“Balance of trade” and “balance of payments”. Reconstructing Early Modern English economics discourse (1600-1650) via corpus linguistics: a data-based approach to historical evidence

This paper is an extract of a larger corpus-based PhD project which focuses on the investigation of the Early Modern English microlanguage of economics during the Renaissance (1572-1664). A key peculiarity of this study is to consider EModE works not only as mere linguistic texts but also as a proper dataset with all the critical issues occasioned by the special nature of historical evidence. Corpus-based software has been increasingly improving the ability to unravel relevant information and trends from EModE texts with the adoption of a data-based analysis, especially with a quantitative approach in terms of aggregation and statistical description of historical data. An enormous contribution has been additionally provided by the normalisation of EModE texts to ameliorate the accuracy of historical corpora as a dataset and the manipulation of the same data statistically. In this case study, a section of the specialised historical sample corpus created for the purpose of the PhD project will be interrogated with some corpus-based software. Particular reference will be devoted to the data collectable from the software packages VARD2, #Lancsbox and CQPweb; and to those retrievable from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English. The main goal will be to observe the diachronic evolution of a selection of related concepts in the EMod economics discourse in the works of some leading intellectuals of the time; and to take advantage of these quantitative data to corroborate the interpretation of some etymological, orthographic, and semantic aspects in the systematization of the same concepts during the examined time frame.