The Linguistic History of (In)Fertility. A Diachronic and Cross-Genre Corpus Study

Fertility and infertility constitute a lexical and conceptual domain that remains largely underinvestigated in corpus linguistics and computational language studies. No systematic analysis has yet examined diachronic variation in fertility-related vocabulary or interpreted language across different domain. This paper addresses that gap by introducing FerTime, a novel diachronic corpus spanning fertility-related documents from 1770 to the present, drawn from both non-clinical sources (historical and contemporary newspapers) and clinical sources (biomedical literature and medical reports). The cross-domain design enables systematic comparison of how fertility language is constructed across registers and over time. We analyze six target terms, barren, sterile, infertile, childless, fertility, and fecundity, along five dimensions - semantic shift, collocational profile, sentiment polarity and gender co-occurrence. Results show that the medicalization of fertility vocabulary is a historically recent process, that the feminization of this lexical field is a modern phenomenon largely absent from historical usage, and that clinical and non-clinical registers diverge systematically in their affective framing of infertility. FerTime is released as an open resource to support future research on fertility language, diachronic lexical change, and the development of best practices for computational stigma detection.

Sep 14, 2026 12:00 AM