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Corpus based analysis of selected lexicon for horses, its collocations and adjectives in Middle and Early Modern English
Vařáková, Zuzana ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Šmídová Müllerová, Světlana (referee)
The bachelor thesis aims at investigating some aspects of the semantic field "horse" and its changes throughout the Middle English and Early Modern English periods on the example of four selected terms from the category of warhorses and aristocratic horses: palfrey, destrier, steed, and courser. The thesis focuses mainly on the collocations of these words, with particular (but not exclusive) emphasis on adjectives. Its main hypothesis is that the collocations of the words may reflect, and thus also help to understand, the historical uses and social perception of the selected types of horses in the given periods. The theoretical part discusses the concepts of collocations, semantic change, and the development of the English lexis. Moreover, the chapter deals with the evolution of the English warhorse and the aristocratic horse in order to provide historical background. The research part is based on two diachronic corpora, the Corpus of the Middle English prose and Verse (CME) and the Early English Books Online (EEBO). In the analysis, the collocations of the selected words are examined by categorising them into various semantic groups, and used to determine the semantic prosody of each term. The findings are also compared and contextualised with the information from the historical and cultural...
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