HISTORICAL

HISTORICAL

1. Think of five related words in a given semantic field, e.g. very, really, extremely, completely, totally or sick, ill, infirm, unwell, unhealthy, etc. (Feel free to use a thesaurus if you'd like: 1 2 3).

2. Use the EEBO-LION Corpus (1500s-1800s), the TIME Corpus (1900s), and the American Corpus (1990-2007) to examine the historical trajectory of these five related words over time:

Which are on the increase, and which are on the decrease?
What would you predict would be the state of affairs 20 or 50 years from now, if things continue as is?
Has there been any significant meaning change with the words over time (use collocates)

3. You might also look for these words in other "non-corpus" corpora, such as the following:

Early English Books Online (best for 1500-1700)
Literature Online (best for 1700-1900)
Early American Periodicals (1741-1900)

19th Century Books (Library of Congress)

19th Century Periodicals (Library of Congress)
New York Times (1850-2000)
LDS General Conference (1851-present)

Two other questions:

-- What were the methodological issues involved in using these corpora?

-- In the American Corpus, how are the historical shifts related to variation between genres?