Subject Predicates

to write

to speak

to vote

to support

to protest

to question

to express

to respond

to declare

to be

1850 - 1950

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

Using data from the Google Books Ngram Viewer, this timeline visualizes the prevalence of particular pronouns when combined with certain actions. The text size of each pronoun-verb pair corresponds to its relative frequency in Google’s archive of scanned English books (~25 million books,) and the span of time can be adjusted to study fluctuations across years. The resulting ratios reflect social norms and developments embedded in published language, including gender, collective/individual, and personal/impersonal associations to activities.