Usury” or “Interest”? Exploring the diachronic variation of early modern English economic discourse (1550-1600): a corpus-based approach

This paper is part of a larger PhD investigation on the taxonomies occurred in the microlanguage of early modern economic theory. The project required the creation of a specialized historical sample corpus, covering a period of approximately hundred years, to represent the intellectual debate on mercantilism in early modern England. Part of the corpus, i.e. the texts published in the second half of the 16 th century, is here examined to evaluate the contribution of corpus-based software, with the support of online dictionaries, in the diachronic analysis of etymological, orthographic and semantic aspects. Firstly, this study reconsiders VARD not only as a proper tool for the normalisation of early modern English (EModE) texts, but also as a reference source to collect quantitative data to be aggregated and interpreted critically; this is particularly true in the analysis of spelling variation and language prestige in EModE. Secondly, the option of automatic part-of-speech (POS) annotation, available in the software package #LancsBox, will be used to establish the representativeness of texts within the corpus, and to observe the general trends occurred in the diachronic development of the diaphasic variety here studied. Thirdly, the Oxford English Dictionary will be adopted in the attempt to investigate the consequences of the linguistic contact between English and Latin in the same period, especially in the field of derivational morphology. Lastly, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary will be utilised to conduct a preliminary observation of the semantic development occurred diachronically in a selection of key terms retrieved in the intellectual debate here explored. Hence, a quantitative approach will be employed to provide a critical summary of the results collected, and a qualitative approach will be adopted to detect prospective recurring patterns of the linguistic features here examined.