A celebration of words and ideas: The stylistic potential of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
Abstract
LALsplalLanguage and Literature0963-94701461-7293SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England10.1177/096394701143204710.1177_0963947011432047ArticlesA celebration of words and ideas: The stylistic potential of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English DictionaryBusseBeatrixUniversity of Heidelberg, GermanyBeatrix Busse, Department of English, University of Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. Email: beatrix.busse@as.uni-heidelberg.deBeatrix Busse holds the chair of English linguistics at the English department of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany. She was a visiting researcher in Birmingham (UK), Stratford (UK), and Lancaster (UK), and is a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy. Her scholarly interests include the history of English, (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, and corpus linguistics. Two of her major publications are Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare (John Benjamins 2006), and Language and Style. In Honour of Mick Short (Palgrave 2010, co-edited with Dan McIntyre). Among her more recent projects are “Speech, writing and thought presentation in the history of English”, “language and urban place” and “language and medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Texts”.22012211Special Issue: A Celebration of Style8492KayChristianRobertsJaneSamuelsMichaelWotherspoonIrené (eds), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; pp.: ISBN 9780199208999, £275.00/$495.00 (hbk). Online version: http://www.oed.com/thesaurus;jsessionid=B91E9039FCD956F86EDD1F30C3680EDC© The Author(s) 20122012SAGE PublicationsThe kind of text I am concerned with here could have been called hereword (a1100),