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Linguistic DNA: investigating conceptual change in early modern English discourse

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posted on 2023-06-09, 06:56 authored by Susan Fitzmaurice, Justyna RobinsonJustyna Robinson, Marc Alexander, Iona C Hine, Seth Mehl, Fraser Dallachy
This article describes the background and premises of the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Linguistic DNA of Modern Western Thought’. We offer an empirical, encyclopaedic approach to historical semantics regarding ‘conceptual history’, i.e. the history of concepts that shape thought, culture and society in a particular period. We relate the project to traditional work in conceptual and semantic history and define our object of study as the discursive concept, a category of meaning encoded linguistically as a cluster of expressions that co-occur in discourse. We describe our principal data source, EEBO-TCP, and introduce our key research interests, namely, the contexts of conceptual change, the semantic structure of lexical fields and the nature of lexicalisation pressure. We outline our computational processes, which build upon the theoretical definition of discursive concepts, to discover the linguistically encoded forms underpinning the discursive concepts we seek to identify in EEBO-TCP. Finally, we share preliminary results via a worked example, exploring the discursive contexts in which paradigmatic terms of key cultural concepts emerge. We consider the extent to which particular genres, discourses and users in the early modern period make paradigms, and examine the extent to which these contexts determine the characteristics of key concepts.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Studia Neophilologica

ISSN

0039-3274

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

sup1

Volume

89

Page range

21-38

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Research Group Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-06-28

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-06-29

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-06-29

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