Evolution in the Use of Evolution? An Overview of the Term in the Corpus of Historical American English

While synchronous analyses of the interaction between language and society abound, e.g., in discourse studies, diachronic corpus-based studies are rare. This paper attempts to fill that gap with an investigation into the frequency and collocational preferences of evolution in COHA: The Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010). This lexeme was chosen for two reasons. First, the acceptance and teaching of biological evolution, especially in public schools, have been points of contention in American culture for 100, if not 150, years, comprising one of America’s “culture wars.” Hence, the topic is of contemporary as well as historical discourse interest. Second, a pattern between the frequency of evolution and the popularity of the theory in American history was noted by Barczewska (2017). This suggests a link between the use of the lexeme and the theory’s reception. The current analysis investigates the frequency of evolution in COHA as a whole and according to genre. Collocational preferences within the corpus reveal changes in the way evolution is used over time. The paper also highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using COHA for similar research projects and suggests that the process applied here could be used to study the verbalization of other culture-shaping phenomena.