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Article published In:
Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 265–285

Beyond speech representation

Describing and evaluating speech in Early Modern English prose fiction

| University of Kansas

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 prose fiction, drawn from A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, and the results are compared to those of Grund (2017a), which considers speech descriptors in contemporaneous witness depositions. The comparison reveals generic differences and points to the importance of studying speech descriptors for our understanding of the dynamics of speech representation in the history of English.

Keywords: A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED), Early Modern English, prose fiction, speech descriptors, speech representation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall distribution: Linguistic realizations and semantic-functional types
    • 4.2Evaluation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00022.gru
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Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Grund, Peter J.
2020. What it means to describe speech. In Late Modern English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 214], ► pp. 296 ff. DOI logo
GRUND, PETER J.
2023. Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in theOld Bailey Corpus. English Language and Linguistics 27:3 ► pp. 517 ff. DOI logo
Walker, Terry & Peter J. Grund
2020. Chapter 5. Saying, crying, replying, and continuing. In Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 97], ► pp. 64 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. The Sociopragmatics of Stance [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 329], DOI logo

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