Diachronic lexical semanticists and intellectual historians alike have long theorised about the mechanisms of conceptual change (Geeraerts, 1997; Koselleck, 2004; Kuukkanen, 2008). Specifically, in diachronic lexical semantics, prototype theory models semantic change by positing that lexical categories have central, highly representative cases, and more peripheral ones (Geeraerts et al., 2024) that shift and change places over time. Similarly, in the Begriffsgeschichte tradition, concepts are seen as having an invariable ‘core’ and a variable ‘margin’ (Kuukkanen, 2008). Despite these conceptual similarities, reflections have been conducted largely in parallel. This paper brings them into dialogue through a quantitative case study of the concept of progress in eighteenth-century Britain.
The concept of progress has been of extensive interest for intellectual historians and philosophers (e.g., Nisbet, 2017; Spadafora, 1990; Wagner, 2016). Our analysis focuses on how progress changed from being a field-specific notion (e.g., progress in dramatic writing) to having a civilisation-wide conception (e.g., the progress of man) within the eighteenth century, as suggested by Spadafora (1990). We analyse syntactic constructions and collocational patterns that mark the transition between senses, reflecting the intellectual undertones of eighteenth-century Britain. We also ask (i) whether specific salient voices influenced this change and (ii) whether any identifiable areas of knowledge served as loci or domains of change.
Methodologically, we approach the problem from both the onomasiological and semasiological perspectives. To do this, we combine recent advances in distributional semantics (Geeraerts et al., 2024) with well-established corpus-based quantitative modelling techniques. To ensure relevance to intellectual history as well as machine readability, we use the Eighteenth Century Collections Online, transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership (ecco-tcp). Working with this historical corpus entails addressing both superficial and profound challenges, ranging from orthographic variation to difficulties in author attribution and challenges in field specification given the loose disciplinary boundaries of the eighteenth century.
Through this analysis, we aim to identify the changing objects of progress and how the concept was referred to throughout the century. Based on existing work in conceptual history and philosophy, we hypothesise that during the eighteenth century progress shifted from having a mostly field-specific sense to a generalised and abstract usage through processes such as metaphorisation and amelioration, while retaining its semantic core. Further, we expect to find that authors who are, in general, regarded as highly influential in this century will be some of the most salient drivers of the change. Likewise, the larger fields of science, religion, and art have been stated as areas where the concept was greatly used and therefore might be more subject to being driving forces of change.
More broadly, our study illustrates how the computational and distributional methods used in diachronic lexical semantics can provide intellectual historians with large-scale descriptive evidence that broadens the scope and complements traditional close-reading methods. In doing so, we also make an initial contribution to establishing the theoretical link between diachronic semantics and conceptual history, showing how the semantic evolution of progress reflects the intellectual and cultural dynamics of eighteenth-century Britain.
Corresponding author: Ángela María Gómez Zuluaga, KU Leuven, Department of Linguistics, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, bus 3301, Leuven, 3000, Belgium. E-mail: angelamaria.gomezzuluaga@kuleuven.be. https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7209-4476
** KU Leuven, Department of Linguistics, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics
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