Course: Shakespeare's Language: Revealing Meanings and Exploring Myths

This video is a direct continuation of the last one (last week) on using CQPweb. Here, Andrew Hardie hones your skills in Word searching, and specifically how to search for …

This video adds a little note to the previous one explaining how one can extract words of a particular grammatical part of speech. For example, one may wish to extract …

The word “horrid” occurs so infrequently in Shakespeare that it is easy to read through the examples of a concordance. What if there are too many examples to read? And …

How can we extract patterns of language use that reveal word-meanings? And what patterns exactly are we talking about? In some ways, corpus-based techniques probing word-meanings are like word association …

Shakespeare dictionaries, like all dictionaries, play a key role in helping us understand word meanings in Shakespeare. There are dictionaries that focus on specialist subsets of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, such as …

If there is one major collection of historical writings of all kinds that is worth knowing about, it is Early English Books Online (EEBO). One reason for this is that …

The processes involved in printing early modern texts had some impact on the language, as we will discuss in the following video. The first step in printing, even today, is …

One of the particular reasons why Shakespeare’s language sounds so Shakespearean, from our point of view, is to do with a particular way in which the parts of a sentence …

Adjectives are words that often qualify nouns (e.g. “quick” as in “a quick car”), and adverbs are words that often qualify verbs (e.g. “quickly” as in “he drove quickly”). We …

There is much more to be said about verbs, and this is why we return to the topic here. Verbs can be adjusted to express particular meanings. We can say …

Pronouns are little words but have big consequences! One of the reasons for that is that pronouns refer to people involved in the speech or writing, including in the fictional …

Following the previous video-talk on English loanwords in general, and Latin in particular, this video-talk focuses on what Shakespeare was doing with those loanwords. Many of Shakespeare’s specific uses reflect …

Shakespeare’s language was not an island but part of “Early Modern English” (or EME). Early Modern English is a conventional label applied to the period of English, spanning approximately 1450 …