A corpus-driven assessment of the concept of 'work' in nineteenth century English

Dominic Smith

Phonological change has been said to be regular, but other aspects of language are not.

“That's just how it is”

To try to use corpus techniques (patterns, collocations...) to understand how semantic change takes place.

To develop a methodology for this.

Aims and Outline of the Study

Approx. 1.5 million words from each of four eras (generations):

1795-1824 ('The 1810 sub-corpus')

1825-1854 ('The 1840 sub-corpus')

1855-1884 ('The 1870 sub-corpus')

1885-1914 ('The 1900 sub-corpus')

Total: 5,999,458 tokens

The Corpus

Looked in history textbooks for main topics (could have been 'aboutness' had they been in electronic format).

'Work' was the topic that was most common by frequency in the whole corpus: 2086 tokens (0.03% of all types), in 54 of the 55 texts.

Because people use synonyms, topic then expanded to include 'business' (1612 tokens). Other words from the field occurred <300 times, and so were discarded.

Defining the research

Common collocates

List of most common 'non-grammatical' collocates calculated for both 'work' and 'business'

89 co-occurrences in span of -4/+5 in same sentence

Significantly rare in 1810

Case study: 'Hard’ + ‘Work‘ (1)

74 of the 89 co-occurrences are with the noun 'work'

[Person] + HAVE + hard + work + to + [task]

'Among such a confusion, we had hard work to find out all his pockets.' (Confessions of a Justified Sinner)

1810 – 1; 1840 – 6; 1870 – 3; 1900 – 0

Only once in Bank of English

Of the 15 occurrences with the verb, 13 have male subjects

Case study: 'Hard’ + ‘ Work' (2)

Types of work that can be 'hard':

Seems that the 'employment' type increased over the century compared with the 'task' type.

No examples with the task type in FLOB+FROWN

Case study: 'Hard’ + ‘Work' (3)

In 1810 + 1840 of the 8 attestations, 6 are negative life there, of his work among his tenants, of his (CR)wretched life of dirty work, was turned out of doors to die (HH) born for is just to work my heart and my life away, and (NS) a' my life long, about work and wages, and masters, and (NS) The mere bodily work at your time of life would break (NS) The hard spade-work robs their brain of life; the (NS) each of them its right work in her life. (NS) had never done a day's work in his life. (K)

In 1870 + 1900, 11 attestations, more positive the whole work of life was suited to the man: (SL) to make one's life a work of art? (PL)of his life, when the work of which he was ashamed (FH) all his life at this work. (FH)accomplish his life's work without loyal and whole-hearted (GS) thread of my life-work, I say sadly and without (D2) best of the life and work which had no interest (TR)assured of his life and work. (TM) is good work, is the best work of my life. (DG)

Case study: 'Life' + 'Work' (1)

In 1810 + 1840, on average 3.25 words separate 'life' and 'work'. In 1870 + 1900, this decreases to 2.1, as people start talking about 'life's work'.

(Yet the OED doesn't mention a link between life and work at all)

'The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work.' (Time Machine)

Case study: 'Life' + 'Work' (2)

So work is harder, more likely to be employment, but is now considered part of life, and can be good as it brings a level of comfort.

What do people think of work?

1) Attempting to divide into broad definitions (prototyping)

2) Prosody: If assessing prosody, how can we avoid adding 21st-century bias? (If hard work is bad now, how to we know it has always been so?)

3) Patterns seem interesting, but probably need to know more about their function synchronically first

4) Using chi-squared tests to assess significance of a collocation, and also differences between sub-corpora

Methodologies Used

Corpus was not part-of-speech tagged

Corpus was not marked-up for spoken, and particularly dialectal forms

Orthographical conventions have changed (today vs. to-day)

Span needs to be wider: have to look at individual occurrences

Too few examples to find many recurring patterns, so mainly concentrated on collocations

Problems

Discussed increasingly

There are two broad types of work: the one-off task and long-term employment.

Employment meaning slightly more common than the task meaning, especially in the second half of the century. Task meaning most common in set phrases.

Work was often manual labour, especially on a farm but also possibly a factory. Business refers to office-based jobs, sometimes involving travel.

The Meaning of 'Work'

Work as religious duty in 1810

Work hard thinking about a problem – common at start

Becomes hard after 1840, but seen as necessary to avoid poverty

In 2nd half of century, work becomes good as people recognise benefits (quality of life)

By 1900, people are lucky if they have business lives

Women in agriculture and possibly business by 1900

The Meaning of 'Work'

Do patterns change with meaning?

~ To set to work doing / to do something: Describes commencing a task. The participle is preferred in the first half of the nineteenth century, the infinitive by the end. (26 attestations)

~ To be hard at work doing something: Expresses the difficulty of a task being undertaken. (11 attestations)

~ To have hard work to do something: This phrase becomes less common over the century. It is replaced by the construction above, which seems to be synonymous. (10 attestations)

~ To go to work doing something: This describes commencing a task, but becomes less common, and was replaced by the 'set to work' construction. (4 attestations)

Task patterns

Students of history and literature both rely on primary sources. But if words have changed, they need to know how they were perceived at the time

Need for a dictionary that ignores modern meanings and nuance to achieve this

Prototypes

OED cannot give as broad a range of data as corpus-techniques

Methodologies shown to work but need larger corpus

Conclusion (or why do this?)

Question over controlling a corpus for political bias?

Discourse-internal / Discourse-external realities?

Is it still corpus-linguistics if we have to look at occurrences individually, rather than counting trends?

No evidence of changes in 'prefabs'

Issues raised

This presentation is also available for download from:http://www.domsmith.co.uk/mphil

Queries / Comments:dom@domsmith.co.uk

© Dominic Smith, 2005.