Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History [Paperback]

Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material.

This open access book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension.

McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources  the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded byKnowledge Unlatched.

Professor Anthony McEneryis a corpus linguist working at the University of Lancaster, UK

Helen Bakeris Part-time Newby Research Fellow, County South, Lancaster University, UK

This book impressively proves: (historical) corpus linguistics and historical science can no longer work in splendid isolation. I am fascinated by this informed, critical and data-driven investigation of prostitution in multifaceted public discourses of eventful 17th-century Britain, with its intelligent, respectful and mutually beneficial integration of the respective methods, tools, concepts and knowledge from both disciplines. This book will serve as a model of interdisciplinary research where, for example, quantification and learned statistical testing of linguistic findings on semantic and lexical change are seen as indispensable, but never sufficient to replace contextualisation. Reinhart Koselleck would havelcZ