Cover not available

In:Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 153–176

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 7
“Die Blumenzeit der Frau”

A corpus-based study of the development of medical references to menstruation in historical texts on herbology

 | Humboldt University of Berlin
 | Humboldt University of Berlin
 | Humboldt University of Berlin
 | Humboldt University of Berlin
 | Humboldt University of Berlin
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.07sch
Abstract
Scientific herbal texts in vernacular German first emerged in the 15th century, and their diachronic analysis presents an opportunity to trace linguistic changes across centuries. This study deals with the linguistic strategies that are used to refer to the concept of menstruation, which we study in the RIDGES corpus, representing herbal texts from the late fifteenth century to the early twentieth century. This exploratory study focuses on terminology, i.e. expressions referring to concepts relevant to scientific communication, and investigates the morphological, syntactic and semiotic characteristics of references to menstruation. Our study reveals two tendencies: a decrease of formal variation as well as a decrease of semiotic variation. Both tendencies point towards the increase of terminologisation in the early and late modern period (1483–1914).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Referring expressions to menstruation in historical medical writing
  • 3.Corpus and annotation
    • 3.1Annotating referring expressions to menstruation
    • 3.2The impact of corpus design
  • 4.Corpus study
    • 4.1Distribution and variants of references to menstruation
    • 4.2Grammatical strategies to refer to menstruation
    • 4.3Semiotic relation between denotation and terms
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
References
Algee-Hewitt, Mark, and Mark McGurl. 2018. Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels. Standford: Stanford Literary Lab. [URL]
Biber, Douglas. 1994. “Representativeness in Corpus Design.” In Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker, ed. by Antonio Zampolli, Nicoletta Calzolari, and Martha Palmer, 243–257. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bode, Katherine. 2018. A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caflisch-Schnetzler, Ursula. 2018. “Die Bedeutung von Kommunikationsnetzwerken für die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Vernakuläre Wissenschaftskommunikation. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte der Modernen Deutschen Wissenschaftssprachen, ed. by Michael Prinz, and Jürgen Schiewe, 87–100. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ebert, Robert P., Oskar Reichmann, Hans-Joachim Solms, and Klaus-Peter Wegera (eds). 2013. Frühneuhochdeutsche Grammatik. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evans, Jennifer. 2012. “‘Gentle Purges corrected with hot Spices, whether they work or not, do vehemently provoke Venery’: Menstrual Provocation and Procreation in Early Modern England.” Social History of Medicine 25 (1): 2–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardt, Andreas. 1998. “Sprachtheoretische Grundlagen und Tendenzen der Fachsprachenforschung.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 26: 31–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gläser, Rosemarie. 1995–1996. “Eigennamen in Wissenschafts- und Techniksprache.” In Namenforschung: Ein Internationales Handbuch zur Onomastik, ed. by Ernst Eichler, 527–533. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gloning, Thomas. 2007. “Deutsche Kräuterbücher des 12. bis 18. Jahrhunderts: Textorganisation, Wortgebrauch, funktionale Syntax.” In Gesund und krank im Mittelalter: Marburger Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Medizin: 3. Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe “Marburger Mittelalter-Zentrum (MMZ)”, Marburg, 25. und 26. März 2005, ed. by Andreas Meyer, 9–88. Leipzig: Eudora-Verl.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guentherodt, Ingrid. 1986. “Maria Cunitz und Maria Sibylla Merian: Pionierinnen der Deutschen Wissenschaftssprache im 17. Jahrhundert”. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 14 (1), 23–49. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2009. “Collection Strategies and Design Decisions.” In Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, ed. by Anke Lüdeling, and Merja Kytö, 154–168. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
King, Helen. 2015. “Menstruation.” In Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klein, Wolf-Peter. 2011a. “Deutsch statt Latein! Zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftsssprachen in der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Wissen Schaffen – Wissen Kommunizieren: Wissenschaftssprachen in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by Wieland Eins, Helmut Glück, and Sabine Pretscher, 35–47. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011b. “Die Deutsche Sprache in der Gelehrsamkeit der Frühen Neuzeit: Vonder Lingua Barbarica zur HaubtSprache.” In Diskurse der Gelehrtenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Handbuch, ed. by Herbert Jaumann, 465–516. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kopf, Kristin. 2018. Fugenelemente Diachron: Eine Korpusuntersuchung zu Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Verfugenden N+N-Komposita. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koplenig, Alexander. 2019. “Against Statistical Significance Testing in Corpus Linguistics.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 15 (2): 321–346. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krause, Thomas. 2019. ANNIS: A Graph-Based Query System for Deeply Annotated Text Corpora. PhD dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Krause, Thomas, and Amir Zeldes. 2016. “ANNIS 3: A New Architecture for Generic Corpus Query and Visualization.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31 (1): 118–139. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kruse, Britta-Juliane. 1999. “Die Arznei ist Goldes wert”: Mittelalterliche Frauenrezepte. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuna, Ágnes. 2017. “Die sprachlichen Muster von Anweisungen in ungarischen medizinischen Rezepten des 16.-17. Jahrhunderts.” In Sprachgeschichte und Medizingeschichte: Texte – Termini – Interpretationen, ed. by Jörg Riecke, 195–208. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lindner, Bettina. 2018. “Sprachenwechsel und Koexistenz: Zur Rolle des Deutschen und Lateinischen in Medizinischen Fallsammlungen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Vernakuläre Wissenschaftskommunikation. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte der Modernen Deutschen Wissenschaftssprachen, ed. by Michael Prinz, and Jürgen Schiewe, 255–270. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lüdeling, Anke, Amir Zeldes, and Hagen Hirschmann. 2011. “Variationism and Underuse Statistics in the Analysis of the Development of Relative Clauses in German.” In Corpus Analysis and Diachronic Linguistics, ed. by Yuji Kawaguchi, Makoto Minegishi, and Wolfgang Viereck, 37–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Odebrecht, Carolin, Malte Belz, Amir Zeldes, Anke Lüdeling, and Thomas Krause. 2017. “RIDGES Herbology: Designing a Diachronic Multi-Layer Corpus.” Language Resources and Evaluation 51 (3): 695–725. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Odebrecht, Carolin, Laura Perlitz, Gohar Schnelle, and Catharina Fischer. 2020. Annotationsrichtlinien zu Ridges Herbology Version 9.0. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perlitz, Laura. 2014. Konkurrenz zwischen Wortbildung und Syntax: Historische Entwicklung von Benennung. Bachelor’s Thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Pörksen, Uwe. 1998. “Deutsche Sprachgeschichte und die Entwicklung der Naturwissenschaften. Aspekte einer Geschichte der Naturwissenschaftssprache und ihrer Wechselbeziehung zur Gemeinsprache.” In Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, ed. by Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann, and Stefan Sonderegger, 193–210. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reiner, Jörg L. 2003. Terminologiesysteme als Grundlagen für die Semantische Interoperabilität von Heterogenen Anwendungssystemen sowie Deren Fachsprachlicher Zugang. Berlin: Aka Akademische.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reul, Christian, Dennis Christ, Alexander Hartelt, Nico Balbach, Maximilian Wehner, Uwe Springmann, Christoph Wick, Christine Grundig, Andreas Büttner, and Frank Puppe. 2019. “OCR4all – An Open-Source Tool Providing a (Semi-)Automatic OCR Workflow for Historical Printings.” Applied Sciences 9 (22): 4853. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Riecke, Jörg. 2004. Die Frühgeschichte der Mittelalterlichen Medizinischen Fachsprache im Deutschen: Bd 1: Untersuchungen. Bd 2: Wörterbuch. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roelcke, Thorsten. 2018. “Von der Wissenschaftlichen Eignung der Deutschen Sprache: Sprachreflexion in Barock und Aufklärung.” In Vernakuläre Wissenschaftskommunikation. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte der Modernen Deutschen Wissenschaftssprachen, ed. by Michael Prinz, and Jürgen Schiewe, 361–374. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Springmann, Uwe, and Anke Lüdeling. 2017. “OCR of Historical Printings with an Application to Building Diachronic Corpora: A Case Study Using the RIDGES Herbal Corpus.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 (2). [URL]
Taavitsainen, Irma, and Päivi Pahta (eds). 2010. Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2018. “Scholastic Genre Scripts in English Medical Writing 1375–1800.” In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change, ed. by Richard J. Whitt, 95–115. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tiemann, Daniel; Schäffler, Arne and Willibald Pschyrembel. 2020. Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch. 268. revised edition, Boston: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wegera, Klaus-Peter, and Frédéric Hartweg. 1989. Frühneuhochdeutsch: Eine Einführung in die deutsche Sprache des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Whitt, Richard Jason. 2019. “Expressions of Knowledge in Early Modern English- and German-Language Midwifery and Gynaecological Texts (ca. 1500–1700): On the Use of Pronominal Subjects and that-Complement Clauses.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 120 (2): 325–353.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zedler, Johann Heinrich. 1731–1754. Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexikon aller Wissenschafften und Künste.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1739. Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexikon aller Wissenschafften und Künste: Ein und Zwantzigster Band Mi – Mt. Leipzig.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zeige, Lars Erik. 2011. Sprachwandel und Soziale Systeme. Hildesheim: Olms.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Shadrova, Anna, Anke Lüdeling, Martin Klotz, Rahel Gajaneh Hartz & Thomas Krause
2025. „Step away from the Computer!“. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 53:1 ► pp. 166 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue