Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment: New Words and Old

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-42909-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 315, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

Reihe: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History

Obsolete old words from seventeenth-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650–1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. The book contains chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women’s roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McIntosh, Carey

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 First Thoughts

2 Very Often, We Do Things with Words

3 A Preview of Six Chapters

4 Words and History

1 Old Words

1 Rural Life

2 A Village Doles Out Punishments

3 Cooking and Eating

4 Remnants of Feudalism

5 Hunting

6 Proverbs

7 Magic

2 New Words and the Middle Class

1 New Words and Cultural Change

2 The Invention of Comfort

3 A ‘Conversable World’

3 The Enlightenment

1 Orderliness, Organization, and Modernity

2 A Gradual Spread of Democratic Values

3 Weights and Measures

4 Science and the English Language

1 The Royal Society

2 Artificial Languages and Prose Style

3 Scientific Words

4 Anna Wierzbicka and Empirical Science

5 Words, Cultural Change, and History

1 Old Words in Dictionaries

2 Local Words

3 New Words – Party and Fun

4 Language and Culture and History

5 The Politicization of English

6 New Words in the Enlightenment

1 Individuality and Self-Consciousness

2 Bluestocking

3 ‘Public’ Words and the Public Sphere

4 Sympathy

5 Commercial

6 Classification

7 Critique and Cosmopolitan

8 Conclusion

Party and Fun – Texts

More Old Words

New Words

Works Cited

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Carey McIntosh, Ph.D. (1964, Harvard University), is Professor of English Emeritus at Hofstra University. He has published books and articles on Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century language, literature, and style, including The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1998).