Anchored in historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, this book weaves together a powerful narrative of the significance of stance marking in the history of English. Focusing on the community of practice that developed during the witch trials in Salem… read more
Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England examines various aspects of the witness depositions comprising An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) on the accompanying CD-ROM.ETED combines modern corpus linguistic methodology and editorial theory, and makes available… read more
[Not in series, 162] 2011. xxi, 360 pp. (Incl. CD-Rom)
This article explores the form, frequency, and function of “speech descriptors” (such as softly in “It matters little,” she said, softly; CLMET3.0, A Christmas Carol, Period 2: 1839) in Late Modern English. Drawing on the narrative fiction category in the CLMET3.0 corpus, I show the rise of… read more
This chapter investigates the form, frequency, and function of speech reporting expressions in Early Modern English, such as quod she in “I perceiue now [$ (quod she) $] how mishap doth follow me” (CED, D1FGASCO, 1573). We focus on the use in the prose fiction texts in Periods 1 and 3 in A Corpus… read more
This article is concerned with “speech descriptors”, markers that describe or evaluate the nature of represented speech, such as very modestly in “The Gentlewoman very modestly bade him welcome” (CED, D2FKIT). The form, frequency and function of such features are charted in Early Modern English… read more
This paper explores the representation of speech in Early Modern English witness depositions. We demonstrate that Semino and Short’s (2004) framework of description, which has for the most part been used in explorations of present-day texts, is generally applicable to our historical data. Our… read more
This article explores the use of evidentials, or markers of source of information in witness depositions from England in the period 1680–1710. By comparing the results with those from a previous study on the Salem witch trials (Grund 2012), I point to significant similarities in the linguistic… read more
