online resources to investigate the use of historical English. In this project, we teach students of history and literature how to use these resources to independently evaluate and understand eighteenth century language use. the language and sentiments of their times teaching the language of eighteenth century text Key words in context concordance lines are the means by which we can see words in their natural environment. If a word collocates (is found near) words which share a given meaning or meanings, it acquires a flavour of those meanings itself, which linguists call semantic prosody. This can also be called a form of connotation. For example, in artfl’s interface to Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the word condescending in key word in context (kwic) lines is: Those experienced with the eighteenth century are aware condescending often has a positive sense during the time period, but if an inexperienced student is shown how to scan down the words to the left and right of a sample of texts they can easily go beyond basic dictionary definitions and their own knowledge of the modern language to check the attested use of the word. The phenomenon is rarely clearly defined even in modern uses: when Homer Simpson, dressed as a criminal all in black, accuses his family of being suspicious when he is merely ‘going out to commit certain deeds’, the joke only works because there is a very negative semantic prosody of commit and deeds. Another eighteenth-century example is awful, which can mean ‘inspiring awe’, as the much-reduced kwic extract below from London’s Old Bailey court records shows. Some court statements are negative (‘awful language’) but many (‘the awful seat of god’, ‘this awful tribunal’) show the other sense in active use. These techniques, used by dictionary makers, can be used to enhance a student’s engagement with a complex text and give them the necessary confidence to interpret challenging words. collocation scanning Condescending screenshot: ecco-tcp in http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/ecco-tcp (using the University of Chicago’s artfl PhiloLogic interface). Awful screenshot: the Old Bailey Corpus in https://corpora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/cqpweb/ (using the University of Saarland's CQPWeb interface). Simpsons screenshot: season 9 episode 16, Dumbbell Indemnity, first aired 1 March 1998. Historical Thesaurus: Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, Irené Wotherspoon & Marc Alexander (eds.). 2018. The Historical Thesaurus of English. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/thesaurus. Visualizations and sparklines are available from the About the Thesaurus link on that page. First edition 2009, second edition continually updated online. Metaphor Families: For more on metaphors, also see http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/metaphor and our 2013 article below. Hughes: Hughes, Geoffrey. 1988. Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Alexander and Struan: Alexander, Marc & Andrew Struan. 2013. ‘In Countries So Uncivilized as Those?’: The language of incivility and the British experience of the world. In Farr, Martin & Xavier Guégan (eds.) The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Note: Other long-c18th corpora from Saarland include the Proceedings of the Royal Society Corpus (1665–1869) and the Early Modern English Medical Corpus (1500-1700). Lancaster University’s https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/ site also has the Corpus of English Dialogues, Early English Books Online, Early English Newspapers, and the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Analysing shifts in ideas through language use can be done by utilizing metaphor families. This approach uses groups of words in the Thesaurus that have similar metaphorical ties and so similar underlying conceptualizations in order to build meaning snapshots within language use at a particular time. Students of the eighteenth century will often deal with notions of (in)civility, because speakers of English explored the world and expanded their contact with different peoples and societies. By encouraging students to explore metaphor families, we are able to show how people conceptualized the world through language and what this reveals about history; as Hughes established, ‘a remarkably close relationship exists between social change and semantic change [and] it is not claiming too much to assert that no major social development has been lacking in semantic correlatives’ (1988: 224). With the example of uncivilized (to the left, Thesaurus category 03.01.03.02.01, adj.), we can track the shifting nature of how speakers of English categorized and discussed those eighteenth-century people deemed ‘barbaric’. This is done by examining the range of word options available in a particular category and placing them into families based on the metaphors used to assign people into these categories. For example, to be uncivilized has been expressed by five metaphor families in English: such people are described as wild and bestial; crude and rude; barbarous; incivil; or as the Other. These metaphor families were all available to speakers in the eighteenth century, although the concept of ‘pre-’ or ‘semi-civilized’ did not exist at that point. In this way, we can ensure students note ‘the central significance of word choice in understanding the cultures and politics of [the] past’ (Alexander & Struan 2013: 233). metaphor families marc alexander english language & linguistics, college of arts andrew struan learning enhancement & academic development service www.glasgow.ac.uk/thesaurus Our Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. The product of over fifty years of scholarship, it lets us know the words available at any time to realize any recorded concept in English. For example, the image above shows the number of words available in each year to refer to an impudent person (Thesaurus category 02.04.19.07|05). A dot is an isolated attestation; a bar shows continuous recorded use of that word in that sense. While there are a number of words available for this concept throughout the history of English, we can immediately see the seven words available during parts of the eighteenth century, as well as four nonce-words briefly attested. In this way, we can see the entire lexical system available to a writer, meaning we can understand a word through the alternatives the writer did not take; words exist in opposition to their semantic neighbourhood as much as they have an inherent meaning. A student is then encouraged to consider that insolent was chosen by a writer in this period in place of impertinent, malapert, or bold-face. This can lead to a scan (see left) to see how each word differs in its semantic prosody, as well as a visual reminder that only two modern English words are still used to render this concept. semantic pictures Finally, moving from words to meanings, we know that patterns of increasing and decreasing word senses available to describe a given concept in English, as recorded by the Thesaurus, can tell us where significant unusual attention has been placed to a concept over time. We therefore can look for peaks and plateaus in the number of words available for a concept in English – significant changes in its rate of lexicalization – to show where an area of the language shows areas of particularly contested meanings, significant cultural attention, or a decline in interest. Words in those areas of unusual rates of lexicalization should have particular attention paid to their subtleties of semantic prosody and their (often metaphorical) negotiation of opposition with their neighbour meanings. This is possible because of the size of the Thesaurus: it contains 793,733 word forms arranged into 235,249 semantic categories. The largest categories are those which contain the words meaning immediately (264 words), stupid (248), excellent (224), to die (212), stupid person (203), and drunk (193). From all this data, we know the average rate of increase of English words at any given point in time. So during a period when a concept in the Thesaurus has a comparatively pronounced rate of change which is out of line with the rest of the English language at that time, we can see that greater or lesser than average attention has been paid to that concept at that point. As an example, the categories to the right have the average rate of increase in words across the entire Thesaurus overlaid as a dotted grey line. The colour red is comparatively uninteresting, as it matches this usual rate of increase. However, as we might expect, the concepts of alchemy and astrology substantially decrease in size while the rest of English increases, showing a change in society’s interest in that concept, while the impact of sewers and indoor plumbing is revealed by the decline in fountains at the same time as a rise in words for inodorousness, in time to be able to express this concept in far more detail. rises and falls 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 01.01.05.04 Fountain 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 01.03.06.01 Inodorousness 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 01.04.01 Alchemy 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 01.10.09.07.03 Red (colour) 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 01.01.10.13 Astrology
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