Usury or interest ?: Reconstructing early modern English economics discourse (1572–1664) via historical corpus linguistics

This chapter aims to explore the lexical variation of the terms usury and interest in the historical microlinguistic ecology of early modern English economics discourse (1572–1664). The case study presents an attempt to apply the quantitative and qualitative approaches from corpus linguistics to examine the role that multiple factors played in the linguistic systematisation of the two concepts. Specific indexes of variation and argumentativeness have functioned as systemic variables with genres in bivariate correlation analysis to determine the impact of a non-standardised microlanguage on the identification of discrete terminological usage. Results confirm that selected systemic factors of the early modern English microlanguage of economics created the conditions for discrete usage of these terms.