Investigating the Social Representations of Contagious Diseases in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Corpus-based Analysis of Cholera, Measles, and Plague in American Historical Texts

Abstract

The current study employed corpus linguistics techniques in order to shed light on the representation of “cholera", “measles", and “plague" over 19th and 20th centuries in American society. To this end and also to compare the representation of the mentioned contagious diseases over time, the current study explored how these target words (i.e., cholera, measles and plague) in texts of 19th and 20th centuries collocate with other words. To study the collocation patterns of contagious diseases over time, corpus of historical American English (COHA) was used. The results indicated that language change represented the events taken place in the society. Moreover, as expected, it was revealed that the texts on different diseases (i.e., cholera, measles, and plague) carried over a negative prosody. Regarding the difference between the 19th and 20th centuries, although the frequency of the target words in the 19th and 20th centuries were not equal, the collocational patterns of these contagious diseases over 19th and 20th centuries were almost similar.