A proposed method of clarifying the meaning of contentious political-cultural words : The case of country and nation

This article discusses how linguistic-combinatory methods can be used to add precision to our understanding of contentious words from the political-cultural field. Eleven English authors’ use of the words country and nation has been investigated and the focus is placed on two authors who show an especially frequent use of nation relative to country, Shakespeare and Marie Corelli. It is shown that nation tends to select human negative-emotional lexical companions to a higher degree than country, and that this difference between the two words reflects their original etymological meanings. It is proposed that a more developed test design could be fruitfully used on a larger material.


Preamble
Some ten years ago, I was invited by Solveig Granath and some of her colleagues to be a contributor to a festschrift in honour of Solveig's predecessor, Moira Linnarud, who was then about to retire.My contribution sought to explore how words derived from the names Britain and England were used by a selection of authors, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf (Mobärg 2005).Now I have had yet another invitation from Karlstad, the city of my youth, this time to be part of a festschrift project in honour of Solveig herself.Having the opportunity to celebrate Solveig is something I cherish very much, not least because we were undergraduates together in the friendly study atmosphere of Karlstad in the early 1970s.1

The Present Study
This study will replicate some of the method of the previous one, but instead of focusing on specific nationality words, I shall try this time to shed some light on two more general words from the same semantic field, viz.country and nation, words which are sometimes used as synonyms or near-synonyms, sometimes with more specific and different meanings, as well as being highly contentious words in the current debate on globalisation and similar issues. 2Therefore, apart from the two words in themselves, I also would like to explore certain methods in trying to pinpoint differences between contentious, closely related political-cultural words, methods that might be useful in elucidating some of the ideas associated with them.

Country and Nation: Etymology 3
Both country and nation are Latin-based words which have entered into the English language via Norman French during medieval times, but whereas nation is a ubiquitous international loanword, country is far more restricted in its international dissemination and use.It originates from the Latin preposition contra ('opposite'), and its suffixed form contrata ('that which lies opposite'), and has cognate forms such as Old French cuntree, Old Occitan encontrada, Italian contrada.The typical early meaning appears to be 'the land, area or region that lies before us'.Interestingly, Middle High German has a corresponding word gegende (> Ger.Gegend 'area' etc.) from the preposition gegen ('against'), which is thought to be a calque of Old French cuntree or Medieval Latin contrata (cf.Duden.de:"Gegend").
The word nation has its origin in the Latin stem nat-(from nasci 'to be born') and the nominal suffix -io(n).Early French forms include nacion, nacioun, nation.The prototypical early meaning appears to be 'people united by language/culture/lineage' etc. 4

Country and Nation: Meanings
Both country and nation have multiple meanings, some of which are still current in present-day English, whereas some have become obsolete or relegated to certain varieties of the language.Here follow lists of some of the most central meanings according to OED:

Country
Land of one's birth, citizenship, residence; homeland (often preceded by a possessive pronoun: my, our, their, etc) 5 , e.g."Richard's first duty was to his country…" (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway) Land, terrain, region, e.g."…torrential rain fell, laying whole tracts of country under water."(Corelli, Innocent) Areas away from conurbations; rural areas (normally preceded by the), e.g."…to be at least equally safe in town as in the country."(Austen, Sense and Sensibility) The territory of a political state, e.g."By this time the king of the country had notice of their arrival…" (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe) Nation A people; a political state; people united by descent, language, culture, history, ethnicity, territoriality, etc., so as to form a distinct unit.Political statehood and territoriality do not always coincide with the meaning of nation.
It will be obvious that the original basic meanings of the two words, country and nation, where the former often refers to the physical territory -the land, to use a Germanic word (which might also have been investigated here), whereas the latter has more to do with the communality of people, are still intact in many 5 It is certainly true that country is often preceded by a possessive pronoun, but it may be more interesting to see to what extent the various possessive pronouns are used in this connection.Here are the number of occurrences in the British National Corpus (BNC; 100,000,000 words) of possessive pronoun + country in falling order: his country (586), their country (426), our country (363), my country (172), your country (133), her country (68).By comparison, nation occurs very rarely together with a possessive pronoun.My nation, for instance, does not occur at all in BNC.The only possessive pronoun to be used more often with nation than with country (corrected for country being six times as common as nation in BNC) is our, our nation having 91 occurrences.This suggests that nation, more than country, is a word that is typically used to emphasise the belongingtogetherness of the speaker/writer and their recipients.cases; but also that the two words have come to influence one another, or overlap, so that in present-day English, they may sometimes be used synonymously, as in the title and content of Michael Porter's seminal book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (Porter 1998), where the reference clearly is to 'political state'.6

Investigation
In this study, we shall, to begin with, see how often the words country and nation (including plural and genitive forms) are used in a selection of writings by eleven English authors who together cover most of the Early Modern and Modern English period up until the mid-twentieth century: William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Marie Corelli, Virginia Woolf.The selection of authors is the same as in Mobärg ( 2005) and has been retrieved from the same database: the "Hyper-Concordance" of The Victorian Literary Studies Archive of Nagoya University. 7It goes without saying that this "corpus" cannot pretend to be statistically representative of 350 years of English language development, and so the analysis, while offering some crude quantitative information, will necessarily be quantitatively indicative at most.

Country and Nation: General Frequencies
Before looking into the corpus statistics, it should be noticed that while both words clearly belong to the central vocabulary of English, country is a more common word than nation.In the British National Corpus (BNC), country (the lemma) has a frequency of 521/m, which means that it is on a par with words such as house, different, week, taking the 193 rd position in the frequency ranking of English.Nation, on the other hand, has a frequency of 85/m, similar to e.g.obvious and confirm, holding position 1,192 in the same ranking. 8Thus, other things being equal, we should on average expect country to appear about six times as often as nation in English text.Notwithstanding the fact that BNC is based on relatively modern text material, whereas the present material is historical, BNC frequencies will be used as points of reference.As expected, all the authors use country more frequently than nation, but there is a great deal of variation between them.Swift is something of an outlier in having a particularly high frequency for country, 1,659/m, which is more than three times higher than the BNC frequency for that word.In fact, he is the only author in this selection who has a higher frequency for country than BNC.Nation, too, is especially frequent in the Swift texts, although not quite as much as country.This state of affairs could be attributed to Gulliver's Travels, which makes up almost the entire Swift sample.That book famously describes journeys to "several remote nations", which will naturally invite the abundant use of both country and nation.We also note that Austen's use of nation is remarkably small; in fact, in all but three of her texts, she does not use the word at all, which is a nice reflection of the fact that in literary texts, subject matter obviously affects the choice of words, Austen's textual microcosm very rarely touching on issues of nation.10More interestingly, two authors, Shakespeare and Corelli, stand out from the rest in having a larger relative proportion of nation than expected.Shakespeare's use of nation in frequency terms is about a quarter of his use of country.But the clear top scorer in relative use of nation is Corelli, whose use of that word amounts to more than half of her use of country.The following discussion will therefore concentrate on these two authors.

Nation
Out of the total of 38 nation in the Shakespeare texts, more than half (20) come from four plays, Henry V (7), Henry VI part 1 (5), The Merchant of Venice (4), and Hamlet (4).Almost all of the instances in Henry V come from one and the same exchange, where the stage Irish speaking Captain MacMorris famously exclaims: What ish my nation?Ish a villain, and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal.What ish my nation?Who talks of my nation?(Act III Sc. 2) This oft-quoted passage seems to place the concept of nation in a surprisingly modern (or post-modern) relativistic position which implicitly problematises nationality and nationalism (cf.Holderness 1991:86f.).On the other hand, it is not clear to what extent Irishness in Shakespeare's days -and in this quotation -was mainly considered a political-territorial matter, or an ethnic-linguistic one, i.e. whether my nation is here referring to 'my country' or 'my people '. 11 Also in Henry V, the Arch Bishop of Canterbury advises the king, saying that if we cannot defend our homeland, "[l]et us be worried, and our nation lose the name of hardiness and policy" (Act I Sc. 2), an indication of existing national traits, which might suggest the existence of 16 th -century nationalism in England, something which has been proposed as well as contested by scholars for a long time (cf.Kumar 2003, ch.5).In Henry V, there is also a reference to the "law of nature and of nations" (Act II Sc. 4), an expression which is mirrored in Troilus and Cressida (Act II Sc. 2)."Law of nations" was an expression which began to be used in the 16 th century, forestalling the modern concept of international law (Hood  Phillips 2005 [1972]:129), where nation must be understood as synonymous with state.In Henry VI part 1, all instances of nation represent the country personified as an agent or a human aggregate of some kind: Nor should that nation boast it so with us (Act III, Sc.The special use of nation which OED defines as "people having a single ethnic, tribal, or religious affiliation, but without a separate or politically independent territory" (OED nation 1.c), is duly represented in The Merchant of Venice, where all four instances of the word have this meaning, in particular the first three: These quotations are all from lines spoken by Shylock, "a rich Jew" according to the play's Dramatis Personae, and indeed, OED has a special note mentioning that nation is "[f]req.used of the Jewish people in the Diaspora."Other examples of the same use of the word, although not from Shakespeare, are e.g."the Zulu Nation" (124,000 Google hits) and "the Navajo Nation" (453,000 Google hits).Compare also the quotation from Henry V above ("What ish my nation?"), which might carry some of that meaning. 12

Country
The word country is predominantly used by Shakespeare in two senses, both fully productive even today: (1) 'political state', 'homeland'; (2) 'countryside', 'rural area'.Here are two examples of either use: Good husband, let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o'er by a country fire -Sir John and all.(The Merry Wives of Windsor Act V Sc. 5) Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court.(As You Like It Act III Sc.

2)
Associated with the 'rural' category is also Hamlet's bawdy pun when teasing Ophelia while they are waiting for the play within the play to begin (Hamlet Act III Sc. 2).

Hamlet.
Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia.
No, my lord.

Hamlet.
I mean, my head upon your lap? Ophelia.
Ay, my lord.

Hamlet.
Do you think I meant country matters?Ophelia.
I think nothing, my lord.
Here the double entendre in country refers both to rough country behaviour and to the female pudenda, "the one unfailing lodestar" among female sexual features in Shakespeare according to Partridge (1968:21, cf. also ibid.p. 87).
There are also cases in the Shakespeare material where country takes on a personalised function in a way similar to nation, but in no way as often and in as obvious a fashion: … when it shall please my country to need my death (Julius Caesar Act III Sc. 2) Bleed, bleed, poor country!(Macbeth Act IV Sc. 3) … base lackey peasants, whom their o'er-cloyed country vomits forth … (Richard III Act V Sc. 3) A further meaning of country, 'land', 'terrain', 'region' (OED, cf.above), finds some limited representation in Shakespeare, e.g.
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns (Hamlet Act III Sc. 1)

Nation and Country in Corelli
Marie Corelli (pen name of Mary Mackay 1855-1924) is one of the now all but forgotten success stories of English literature.Her literary career coincided with the peak period of the British Empire, when she outsold most other novelists, only to be left in oblivion by posterity. 13

Investigating the Corelli Sample
The Corelli sample is one of the biggest in this investigation, numbering well over 1.7 million words.In addition, as noted, Corelli stands out as the clearly most lavish user of nation, relative to country, in the present material.It is therefore of particular interest to try and see what semantic (or stylistic; or rhetorical) needs are fulfilled by these two words, respectively, which might help to explain the author's choice.
One way of doing that is to apply a contextual-collocational approach to the two words, i.e. to know them by the company they keep, to paraphrase Firth. 14We have already seen that in terms of dictionary definitions, country and nation can sometimes be used as nearsynonyms, but often they have meanings which refer back to their etymological origins; country is a more concrete word, which can represent the land, the countryside, and the terrain, as well as the political state, whereas nation is typically associated with some kind of human communality.
The method I propose, and will be testing on the Corelli sample, is to investigate how country and nation (including inflected forms), behave in the following contextual-semantic roles/situations: (1) What country/nation 'is ', i.e., what adjectival modifiers, etc., the word is used together with, e.g.'a strong country'; 'the country is strong' etc.
Reporting results, I will call this category 'descriptive'.(2) What country/nation can 'do', i.e. what predicate verb the word is used together with when it is 'agentive', most typically as subject, e.g.'the nation accepts…' 13 For substantial information about the life and works of Marie Corelli, see e.g.Ransom  (1999). 14Referring to Firth does not imply that I am subscribing to his semantics, that the meaning of a word is determined by its "company", but rather that its company may add stylistic, rhetorical, ideological, etc., nuances to our understanding of the word, which may secondarily rub off onto the word itself.
(3) What you can 'do to' country/nation, i.e. what verb is used with country/nation when the latter is 'patientive', most typically as direct object, e.g.'to love one's country'. 15nceforth, I will use the expression 'companion' as a common term for whatever word co-functions with country/nation in these three ways, thus avoiding the term 'collocate', which may carry too many implications of prefabricated or fixed expressions to suit my purpose.The syntactic relationships that make up these co-functions may vary; a nominalisation like 'her love for her country' would here count for the same as 'she loves her country'.In the same vein, a genitive construction such as 'a country's honour' will here be equated with 'the country has/shows/displays honour'. 16The identified companions will then be classified according to whether they have a predominantly positive, negative or neutral meaning (e.g.'support' [pos.];'enslave' [neg.]'do sth to ' [neut.]).
In addition, it will also be investigated whether the companions of country/nation are prototypically 'human' (e.g.'astonished') or 'nonhuman' (e.g.'decaying').In a few cases it will not be possible to make that distinction and so a neutral category will be used wherever necessary (e.g.'known').
It goes without saying that there is an element of uncertainty and subjectivity in making these kinds of distinctions, but in view of the fact that this is merely an explorative investigation partly set up to test a way of approaching the meaning of contentious words, we need go no further into technical detail in the present context.

Overall Quantities
Table 2 shows those particular instances of country and nation which occur with descriptive, agentive and patientive companions according to the method presented above.Thus, we see that even though Corelli in her total sample uses country almost twice as often as nation (rightmost column), the present method elicits a much larger share of her nation than of her country: As much as two-thirds of her total nation surfaces in this investigation, compared to less than a fifth of her total country.There appears to be a particularly strong tendency in Corelli's texts for nation, relative to country, to 'do' things; a strong, but less so, tendency for nation to 'have something done to it', again relative to country; whereas the two words are equal in number of descriptive companionships (adjective modifiers etc.).21) 20 ( 16) 76 ( 67) 405 Nation 32 (30) 67 ( 64) 45 ( 41) 144 ( 135) 217

Country/Nation Overlapping
In only a few cases do country and nation share the same companions.
Here is the full list: Descriptive: strong, worthless Agentive: accept, fight, vote Patientive: destroy, love, put something to, rule (over) These overlapping words, interesting as they may be, will be disregarded in the following discussion as our main interest is to trace combinatory differences, rather than similarities, between country and nation.Thus, it is the numbers in brackets in Table 2, i.e. companions unique to either country or nation, that form the basis of the following discussion.It would take up too much space to list all words relevant to the following sections.Instead I will concentrate on the main tendencies, while offering a few illuminating examples.

Descriptive: Companions Unique to Country
There are 30 instances in all in the Corelli sample of the "descriptive" type country used uniquely (multiple instances only counted once here and throughout).The largest homogeneous group (≈ 40%) concerns country as 'land', 'terrain', where among the companions used we find far-off, green, tropical and undiscovered.
About a third of the descriptive companions are positive, e.g.civilized, healthy, prosperous.Less than a handful are negative: cheerless, inglorious, [subject to] curse making up the full list.There are also a few companions that defy the positive/negative classification, e.g.old.
As could be expected, "non-human" companions tend to coincide with country as 'land', 'terrain', even if some such companions could have a secondary meaning that is potentially human, e.g.fair, sweet.There are altogether nine companions that have been marked as "human", most of which are positive (e.g. at peace, healthy); only a couple are negative (e.g.cheerless) or unclassifiable.

Descriptive: Companions Unique to Nation
By coincidence, Corelli's unique use of nation with "descriptive" companions amounts to the same number of instances as for country: 30.With nation we do not need to consider a physical sense of the word ('land', 'terrain'), since such a meaning has never been available for that word.On the other hand, there are a couple of examples of a very special type of companion to go with nation: nationality adjectives (American, French).Such words would not easily collocate with country, other than in phrases including the "rural" sense of the word (French country cooking).In other words, a country as a whole does not have a nationality, but a nation does -a good reflection of a case where the original distinction between place and people is maintained.
The clearest tendency to come out here is that the majority of the unique descriptive companions of nation are human (e.g.astonished, dying, hypocritical, even unmusical), whereas only a couple of them are non-human (e.g.decaying).About a third of the companions cannot be classified according to human/non-human (e.g.known).
Unlike the situation for country above, where positive companions were more numerous than negative ones, it is somewhat more common (≈ 40%) for nation to take negative descriptive companions (e.g.degenerate, as frightened children), but there are also several cases (≈ 30%) with positive companions (friendly, happy).
Comparing Corelli's country and nation, therefore, appears to suggest that nation, more than country, invites negative descriptive companions, whereas the two words appear to be more similar in attracting positive companions.

Agentive: Companions Unique to Country
Out of the 21 combinations where country is uniquely used agentively (typically as subject), two-thirds take human companions (e.g.claim, go mad over something, breathe freely) and one-third non-human ones (e.g.remain).Over half take positive companions (e.g.get on without, have honour, wish) and only very few take negative ones (e.g.abuse).Just under a third cannot be judged by positive-negative (e.g.find).

Agentive: Companions Unique to Nation
As already noted, agentive nation in Corelli is three times as common as agentive country.This circumstance in itself is probably the most important finding: nation appears to be a clearly more natural choice than country when it comes to "doing" things.Furthermore, unique companions to agentive nation are overwhelmingly human (≈85%; e.g.love, praise, shudder).On the other hand, even though there is a certain majority (≈ 40%) for positive companions with agentive nation (e.g.bless, have/show heart and soul, revere) compared to negative companions (≈ 30%; e.g.decay, hate) the majority is clearly less marked than was the case for country.

Patientive: Companions Unique to Country
There are 16 unique cases in Corelli where country is patientive.All but one have human companions (e.g.be true to, love, save).Positive companions (like the ones just mentioned) are somewhat more common (≈ 50%) than negative ones (≈ 35%; e.g.betray, enslave).

Patientive: Companions Unique to Nation
Overall figures (Table 2) show that not only does nation seem to be a more attractive choice than country for "doing things", but also for "having things done to it", even though the difference is less extreme in the patientive context.On the other hand, unlike the situation for country, there is a clear dominance of negative companions with patientive nation (≈ 50%; e.g.cripple, exterminate, put in peril), the remaining cases being shared equally between positive companions (≈ 25%; e.g.bless, rely on) and such as could not be classified for positive/negative (≈ 25%; e.g.manage, return to).Human companions outnumber non-human ones by nine to one.

Final Remarks
A breakdown of these findings would suggest the following: (1) When country is used with a descriptive companion, it is predominantly the "rural" meaning of the word that we find, as in the example, "… who has never visited wide-spreading country, over-canopied by large stretches of spreading open sky", where furthermore the companion is practically always, and expectedly so, non-human; (2) A descriptive companion together with nation is most likely human, and there is a tendency for it to be negative, a typical example being, "… England is running a neck and neck race with other less hypocritical nations in pursuit of social vice"; (3) When used agentively (typically as subject), the main tendency for both country and nation seems to be to combine with human and positive companions, but that human companions are far more common with nation, e.g."A veritable queen, to whom nations shall pay homage"; (4) When used patientively (typically as direct object), there is a strong tendency for both country and nation to combine with human companions, but the most conspicuous finding is the strong dominance of negative companions with nation, e.g."No need to exterminate nations with your destructive stuff".
This in turn suggests that nation, more than country, does maintain more of a human-related quality of meaning, but also that it might have a greater emotional potential than country in inviting negative companions.
In any case, the method employed would seem to constitute a feasible way of investigating the relative meaning of contentious political-cultural words with related meanings, to the benefit of enhanced semantic 3) a lordly nation (Act III Sc. 3) a fickle wavering nation [about France] (Act IV Sc. 1) Our nation's terror (Act IV Sc. 2) Betwixt our nation and the aspiring French (Act V Sc. 5) This is in fact the case for about a third of Shakespeare's uses of nation.Here are examples from other plays: an impudent nation (All's Well that Ends Well) The courtesy of nations (As You Like It) such a gentle nation (The Comedy of Errors) and the nation holds it to no sin to tarre them to controversy (Hamlet) This heavy-headed revel […] Makes us traduc'd and tax'd of other nations (Hamlet) permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me (King Lear) O nation miserable!(Macbeth) O nation, that thou couldst remove!(King John) our tardy apish nation (Richard II) But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they [N.B plural pronoun] have a good thing, to make it too common.(Henry IV part 2 Act 1 Sc.2) He hates our sacred nation (Act I Sc. 3) He [---] scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains (Act III Sc. 1) the curse never fell upon our nation till now (Act III Sc. 1)

Table 1 .
Sample sizes, frequency of country and nation and nation/country quotient per author in the material

Table 2 .
Number of occurrences of country and nation per category of companionship in the Corelli sample.Number of occurrences unique to either country or nation in brackets.For comparison, the total number (tokens) of country and nation in the Corelli sample is given far right.