This volume extends research on ideology in the news into the historical sphere, spanning discourse from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The chapters investigate the ideological representation and assessment of political events across three continents, such as uprisings,… read more
This volume explores changing norms and conventions in the English language, as displayed in a broad range of historical data from more than five centuries. The contributions discuss the interplay of sociocultural conditions, specific discourse traditions and structural aspects of language, paying… read more
Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English, this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal, verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss, rise and restructuring of morphonological… read more
The treatment of Ireland in the London press from 1640 to 1800 is investigated with the help of the ZEN and Lampeter corpora, following up on De Nie’s (2004) hypothesis that views of the Irish could have functioned as a foil for creating a British identity. Mentions of the Irish and Irish… read more
A distinction is here introduced into restrictive, hedgy understatementR and emphatic understatementE, which are traced in historical data via the metalinguistic and the form-to-function approach. The metalinguistic approach found the modern sense of understatementE with examples from mostly… read more
This study investigates selected epistemic adverbs in the courtroom discourse of the Old Bailey Corpus. Over time, more epistemic types are used in court and the frequencies of individual items are on the rise, with probably standing out as the most frequent item. All items are overwhelmingly… read more
An aspect distinguishing historical from other narration is the historiographers’ engagement with sources and other scholars, which shows as intertextuality in the text. A prominent intertextual device is the (foot)note, which originates around 1700 (Grafton 1997: 191) and whose… read more
This chapter investigates how drunkenness is presented during criminal proceedings in courtroom speech by focusing on words meaning ‘drunk’. A wide range of drunken terms are used by all courtroom participants, which differ in force, euphemistic potential and style, and are thus employed to… read more
All variants of the form a x deal of are investigated across nineteenth-century English in south-eastern England and in Australia. Determiner uses dominate followed by adverbial uses with verbs and pronominal uses coming last. The great majority of items found include an adjective, almost… read more
The investigation of the pragmatic marker now in trial proceedings from 1560 to 1800 shows a genre-specific usage profile with regard to its uses and functions. Courtroom “professionals” (lawyers, judges and other officials) use now significantly more frequently than lay speakers (witnesses,… read more
Radical papers like The Poor Man’s Guardian had an important role in bringing about class consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain. The newspaper linguistically constructs three groups involved in the class struggle in an extended us vs. them deictic constellation, namely the rich and powerful… read more
This paper deals with the question how early newspapers deal with the encoding
of place and time information. The influence of genres relevant to early news,
i.e. letters and chronicles, is taken into account as well as later developments
within news writing. Deictic items frequent in early news… read more
This article investigates the degree modifiers pretty and a bit in the subsection 1730s–1830s of the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC), containing speech-based/related data (ca. 50 million words). Pretty is shown to be already grammaticalized, with the degree modifier uses clearly dominating.… read more
The article traces the development of three pragmatic markers with a hedging function, as it were, so to speak and if you like, back to their origins in the fourteenth century, the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, respectively. They all probably started out as full clauses,… read more
The multi-word items how come and what…for can both mean ‘why’ in modern English. Semantically they derive via the conceptual links ‘causes are temporally prior’, ‘causation is forced movement’, and ‘causes are purposes.’ What…for has the longer history of the two forms, going back to at least… read more
The concept of ‘non-standard’ remains somewhat fuzzy during the Early Modern English period. Language change and especially ongoing standardization can make it difficult to pin down an individual feature at any given time as clearly non-standard. Contemporary views of ‘good’ language, which we also… read more
The paper explores the functions and distribution of questions in the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, a 1.1 million-word corpus of pamphlets written between 1640 and 1740. Pamphlets are a highly interactive medium with a mostly persuasive function. Thus it is not surprising that… read more
