Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

Reviews

This book impressively proves: (historical) corpus linguistics and historical science can no longer work in splendid isolation. I am fascinated by this informed, critical and data-driven investigation of prostitution in multifaceted public discourses of eventful 17th-century Britain, with its intelligent, respectful and mutually beneficial integration of the respective methods, tools, concepts and knowledge from both disciplines. This book will serve as a model of interdisciplinary research where, for example, quantification and learned statistical testing of linguistic findings on semantic and lexical change are seen as indispensable, but never sufficient to replace contextualisation. Reinhart Koselleck would have loved to read how his concept of the history of ideas is enhanced by modern, state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary studies of big historical language data like EEBO really looked at on the inside. -- Beatrix Busse, Professor of English Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Germany
This fascinating book provides a welcome guide to the use of big data (EEBO) for interdisciplinary study. It applies corpus linguistic methods for historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic research questions on attitudes and culture. It successfully combines the quantitative approach with qualitative contextual assessment, something that until recently seemed almost impossible. -- Irma Taavitsainen, Professor emerita, University of Helsinki, Finland

Author Bio

Professor Anthony McEnery is a corpus linguist working at the University of Lancaster, UK Helen Baker is Part-time Newby Research Fellow, County South, Lancaster University, UK