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International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

A corpus-based analysis of ‘vernacular synonyms’

Citizens, burgesses, and freemen in Early Modern English (1550–1700)

| University of Liverpool
Against the backdrop of the significant social changes taking place during the Renaissance, this paper interrogates the lexical domain of citizenship, focusing on three words deemed near-synonymous in the historical literature: citizens, burgesses, and freemen. The study takes a corpus-linguistic quantitative approach to the data in the Early English Books Online corpus (1550–1699) and consults lexicographical sources (the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Lexicons of Early Modern English 1550–1700) to offer an overview of the organisation of the conceptual domain occupied by citizenship terms referring to “dwellers”, and identify central and peripheral terms. The relationships between citizens, burgesses, and freemen over time are addressed through detailed quantitative collocation analysis, considering their overall profile, stability and innovation, and areas of functional overlap and distinctiveness. Overall, the results support historians’ intuitions that citizens, burgesses, and freemen are “vernacular synonyms”.
Keywords: citizenship, Early Modern English, diachronic, collocation analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Socio-historical and linguistic context
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1 Citizens, burgesses, and freemen as central terms for “dwellers”
    • 4.2Collocation analysis: Parameters
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Central and peripheral terms
    • 5.2Patterns of change
    • 5.3Functional overlap and distinctiveness
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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