A collocational approach to semantic change: the case of worship and honour in Malory and Spenser

The word worship, which in Late Middle English named an obligation-related social value, had by early modem times been largely replaced with honour. This article uses collocational data from two literary texts - Malory's Works and Spenser's The Faerie Queene - to propose an explanation for this change. Patterns of lexical connection for worship and honour support their respective assignment to two different social paradigms, status and contract. The different semantic categories which are present in the collocational data suggest that the change from worship to honour may be part of a larger rearrangement of the vocabulary of obligation in the period, caused by the contemporary shift of dominant social paradigm from status to contract. A sociohistorical analogue to the linguistic case is also presented.