McEnery, Anthony Helen Baker: Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution. Computational Linguistics and History

Abstract

This monograph by Anthony McEnery and Helen Baker brings together a number of areas of study, among them historical corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, word studies, and social history. The authors have aimed to “explore, in a spirit of full cooperation, what a linguist and historian can achieve together” (p. 1). The study thus takes us back in time to the socio-cultural circumstances of seventeenthcentury England and focusses on “women who traded sex for cash or some benefit in kind in the seventeenth century” (p. 2). The broad aim of the book is to investigate how prostitution was represented in contemporary writings: how did people think and write about those involved in the sex trade and the trade itself, and what was the language and discourse about these issues like? These are intriguing questions about the life of almost any sections of society in the past, and they may be the more intriguing when targeting those involved in controversial professional activities such as prostitution. The seventeenth century was a period of political and social upheaval in the history of England, and it was also the period when the English language continued to take shape and navigate towards what was subsequently known as ‘Standard English’. As their source of information, the authors opted for public discourse and “general written English from the period” (p. 2), setting aside specialized documents such as court records, which might have conveyed judicial rather than general attitudes to prostitution. Clearly, the goal set for the study required advanced methodology. The methodology the authors chose comprises automated searches of quantitative data in large-scale language corpora containing hundreds of millions of words drawn from machine-readable texts of various types, and traditional close readings and qualitative analyses of examples drawn from texts. This is precisely where the skills of a historian and a corpus linguist could be harnessed to raise and answer research questions in a joint creative effort. Chapter 1, “Introduction”, presents the aim of the book and surveys the ways in which electronic corpora, big and small, have been used in previous Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2019; 20170026