The Reallocation of Attention: A Psychoinferential Computational Linguistic Analysis of the English-Speaking World, 1946-2019

This analysis of Google Ngram data (1946-2019), treated as part-of-speech-locked lexeme time series, reveals clear structural breaks in collective attention and linguistic patterns. Trust indices show a sharp decline after 1992 following the end of the Cold War. A pronounced shift from "we" to "I/me" language begins in 1997. Post-1992 word frequencies move away from abstract, high-age-of-acquisition terms toward more concrete, lower-complexity emotional and sensory vocabulary. Word-cloud centroids shift from "quantification" in the earlier period to terms clustered around fragility, delicacy, and nervous irritation ("vellicate") in the later one. Three-dimensional attentional realm surfaces illustrate increasing volatility and warping of shared focus under conditions of apparent abundance masking scarcity. These patterns support a computational psycho-inferential framework in which linguistic change functions as an economic signal of personality and societal self-selection under shifting constraints.