“Heav’n bess you, my Dear”
Using the ESDD corpus to investigate address terms in historical drama dialogue
The English and Swedish Drama Dialogue (ESDD) corpus is a sociopragmatically tagged corpus of
English and Swedish drama texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using this corpus, I investigated the use
of the address terms Fool, Dear, Sir and Brother. The study focused on the contexts where these
terms were found and traced diachronic usage patterns. The main questions asked in the investigation concerned, first, the
speaker’s attitude towards the addressees when using the address phrases and whether attitudes connected with particular phrases
changed over time; second, whether the phrases could be said to signal intimacy or distance between the interlocutors.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Drama dialogue
- 1.2Address terms
- 1.3Aim and scope
- 2.The ESDD corpus
- 2.1Sociopragmatic tagging
- 2.2Corpus makeup
- 3.Method
- 4.Results
- 4.1
Sir
- 4.2
Dear
- 4.3
Brother / Bror
- 4.4
Fool
- 5.Conclusion
-
Corpora
-
References
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LingVaria 18:2(36)
► pp. 323 ff.
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
2024.
‘My dearest Clara … my dear friend’ – Personal Names and direct address in Mary Hamilton’s private correspondence.
Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 10:1
► pp. 31 ff.
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