This paper demonstrates the value of studying co-occurrence ‘quads’ – constellations of four non-adjacent lemmas that consistently co-occur across spans of up to 100 tokens – for understanding discursive change. We map meaning onto quads as ‘discursive concepts’, which encompass encyclopaedic semantics, pragmatics, and context. We investigate a high-frequency quad with high co-occurrence strength in EEBO-TCP: world-heaven-earth-power. We conduct semantic and pragmatic analysis to generate hypotheses regarding discursive change. The quad’s components are semantically underspecified; thus, although the quad indicates a discursive concept, each instantiation of the quad is variable, contingent, and dependent upon context and pragmatic processes for interpretation. We observe how the vague lexemes that constitute building blocks of religious discourse are employed to generate new, timely secular discourses; and we argue that semantic underspecification is the site and source of discursive change. Indeed, the volatile, unstable nature of the component lexical meanings renders them indispensable to early modern debate.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Robinson, Justyna A., Rhys J. Sandow & Roberta Piazza
2023. Introducing the keyconcept approach to the analysis of language: the case of regulation in COVID-19 diaries. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 6
Mehl, Seth
2022. Discursive Quads: New Kinds of Lexical Co‐occurrence Data With Linguistic Concept Modelling. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 ► pp. 474 ff.
2022. From Constellations to Discursive Concepts; or: The Historical Pragmatic Construction of Meaning in Early Modern English1. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 ► pp. 489 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.
