“What Lamb: What Lady-bird… Where’s this Girle?” On Shakespearean Terms of Endearment
“What Lamb: What Lady-bird… Where’s this Girle?” On Shakespearean Terms of Endearment

Summary/Abstract: The language of intimacy and – in particular – terms of affection, which constitutes its major element, are a significant part of our everyday language. The first such terms came forth as early as Anglo-Saxon times and this conceptual category is still being constantly enlarged with new lexical items. The key objective of our paper is to examine a mere fraction of this extensive conceptual category, by confining our analysis to those terms that were employed at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. To be more precise, we shall focus on nine terms of endearment which were used by Shakespeare in his works. By means of the cognitive apparatus, we will trace the semantic development of these words and, finally, we will search for their traces in modern dictionaries of English.

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