Fitzmaurice, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-8804-1987 and Mehl, S. orcid.org/0000-0003-3036-8132 (2022) Volatile concepts. Corpus studies of language through time, 27 (4). pp. 428-450. ISSN 1384-6655
Abstract
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 highfrequency quad with high co-occurrence strength in EEBO-TCP: worldheaven-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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © John Benjamins Publishing Company. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | co-occurrence; discourse; Early Modern English; pragmatics; semantics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL AH/M00614X/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 23 Dec 2022 14:53 |
Last Modified: | 23 Dec 2022 14:53 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22005.fit |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1075/ijcl.22005.fit |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:194380 |