The chapters in this volume study the construction, representation and negotiation of a variety of social roles through self- and other-reference markers or the discussion of reference as a tool for identification. The chapters uncover new insights both from a historical and present-day perspective… read more
Edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin and Tanja Säily
Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus… read more
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
The history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like… read more
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations, hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources, and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch, Finnish and… read more
Edited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin
This volume presents a ground-breaking overview of the interconnections between socio-cultural reality and language practices, by looking at the different ways in which social roles are performed, maintained, adopted and assigned through linguistic means. The introductory chapter discusses and… read more
Edited by Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin
The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study… read more
This introductory chapter sets the scene for the contributions to this volume which are all focused on the analysis of self- and other-reference in social contexts. In this chapter, we provide an overview of previous approaches to reference and context, offering a foundation on which the… read more
This chapter explores how societal democratisation can be studied by using linguistic big data. More specifically, we are interested in establishing whether it is possible to see how the gradual democratisation of society affected the employment relationship in nineteenth-century Britain by… read more
This chapter discusses the long diachrony of English news discourse from seventeenth-century newsbooks to the twentieth century and the dawn of multimedia. We shall place news discourse in its context of sociocultural developments considering what might be diachronically constant and what prone to… read more
In this chapter we discuss the current achievements of historical sociolinguistics and highlight new insights provided by the contributions in the volume. Taking the essay by Nevalainen (2015) as a starting point, we will consider the themes of crossing boundaries and bridging gaps between… read more
The inclusion of advertisers, audiences and other persons, i.e. person-mention,
in late 18th- and early 19th-century English advertisements is a salient feature
of advertising style. As person-mention decreases during the century, this study
explores how the change progresses from 1785 to 1880 in… read more
This study focuses on reporting in the letters of eighteenth-century writer Frances (Fanny) Burney. Our purpose is to study the occurrence of reporting from a socio-pragmatic perspective, with the aim of understanding the function of reporting in all its communicative situations as well as in… read more
Choosing who and what to report, writers adopt a position in interaction that serves their needs and expectations of the situation as well as the addressee’s expected needs. In this paper, we study reporting from a socio-pragmatic perspective with the aim of understanding the function of reporting… read more
The pronoun I indexes the speaker or writer in place and time but also situates him or her in the moral order as the person responsible for what is uttered (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990). Consequently, this paper asks (1) what gentlemen of the Early and Late Modern England could say about themselves… read more
This paper explores patterns of interaction in late sixteenth-century personal letters. Self-mention (I) and addressee inclusion (you vs nominal title) are studied quantitatively and qualitatively in the letters of Norfolk gentleman Nathaniel Bacon and his correspondents to see how social… read more
