“Herbs and Other Ingredients.” Specific and General Extenders in the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE18)

Abstract

Extenders frequently appear at the end of enumerations, often taking forms such as or things like that or and so on, and their primary function is to broaden the semantic range of a list of elements. This study aims to examine the distribution and usage patterns of extenders by female authors in the eighteenth century in a corpus of recipes called Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE18) comprising a total of 541,973 words. From a methodological perspective, the compilation of a list of likely general and specific extenders will represent a preliminary step. The subsequent analysis will be conducted using a computerised corpus-based approach, with the aim of identifying which forms are most frequently
employed in instructional discourse produced by women in that century.