CULTURE as a "Liquid" Modern Word. Evidence from Synchronic and Diachronic Language Resources

The aim of this paper is to discuss the results of a corpus-based investigation of the process that has transformed the very specific material meaning of the word “culture” into the ex-tremely elusive, liquid (Bauman 2011) concept we are familiar with today. The analysis starts from the lexico-grammar profile of the world “culture” in contemporary syncronic corpus re-sources (Gatto 2011; 2014) and attempts further exploration of these findings on the basis of dia-chronic language resources. In particular, data from Google Books, accessed both via Ngram Viewer and through the tools available at BYU Corpora, have been used to test hypotheses for the behaviour of the world “culture” in the 19th and early 20th century, whereas data from EE-BO (Early English Books Online) have been used to explore patterns of usage in the period of time from 15th to 18th century. The partial results of this research suggest that there is room for far reaching investigations into the (hi)story of this intriguing “complicated" word, as Williams (1985: 87) dubbed it, and that computational methods and language resources can well complement studies carried out in the context of the digital humanities, from the per-spective of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and cultural studies, when not providing the basis for fresh new insights and further explora-tions.