Overlexicalization and semantic variation in the Early Modern English naming of Native Americans

This article takes as its focus the overlexicalization and semantic variation of reference terms for Native Americans in the period of the English exploration, settlement and colonization of Virginia (1584-1724). The corpus-assisted discourse analysis of pamphlets, first-hand accounts and letters taken from the Virtual Jamestown Digital Archive reveals that the lexical items used for naming the Natives undergo a process of amelioration and pejoration throughout the decades in relation to the changing historical and socio-cultural context in which they are used. An investigation of the definition and quotations of the same lexical items in the online version of the OED shows that although the dictionary attests the overlexicalization which occurs for the Native Americans and reflects the most frequent lexico-syntactic patterns in which the words occur in the corpus, the choice of the quotations fails to account for instances of semantic variation and for the resulting ambivalent connotations of the terms.