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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:4 (2024) ► pp.562–594

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A corpus-based analysis of ‘vernacular synonyms’

Citizens, burgesses, and freemen in Early Modern English (1550–1700)

 | University of Liverpool
Published online: 9 December 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22115.gua
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 (EEBO). Retrieved October 25, 2022, from [URL] 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”.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Socio-historical and linguistic context
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Citizens, burgesses, and freemen as “central” terms for “dwellers”
    • 4.2Collocation analysis: Parameters
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1“Central” and “peripheral” terms
    • 5.2Patterns of change
    • 5.3Functional overlap and distinctiveness
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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