English Historical Semantics

An overview of the structural and cognitive approaches to English historical semantics

This guide gives students a solid grounding in the basic methodology of how to analyse corpus data to study new words entering the language or language change. It uses a number of case studies to provide insights into collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. Students will become proficient in the key concepts in semantic change by applying ideas from theoretical semantics to historical data. They will also cover recent work at the intersections between historical semantics and other disciplines.

• Focuses primarily on Lexical Semantics – the study of word meaning
• Offers a solid grounding in the basic methodology for corpus data analysis
• Features extended case studies on colour and kinship terms
• Includes exercises and suggestions for further reading in every chapter