The changing semantics of happy and glorious after the English Revolution of 1688: A corpus-assisted discourse study

Abstract

My paper takes as its focus the semantic variation of the pre-modifying adjectives happy and glorious which resulted from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent triumphal representation of Britain as a champion of freedom and emancipation. By adopting principles of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Stubbs 2001; Partington 2004), I shall examine the collocational patterns of the two lexical items in the British periodical press, covering the period from 1620 to 1789. Before the Glorious Revolution the meaning of the two premodifiers appears consistent with the definitions provided in the OED but from 1688 onwards changes in the phraseology affect their semantics. In particular, after the Revolution, happy and glorious show a semantic preference for words referring to liberty and (universal) rights which enriches their meaning with a sense of freedom from oppression and corruption. Given that the two adjectives already had a positive meaning, the libertarian semantics acquired after 1688 can be interpreted as a further amelioration in the direction of liberalism and, at the end of the century, Enlightened universalism. In order to investigate the changing semantics of the two adjectives throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries, I shall make use of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (1620-1649), the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (1653-1654), the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1671, 1681, 1691) and the British Newspaper Archive for the period from 1700 to 1789.