Diachronic lexical semanticists and intellectual historians alike have long theorised about the mechanisms of conceptual change (Geeraerts 1997, Koselleck 1979, Kuukkanen 2008). However, these reflections have been conducted largely in parallel. This paper brings them into dialogue through a quantitative case study of the concept of progress in 18th-century Britain, tracing its shift from a field-specific sense to a civilisation-wide conception. In diachronic semantics, prototype theory models lexical semantic change by rejecting strict definitional boundaries. Rather, categories have central, highly representative cases, and more peripheral ones (Geeraerts et al. 2024). Similarly, in the Begriffsgeschichte tradition, concepts are seen as structured through an invariable ‘core’ and a variable ‘margin’ (Kuukkanen 2008). Despite these similarities to how prototype theory conceptualises change, the resemblance has not yet been systematically explored. In this study, we map the evolution of progress, a concept that has been of extensive interest for intellectual historians and philosophers (Nisbet 2017, Spadafora 1990, Wagner 1980). The analysis focuses on how progress changed from being a field-specific notion (e.g., progress in dramatic writing) to having a generalised, abstract, civilisation-wide conception (e.g., the progress of man) within the 18th century, as suggested by Spadafora (1990). We explore the syntactic constructions and collocational patterns indicating the transition and distinction between senses, reflecting the intellectual undertones of 18th-century Britain. To keep the focus on historically relevant texts, we use the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ecco), a comprehensive corpus of primary sources for the analysis of historical English discourse (Tolonen et al. 2021). Methodologically, we combine recent advances in distributional semantics (Geeraerts et al. 2024) and well-established methods in corpus-based diachronic analysis. Based on existing readings in conceptual history and philosophical texts concerning the concept of progress, we hypothesise that, during this century, the concept did undergo a shift from a field-specific sense to a generalised and abstract usage, through processes such as metaphorisation and amelioration, while retaining its semantic core. More broadly, our study illustrates how the computational and distributional methods used in diachronic lexical semantics can provide intellectual historians with large-scale descriptive evidence that broadens the scope and complements traditional close-reading methods. In doing so, we also make an initial contribution to establishing the theoretical link between diachronic semantics and conceptual history, while showing how the semantic evolution of progress reflects the intellectual and cultural dynamics of 18th-century Britain. * Corresponding author: Ángela María Gómez Zuluaga, KU Leuven, Department of Linguistics, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, bus 3301, Leuven, 3000, Belgium. E-mail: angelamaria.gomezzuluaga@kuleuven.be. https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7209-4476 1 KU Leuven, Department of Linguistics, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, Leuven, 3000, Belgium. E-mail: dirk.speelman@kuleuven.be. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1561-1851
Gómez-Zuluaga et al. (Fri,) studied this question.