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Crossing Boundaries through Corpora: Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan, Theresa Neumaier, Andreas Weilinghoff and Lisa Westermayer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 119] 2024
► pp. 100–124

Chapter 5
120 years of reporting clauses

Stability or change?

| University of Oslo
Introducing the Corpus of British Fiction, this paper studies the development and functions of expansions in the form of manner adverbs and ‑ing clauses within reporting clauses. The investigation shows that the use of single adverbs to modify the reporting verb has not increased in line with the increased use of say as a reporting verb. The opposite is the case with ing-clause expansions, as the use of these is stable or on the rise in the 120 years covered by the corpus. The study contains a diachronic, mostly unsupervised quantitative part and a synchronic qualitative part, including manual scrutiny of the functions of the expansions under study.
Keywords: corpus stylistics, diachronic change, distant reading, fictional dialogue, reporting clause
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and previous research
    • 2.1The reporting verb
  • 3.Data, material, and method
    • 3.1Balance and representativeness
    • 3.2Annotation
  • 4.Classifying reporting clauses
  • 5.Quantitative findings
  • 6.Qualitative findings
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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