Helen Baker
List of John Benjamins publications for which Helen Baker plays a role.
2025 Chapter 5. Transformations and the dynamics of memory: Gladstone and the Phoenix Park Murders News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press, Claridge, Claudia (ed.), pp. 82–107 | Chapter
In this study, we explore how the Phoenix Park murders were written about in public and private discourse, utilising the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus, personal diaries and historiography. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen, 2008), we examine how events underwent… read more
2024 Family, politics and media: Gladstone during the Midlothian campaign, 1879–1880 Corpus-Pragmatic Studies of Democratization in Public Discourses: New perspectives, methods and materials, Hiltunen, Turo, Turo Vartiainen and Jenni Räikkönen (eds.), pp. 329–353 | Article
In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a… read more
2022 Chapter 2. “A geography of names”: A genre analysis of nationality-driven names for venereal disease in seventeenth-century England Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse, Hiltunen, Turo and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), pp. 23–48 | Chapter
We investigate discourses surrounding venereal disease in a wide body of seventeenth-century texts in the one-billion-word Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus. By combining quantitative methods with close reading of texts within EEBO, we explore whether perceptions of sufferers and… read more
2021 Slavery and Britain in the 19th century Time in Languages, Languages in Time, Čermáková, Anna, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik (eds.), pp. 9–38 | Chapter
This study uses a corpus of just under two billion words from one historic British newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, to explore shifting attitudes to slavery in Britain in the nineteenth century in the context of a port city that benefitted from the trade. In doing so, we explore three… read more
2019 Usage Fluctuation Analysis: A new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:4, pp. 413–444 | Article
This article introduces a methodology for the diachronic analysis of large historical corpora, Usage Fluctuation Analysis (UFA). UFA looks at the fluctuation of the usage of a word as observed through collocation. It presupposes neither a commitment to a specific semantic theory, nor that the… read more
2017 A corpus-based investigation into English representations of Turks and Ottomans in the early modern period Lexical Priming: Applications and advances, Pace-Sigge, Michael and Katie J. Patterson (eds.), pp. 41–66 | Chapter
Lexical priming theory (Hoey 2005) works not just at any single moment in time. For Hoey (2005: 8) words are “primed for collocational use. A word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and c-texts in which it is encountered,… read more
2017 Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005: Plotting changes in discourse in a large volume of time-series corpus data Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics, Säily, Tanja, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer (eds.), pp. 83–107 | Chapter
This study investigates the changing contexts in which the word ireland appears in the The Hansard Corpus of British Parliamentary debates. It combines the use of two statistical techniques for analysis and visualization of historical data (Meaning Fluctuation Analysis and sparklines) with more… read more