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Julie Coleman, Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). xvii + 599 pp. ISBN 090-420-0433-9. $74.50.
Julie Coleman's inventory of the lexical domains of love, sex, and marriage from Old English to the present day presents a detailed picture of the varying assumptions, practices, and preoccupations which have figured, both diachronically and synchronically, within these related spheres of linguistic usage. Taking her data from the OED, the Thesaurus of Old English, as well as the ongoing Dictionary of Old English, and the Historical Thesaurus project based at Glasgow, together with a wide range of other sources (including an abundant array of register-specific dictionaries), Coleman has assembled almost 400 pages of text which anatomize the sense-relationships of the English lexicon...