English Historical Semantics

This guide gives students a solid grounding in the basic methodology of how to analyse corpus data to study new words entering the language or language change. It uses a number of case studies to provide insights into collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. Students will become proficient in the key concepts in semantic change by applying ideas from theoretical semantics to historical data. They will also cover recent work at the intersections between historical semantics and other disciplines.