JOURNAL ARTICLE

A corpus-based analysis of 'vernacular synonyms': Citizens, burgesses, and freemen in Early Modern English (1550–1700).

  • Published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2024, v. 29, n. 4. P. 562 1 of 3

  • Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Guardamagna, Caterina 3 of 3

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the significant social changes taking place during the Renaissance, this paper interrogates the lexical domain of citizenship, focusing on three words deemed near-synonymous in the historical literature: citizens, burgesses, and freemen. The study takes a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach to the data in the Early English Books Online corpus (1550–1699) and consults lexicographical sources (the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Lexicons of Early Modern English 1550–1700) to offer an overview of the organisation of the conceptual domain occupied by citizenship terms referring to "dwellers". The relationships between citizens, burgesses, and freemen over time are addressed through detailed quantitative collocation analysis, considering their overall profile, stability and innovation, and areas of functional overlap and distinctiveness. Overall, the results support historians' intuitions that citizens, burgesses, and freemen are "vernacular synonyms". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 2024/10, Vol. 29, Issue 4, p562
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:Language and Linguistics
  • Publication Date:2024
  • ISSN:1384-6655
  • DOI:10.1075/ijcl.22115.gua
  • Accession Number:182124531
  • Copyright Statement:Copyright of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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