A corpus-based analysis of 'vernacular synonyms'

Against the backdrop of the significant social changes taking place during the Renaissance, this paper interrogates the lexical domain of citizenship, focusing on three words deemed near-synonymous in the historical literature: citizens, burgesses, and freemen. The study takes a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach to the data in the Early English Books Online corpus (1550-1699) and consults lexicographical sources (the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Lexicons of Early Modern English 1550-1700) to offer an overview of the organisation of the conceptual domain occupied by citizenship terms referring to "dwellers". The relationships between citizens, burgesses, and freemen over time are addressed through detailed quantitative collocation analysis, considering their overall profile, stability and innovation, and areas of functional overlap and distinctiveness. Overall, the results support historians' intuitions that citizens, burgesses, and freemen are "vernacular synonyms".