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Social network analysis and the eighteenth‐century family network: a case study of the Walpole family
Author(s) -
Henstra Froukje
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.2007.00193.x
Subject(s) - rule based machine translation , relation (database) , norm (philosophy) , linguistics , set (abstract data type) , variation (astronomy) , social network (sociolinguistics) , context (archaeology) , sociology , history , computer science , epistemology , philosophy , physics , archaeology , database , world wide web , astrophysics , social media , programming language
In this paper 1 I demonstrate that the present‐day research model of social network analysis can successfully be used to describe and explain linguistic variation and change in a historical context. I do so by presenting a case study of the language of the Walpole family in relation to the norm as set in contemporary eighteenth‐century grammars. I select three linguistic features which were commented on by Lowth and test these against the corpus of the letters of Walpole family members, which I have created from the complete edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence.