Article published In:
Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. JuckerEdited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 225–244
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 225–244
The sociopragmatic nature of interjections in Early Modern English drama comedy
From ah to tut
Interjections have been studied for all periods in the history of English, ranging from the study of Old English exclamations such as hwaet (Brinton 2017) to the pragmatic functions of forms such as oops in Present Day English (Lutzky and Kehoe 2017). The Early Modern English (EModE) period represents a turning point as it witnessed an increase in dialogic and speech-related text types, including drama comedy and trial proceedings. Nevertheless, despite recent advances in the compilation and especially the sociopragmatic annotation of corpora, EModE pragmatic markers have not been studied extensively over the last decade. This article addresses this gap by offering an investigation into the sociopragmatic nature of interjections in EModE drama comedy. It is based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus which includes a total of 242,561 words from the period 1500 to 1760. Taking a data-driven, form-to-function mapping approach, this study explores the use of interjections in the Drama Corpus with a focus on their distribution according to sociopragmatic variables. The aim of this study is to contribute to reaching a more comprehensive understanding of pragmatic marker use in EModE.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, drama comedy, Early Modern English, interjections, pragmatic markers, sociopragmatics
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Pragmatic markers
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Analysis and discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
Corpora -
References
References
Corpora
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (ced)
2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (ppceme)
Sociopragmatic Corpus (spc)
2007 Annotated under the supervision of Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University). A derivative of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
References
Aijmer, Karin
2004 “Interjections in a Contrastive Perspective”. In Edda Weigand (ed.), Emotion in Dialogic Interaction: Advances in the Complex, 99–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
2015 “Pragmatic Markers”. In Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann (eds), Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, 195–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ameka, Felix
1992 “Interjections: The Universal Yet Neglected Part of Speech”. Journal of Pragmatics 18 (2): 101–118.
Amsler, Mark
2021 The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Archer, Dawn and Jonathan Culpeper
2003 “Sociopragmatic Annotation: New Directions and Possibilities in Historical Corpus Linguistics”. In Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery (eds), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, 37–58. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Archer, Dawn
2005 Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen
1998 Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Blake, Norman F.
2002 A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Brinton, Laurel J.
1996 Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
2017 The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English: Pathways of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö
2010 Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Samuel J. Oliver
2020 “Pragmatic Noise in Shakespeare’s Plays”. In Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson (eds), Voices Past and Present – Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts, 11–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hiltunen, Risto
2006 “
Eala, geferan and gode wyrhtan: On Interjections in Old English”. In John Walmsley (ed.), Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, 91–116. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Jucker, Andreas H.
2002 “Discourse Markers in Early Modern English”. In Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds), Alternative Histories of English, 210–230. London: Routledge.
2008 “Historical Pragmatics”. Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (5): 894–906.
2013 “Corpus Pragmatics”. In Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics, 1–17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv
1998 “Discourse Markers: Introduction”. In Andreas H. Jucker and Yael Ziv (eds), Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory, 1–12. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen
2013 English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
van Kemenade, Ans and Meta Links
2020 “Discourse Particles in Early English: Clause Structure, Pragmatics and Discourse Management”. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5 (1): 31, 1–23.
Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara
2006 “Impoliteness in Early Modern English Courtroom Discourse”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7 (2): 213–243.
Lenker, Ursula
2000 “
Soþlice and witodlice. Discourse Markers in Old English”. In Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (eds), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 229–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lutzky, Ursula
2013 “Early Modern English Discourse Markers – A Feature of Female Speech?” In Gabriella Mazzon and Luisanna Fodde (eds), Historical Perspectives on Forms of English Dialogue, 80–98. Naples: Franco Angeli Editore.
Lutzky, Ursula and Jane Demmen
Lutzky, Ursula and Andrew Kehoe
2017 “ ‘Oops, I Didn’t Mean to Be So Flippant’: A Corpus Pragmatic Analysis of Apologies in Blog Data”. Journal of Pragmatics 1161: 27–36.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart English. London: Longman.
Norrick, Neal R.
2009 “Interjections as Pragmatic Markers”. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (5): 866–891.
OED = The Oxford English Dictionary
Online Edition.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online at: [URL]
Person, Raymond F.
2009 “ ‘Oh’ in Shakespeare: A Conversation Analytic Approach”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10 (1): 84–107.
Sauer, Hans
2008 “Interjection, Emotion, Grammar, and Literature”. In Masachiyo Amano, Michiko Ogura and Masayuki Ohkado (eds), Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts, 387–403. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Schiffrin, Deborah
1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taavitsainen, Irma
1995 “Interjections in Early Modern English: From Imitation of Spoken to Conventions of Written Language”. In Andreas Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 439–465. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Traugott, Elisabeth C.
2015 “ ‘Ah, Pox o’ your Pad-lock’: Interjections in the Old Bailey Corpus 1720–1913”. Journal of Pragmatics 861: 68–73.