Project overview

Objectives

The project Discourses and contexts of well-being in the history of English aims to investigate the roots of discursive practices concerning the pursuit of well-being in a theoretical, descriptive, and applied perspective.
The theoretical investigation will reformulate the concept of well-being by considering how it took form in the Late Modern age, and how it was linguistically and discursively negotiated in the British and American speech communities. The very introduction of the neologism ‘well-being’ – calqued on Italian ‘benessere’ – and its semantic development through time will be studied, also by considering other lexemes in the same semantic field.
The descriptive investigation will concentrate on the texts selected and organised in subcorpora by the different Units, in order to show how the ideas and practices of well-being were dealt with in Late Modern times. The emergence of well-being will be analysed in both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The genres investigated will include newspapers, educational material, ego documents, scientific texts disseminating and popularising medical issues, and texts concerning leisure activities. Particular attention will be paid to genres which so far have elicited relatively marginal interest in scholarly investigations, although they played a significant part in the definition of specific cultural sets and of linguistic forms through which persuasive discourse was enacted (e.g. popular magazines and literature, pamphlets, schoolbooks, ballads and promotional materials). This largely corresponds to the critical approach known as a people’s history, or history from below, i.e. a type of historical narrative which tries to account for historical events from the perspective of ordinary people and marginal groups rather than the upper classes and leaders (e.g. Krantz 1988). In this respect, attention will be paid to what new audiences such texts could address, especially in relation to class, gender and ethnicity. The linguistic focus will be on lexical and phraseological choices, textual processes, rhetorical and argumentative structures and communicative strategies (use of metadiscourse, definitions, repetitions, reformulations, analogies and metaphors; reader/listener engagement, simplification and explication strategies; multimodality).
The applied perspective will look at the implications of the theoretical and descriptive investigations of the project for the existing research on well-being and the recently-recognised centrality of well-being at personal and societal levels.

Methodology

To tackle socially relevant issues in historical texts, a combination of methods integrating the quantitative and qualitative dimensions, is the most suitable option. As a general approach, corpora of Late Modern texts related to the chosen research topics will be collected and then analysed by relying on the methodological tools provided by historical pragmatics (Brinton 2001, Culpeper 2009, Jucker & Taavitsainen 2010), historical sociolinguistics (HernándezCampoy & CondeSilvestre 2012), Critical Discourse Studies (Fairclough 2018, Flowerdew & Richardson 2018), Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia 2014), and the Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl 2018).
In addition, while the units are mostly made up of scholars specialising in English historical linguistics, the inclusion of experts in literary criticism, medical history, anthropology and communication studies will also offer perspectives on how documents place themselves within the broader cultural context of the times. This will also support the application of a multi-, inter and cross-disciplinary approach, which is key to researching multifaceted concepts/social phenomena such as well-being.
Quantitative aspects will be approached by following the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Baker et al. 2008), through the use of software for the analysis of corpora like WordSmith Tools (Scott 2020), SketchEngine (Kilgarriff & Rychly 2003), AntConc (Anthony 2019) and LancsBox (Brezina et al. 2020). The corpora will be gathered from large collections of digitized texts: e.g., Eighteenth Century Collection Online; 17th and 18th c. Burney Newspapers Collections; Wellcome Library Digital Collections; the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; etc. Other resources will be considered, depending on the specific focus of the different units and as they become available, given the increasing attention paid to these materials by libraries and archives, where digitisation projects are constantly growing.
The combined study of quantitative findings and qualitative observations will ensure that results are both reliable and suitably structured in a consistently homogeneous methodological framework, in which the 4 units will operate following shared tenets pertaining to both linguistic investigation and cultural history.
The methodological approach to the research will be developed in the following steps:

1. a linguistic analysis of the term ‘well-being’ and the selection of other relevant key terms to be used for a wide-ranging bibliographic search in the catalogues of international, national and university libraries as well as special collections of catalogues or meta-catalogues (e.g. Worldcat). ‘Well-being’ and the other key terms will be used to identify relevant texts belonging to a variety of different genres and text-types;
2. creation of a bibliographical database of the primary literature meeting the selection criteria, including the metadata necessary to structure the corpus (e.g., genre, date, authorship, original/translated text, etc), and creation of a bibliographical database of relevant secondary literature;
3. collection of the relevant primary and secondary literature to be shared among the different research units;
4. selection of a substantial number of primary texts that may be considered as representative of a given genre and/or well-being-related topic to be included in the online corpus;
5. the actual compilation of the corpus, by using already existing digital editions (in compliance with the current legislation on intellectual property) or by carrying out original digitisation;
6. analysis of the corpus by the members of the 4 units for individual and team research.

Throughout the project, preliminary findings will be presented at academic events, to foster discussion within the scientific community. Work-in-progress publications are also envisaged, while the outcome of the project will be discussed at a concluding event and in publications meant for either scholars or the general public, the latter to ensure impact beyond academia, not least among students.

Results

Expected results include:

• a clearer definition of the concept of well-being, in view of its historical roots;
• greater awareness that this concept is historically, culturally and socially determined; this is particularly relevant in the present-day context of migrations and contacts between peoples from different cultural and ideological backgrounds;
• greater awareness that historical linguistic research can provide a better understanding of present-day society, and hence of its foreseeable future;
• a more complete survey of genres that offer evidence on the concept and practices of well-being;
• (open access) scholarly publications;
• a website providing primary and secondary literature on well-being, and a bibliography of relevant materials fostering further research;
• an electronically-readable corpus of historical texts. The corpus will contain both (semi)specialized and non-specialised texts;
• sample teaching/learning materials for university students at BA and MA level on the diverse and interconnected dimensions of physical, mental, and social well-being as conveyed through discourse;
• teaching units on well-being across time to be made freely available to secondary school teachers practising CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) in English;
• a webinar or podcast making the main results of the project available to the community at large;
• public engagement activities, such as talks and outreach events, meant to draw attention on the historical roots of the culture of well-being in its socio-linguistic and pragmatic dimensions.

Credits: La Statale Immagini.