Semantic change in the Paston letters Looking at semantic change within farming-related nouns in the Paston Letters.

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the semantic change within farming-related nouns in the Paston letters. This is done by extensively searching the Paston letters in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, where seventeen farming-related nouns were found, categorized, and studied. The results of this search regrettably found no indication of change within the nouns chosen despite testing using Blank and Bloomfield’s typologies and a cursory semantic prosody study. While this thesis fell short the letter collection proved to contain a notable amount of yet to be studied data that would be a sound choice for any historical linguistics research.