Speaker: Alessandra De Mulder (1), Lauren Fonteyn (2) and Mike Kestemont (1)
Affiliation: (1) University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; (2) Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands
Title: Linguistic Value Construction in 18th-Century London Auction Advertisements: a Quantitative Approach
Abstract: Georgian England was characterised by a buzzing consumer society in which advertising played a progressively important role when it came to the (linguistic) value construction surrounding material goods. Increasingly, the perceived value of goods was not only determined by the intrinsic quality of the goods, but also by the socio-commercial discourse used to characterise them. Linguistic modifiers, such as adjectives, must have played an important role in this process – reflecting these socio-economical trends in text while also reinforcing them. Here, we focus on a diachronic corpus of over 5,000 pages of London auction advertisement pages, digitised via automated transcription and divided across four sample periods between 1742-1829. Prime methodological challenges include: (1) the noisiness of the available data because of imperfect transcription; (2) the coarseness of the available time stamps, and (3) the lack of suitable NLP software, such as lemmatizers or (shallow) syntactic parsers. Through the use of word embeddings, we try to alleviate the issue of spelling variation with reasonable success. We find that, over time, subjective or ‘evaluative’ modifiers have become more prominent in these advertisements than their objective or ‘descriptive’ counterparts – but there are different temporal patterns for different types of advertised objects
