Volatile concepts

This paper demonstrates the value of studying co-occurrence ‘quads’ – constellations of four non-adjacent lemmas that consistently co-occur across spans of up to 100 tokens – for understanding discursive change. We map meaning onto quads as ‘discursive concepts’, which encompass encyclopaedic semantics, pragmatics, and context. We investigate a high-frequency quad with high co-occurrence strength in EEBO-TCP: world-heaven-earth-power. We conduct semantic and pragmatic analysis to generate hypotheses regarding discursive change. The quad’s components are semantically underspecified; thus, although the quad indicates a discursive concept, each instantiation of the quad is variable, contingent, and dependent upon context and pragmatic processes for interpretation. We observe how the vague lexemes that constitute building blocks of religious discourse are employed to generate new, timely secular discourses; and we argue that semantic underspecification is the site and source of discursive change. Indeed, the volatile, unstable nature of the component lexical meanings renders them indispensable to early modern debate.