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Article published In:
Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. Jucker
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

| Vienna University of Economics and Business
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
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00054.lut
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A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (ced). 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).Google Scholar
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (ppceme). 2004. Compiled by Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini and Lauren Delfs. See: [URL].
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).Google Scholar
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