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AbstractIn this article, we study the way in which prostitutes, on the one hand, and prostitution, on the other, were evaluated and represented in nineteenth-century English news articles. The main aims of the study are to chart referential terms used of prostitutes as socially marginal agents and objects, as well as to map concepts related to the metaphorical field of prostitution. Our data come from the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Database (British Library newspapers parts 1 and 2: 1800–1900. http://www.gale.com/c/british-library-newspapers-part-i) and The Times Digital Archive (1785–2011. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-digital-archive), consisting of altogether 300 news articles relating to prostitution. Our results suggest that there is variation between vilification and pity in the language relating to prostitutes in the Victorian press, both from the socio-pragmatic and the cognitive perspectives. While the overall attitudes are mostly negative, there is a tendency to highlight the humanity of the prostitute by referring to her, for example, as a pitiful object of a crime. All the metaphors found in the material also draw from the negativity seen as inherent in prostitution and prostitutes. This is accentuated by the frequent personification of states or political institutions as prostitutes, whose lamentable behaviour or appearance is referred to in the metaphor.

"The chapters in this volume study the construction, representation and negotiation of a variety of social roles through self- and other-reference markers or the discussion of reference as a tool for identification. The chapters uncover new insights both from a historical and present-day perspective and show how positioning the self and other varies, what kind of reference choices language users make and what follows from these choices. The data come from a variety of public texts, private encounters and questionnaires, and the methodologies range from macro to micro perspectives, including combinations of qualitative close-reading and quantitative corpus methods, and synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The findings enhance our understanding and use of reference practices in the context of global, institutional, political and multicultural, as well as media texts"--

This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. The data comes from a small and representative corpus of British English (ARCHER-3.1) and from three "big data" sets (Google Books, British Library Newspapers and The Economist). We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signaling social status and referring to individuals have decreased and from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards words referring to collectivities of people have increased. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. ; Peer reviewed