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home / papers / 2017 / “This is an age for news”: A corpus-based analysis of the word NEW(E)S in the spoken discourse of Early Modern English society (1560-1760)

“This is an age for news”: A corpus-based analysis of the word NEW(E)S in the spoken discourse of Early Modern English society (1560-1760)

Paper · 2017 · Elisabetta Cecconi

Summary

Cecconi asks whether the hunger for news in Tudor and Stuart England shows up in everyday speech, and not only in news publications. She studies the word NEW(E)S in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (CED), using Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) in the tradition of Stubbs and Partington. The method combines two parts:

  • Quantitative: how often the word occurs in each of five 40-year periods.
  • Qualitative: concordance reading of its verb collocates and premodifying adjectives.

The concordances are interpreted against a multilayered notion of context: the history of news, reading practices and literacy.

The word is used heavily up to about 1720. It peaks in 1640-1679, which the author links to the Civil War, the end of censorship in 1641 and the rise of newsbooks. It then drops after 1720, mirroring a decline Brownlees found in news corpora. An EEBO search places the word's take-off in the 1520s.

The study shows how a corpus not built around a topic can still reveal how that topic shaped ordinary social life. It also offers a model for historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics.

Key points

  • The corpus: CED (Culpeper and Kytö, Uppsala/Lancaster) has about 1.2 million words in two groups.
    • Constructed dialogues: comedies, prose fiction and didactic works.
    • Authentic dialogues: trial records and witness depositions.
    • The span is divided into five 40-year periods.
  • Frequency over time: NEW(E)S peaks in period 3 (1640-1679) and falls sharply in period 5 (1720-1760).
  • Baseline from EEBO (vol. 3, about 1.2 billion words, 1470-1780):
    • 1470-1500: a single hit.
    • 1500-1520: 6 hits in 3 texts, or 1.96 per million words.
    • 1520-1529: 87 hits in 9 texts, or 26.34 per million words.
  • Usage patterns:
    • The greeting "What newes?" occurs across social ranks.
    • "Bundles" sometimes stands in for news or intelligence.
  • Proposed next step: apply the same method to Early Modern letters.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Studying a phenomenon through texts that are not about it shows how the phenomenon spread into ordinary talk, not only how specialists framed it.
  • I2. Keeping "constructed" and "authentic" dialogue apart lets the analyst see whether patterns differ between imitated speech and recorded speech.
  • I3. Reading verb collocates of a noun (who gets, brings or tells news) recovers the channels and actors of a practice.
  • I4. A huge reference corpus (EEBO) supplies a normalised per-million baseline that dates when a word took off.
  • I5. Spotting near-synonyms in context, such as "bundles" for news, shows that a concept can hide under a different word.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Build evaluation sets from off-domain text, such as fables and dialogues, to check that knowledge of a concept generalises beyond its home genre.
  • I2 (learn): Tag silver data by provenance (fiction, transcript, didactic) and report parser agreement per stratum, so genre-specific errors are not averaged away.
  • I3 (frames): Collect the verbs that govern a noun in UD trees and map them to VerbNet roles, giving a profile of who typically does what with an object type.
  • I4 (world): Use per-million frequencies over time from a large reference corpus as a prior for dating or flagging archaic senses in the lexicon.
  • I5 (world): Let the ontology record context-dependent synonyms (container for its content) so coreference and entity linking can join "the bundles" to "the news".

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of FlorenceFlorence · Italy5 works · 1 citation

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksDiscourse analysis · 394 works

Cite

Cite as Elisabetta Cecconi. 2017. “This is an age for news”: A corpus-based analysis of the word NEW(E)S in the spoken discourse of Early Modern English society (1560-1760). NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 16.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.35360/njes.412

@article{cecconi2017this,
  title = {{“This is an age for news”: A corpus-based analysis of the word NEW(E)S in the spoken discourse of Early Modern English society (1560-1760)}},
  author = {Elisabetta Cecconi},
  journal = {NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 16},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.35360/njes.412},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.412}
}

References

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  4. Brownlees, Nicholas. 2011. The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. NEW(E)S in Early Modern English spoken discourse Brownlees, Nicholas. 2015. “‘We have in some former books told you’: The significance of metatext in 17 th -century English news.” Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse. Eds. Birte Bȍs and Lucia Kornexl. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 3-22. find
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