book. The book is targeted at academic, professional and an ‘informed’ public audience. The academic audience will include linguists, psychologists, speech and language pathologists, public health professionals and paediatricians and their equivalent in different countries. But it will also be important for health, education and public policy professionals.

This chapter explores trends in obesity coverage over time, both in terms of areas of stability and change. Two perspectives on time are adopted. First, changes to keywords are studied on a year-by-year basis, spanning the duration of the corpus (i.e. 2008 to 2017). Second, change is studied in terms of the annual press cycle, with keywords obtained by comparing articles in terms of the particular month in which they are published (e.g. comparing articles published in January against those published in all other months combined, and so on). The first part of the analysis shows how certain discourses, namely those which represent obesity as a matter of personal responsibility, are increasing in relative frequency over time, while those which represent obesity as something resulting from social and political factors are in decline. The second part of the analysis shows how obesity representations can be driven by the news values associated with particular events in the annual (press) cycle, such as Christmas, Easter, summer holidays and the timing of children’s school terms.