Chapter published in:
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 53–82

Reading into the past

Materials and methods in historical semantics research

| University of Sheffield
| University of Sussex
| University of Glasgow
| University of Sheffield
| University of Sheffield
| University of Glasgow

The Linguistic DNA project investigates concepts in Early Modern England and adopts a bottom-up approach to query whether the key concepts intuited by historians of ideas are manifested in the printed discourse of the time. By applying computational methods and close reading to Early English Books Online, we identify concepts that Early Moderns were discussing, developing and changing. In this article, we discuss the challenge of information retrieval and the negotiation between distant reading and close reading. We present three case studies informed by the project’s three research themes. Research Theme 1 examines historical and social contexts of conceptual change. Research Theme 2 analyses lexical semantic relationships within conceptual structures. Research Theme 3 explores lexicalisation pressure, using categories from the Historical Thesaurus of English.

Keywords: historical semantics, Early English Books Online , Early Modern, lexicalisation, distributional semantics, computational methods, cultural literacy, concepts, data
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discursive concepts
  • 3.Materials and methods
  • 4.The research challenge: Three case studies
    • 4.1Case study 1: The Early Modern fortunes of Virginity
    • 4.2Case study 2: Discursive polysemy
    • 4.3Case study 3: Virgin/Virgin and its Early Modern contexts
  • 5.Prospects
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.03fit
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