Language Surrounding Poverty in Early Modern England : A Corpus-based Investigation of How People Living in the Seventeenth Century Perceived the Criminalised Poor

McEnery, Tony and Baker, Helen (2019) Language Surrounding Poverty in Early Modern England : A Corpus-based Investigation of How People Living in the Seventeenth Century Perceived the Criminalised Poor. In: Language and Computers :. Language and Computers . Brill Rodopi, Liden, pp. 225-257. ISBN 9789004390645

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Abstract

This study uses a corpus of approximately one billion words from the seventeenth century, based on data drawn from Early English Books Online, to explore shifting attitudes to the criminalised poor in England in the period. Using the methods of corpus linguistics, the study explores the representation of this group, attitudes towards them and the link, if any, between the group and punishment in public discourse. The focus is on four terms frequently applied to the group in this period, beggar, rogue, vagabond and vagrant. While all of these words appear, ostensibly, to be synonyms, this paper argues that they are near synonyms. Moreover, in the exploration of the differences in meaning between them as evidenced from the corpus data, we gain insights into the differing ways in which the group was perceived and labelled in the century.

Item Type:
Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings
Additional Information:
Funding Information: * The work reported in this study was supported by a grant from the Newby Trust, which the authors gratefully acknowledge. It was also supported by the esrc Centre for Corpus Ap-proaches to Social Science, grant number ES/K002155/1. Publisher Copyright: © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1203
Subjects:
?? early modern englishnear synonymypublic discourseseventeenth centurysocial historythe criminalised poorlanguage and linguisticslinguistics and languagecomputer science applications ??
ID Code:
185984
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
08 Feb 2023 10:20
Refereed?:
No
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
16 Jul 2024 05:17