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On “shapelings” and “childlings”: a linguistics approach to the emergence of new cultural borders between the unborn and the new-born child in EME (1500-1700)

Paper · 2020 · Paloma Tejada-Caller

Summary

The paper asks whether vocabulary can show how English speakers of 1500–1700 conceived the earliest phase of life, before and just after birth. Working within Cultural Linguistics and Age Studies, Tejada-Caller draws her corpus from the HTOED, the OED's companion thesaurus arranged by historical sense. She gathers new Early Modern English (EME) synonyms and word senses under two categories, ['child' as embryo] and ['child' as infant], and reads each set of synonyms as a profile of how society saw the concept. In this period, embryos gained vernacular and affectionate names, including some that cast them as persons. Infants gained a distinct identity built on smallness, tenderness and being unable to walk. Taken together, the two word sets point to a temporary shared category, the [vulnerable small person], which spans birth instead of being split by it. Most of these coinages were colloquial and soon disappeared, as scientific thinking later made birth the key dividing line. The study shows that historical lexicography can supply evidence for questions usually left to social historians.

Key points

  • The source data is the HTOED, together with OED Online definitions. The first OED sense of "child" relating to state or age covers both the unborn and the newly born, which is why embryo terms were included.
  • The study extends earlier work (Tejada 2018, 2019b) that found lexical evidence for a "discovery of childhood" in English between 1500 and 1700.
  • Embryo vocabulary moves beyond scientific terms and words for progeny. It adds homely metaphors of size and confinement, and person-like formations such as womb-infant and hans-in-kelder.
  • Infant vocabulary was nativized and shifted from religious framing toward ideas of helplessness and dependency. Examples include childling, tenderling, lap-child and child-in-arms. two-year-old appears as a synonym for the lap-child, which places the turning point at about age two rather than at birth.
  • Much of this lexis was popular and emotional, created within private household life, and did not last in the language.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat a cluster of synonyms that appeared in the same period as joint evidence for a concept's profile, rather than examining words one at a time.
  • I2. Category boundaries are cultural and can move; here the unborn and the newborn were merged into one category that cut across birth.
  • I3. Analyse the metaphors inside word formations (size, confinement, tenderness, inability to walk) to recover the features speakers attached to a referent.
  • I4. Look at how long words survive: short-lived colloquial coinages point to private, informal concerns, while lasting words reflect institutional usage.
  • I5. Read two neighbouring categories together to find a hidden category that bridges them, as embryo and infant terms jointly suggest a [vulnerable small person].

For Mova

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

  • I1 (world): Ontology nodes built from WordNet/FrameNet could hold the features shared by a synset's members, such as smallness or dependency, so that a category's meaning is explicit and can be inspected.
  • I2 (world): Allow ontology boundaries to depend on period or text, so that the world model of an older text does not quietly impose modern categories.
  • I3 (tokens): The morphology module could break compounds and derivations (-ling, womb-, -in-arms) into feature-bearing parts and pass those features on to later stages, even for rare or archaic words.
  • I4 (answer): When answering questions about older tales, flag rare period vocabulary and resolve it using compiled historical senses rather than modern defaults, and show that step in the explanation.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation could include paired-category probes that test whether the system merges or separates neighbouring concepts, with modern-sense controls acting as negatives.

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

🎓Universidad Complutense de MadridMadrid · Spain9 works · 63 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksHistory · 85 works

Cite

Cite as Paloma Tejada-Caller. 2020. On “shapelings” and “childlings”: a linguistics approach to the emergence of new cultural borders between the unborn and the new-born child in EME (1500-1700). Journal of English Studies 18.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/jes.4502

@article{tejadacaller2020shapelings,
  title = {{On “shapelings” and “childlings”: a linguistics approach to the emergence of new cultural borders between the unborn and the new-born child in EME (1500-1700)}},
  author = {Paloma Tejada-Caller},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 18},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.4502},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.4502}
}

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