Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2017

This paper explores the representation of speech in Early Modern English witness depositions. We demonstrate that Semino and Short’s (2004) framework of description, which has for the most part been used in explorations of present-day texts, is generally applicable to our historical data. Our study shows that factors such as the importance of the evidence cited and the clarity of the deposition narrative were crucial considerations in representing speech in different contexts.

This paper investigates the formal and functional dimensions of reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence. It focuses on how letter-writers report the utterances – spoken, thought and written – of high-status sources (namely, the king or queen), in order to assess how the early modern reporting system compares with the present-day equivalent. The early modern values of authenticity, verbatim reporting and verbal authority are examined. The results taken from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) suggest that early modern writers prefer to present royal language using indirect reports with semi-conventionalised linguistic features that clearly mark the authority of the source. Only an elite few, associated with the Court, use direct speech. The paper suggests that reporting practices distinguish between speech and writing, with the latter showing nascent signs of anxiety over verbatim reporting. I argue that these trends arise from the larger cultural shift from oral to written records taking place throughout the early modern period.

The most frequent strategy of direct reported speech in Old Irish (OIr) is characterized by the use of a constituent which is known in this paper as Reported Speaker, which consists of the element ol introducing the noun or the tonic pronoun referring to the person whose words are quoted. This paper offers a formal and pragmatic description of the Old Irish Reported Speaker, paying special attention to its basically nominal character and to its frequent coreferential association with first-person referents in the quote. The OIr quotative marker ol is diachronically explained as a further use of the OIr multifunctional element ol, which is essentially a preposition (‘beyond’) secondarily used as the marker of the NP standard of comparison and as a clausal connective.

Over the past two centuries, the use of the adjective grand underwent a specific semantic expansion in Irish English. Apart from the meaning of ‘displaying grandeur’, the adjective came to mean ‘fine’, ‘alright’ and ‘in good form’, both as an expression of the speaker’s situation and as a reference to that of the addressee. This development can be shown to represent a case of subjectification, as described seminally by Elizabeth Traugott in various publications (e.g., Traugott 1995 ), with the element of intersubjectification arising somewhat later ( Traugott 2003 ). Through the examination of various texts, this paper examines the diachronic development of grand in its various uses and the rise of the Irish English extension with a consideration of possible precursors and parallels in other varieties. The subjective and intersubjective uses of grand are labelled “approving grand” and “reassuring grand” respectively and are shown to be in keeping with other features of Irish discourse structure and pragmatics.

Recent analyses of written text types have discovered significant frequency increases of colloquial or conversational elements, such as contractions, personal pronouns, questions or the progressive. This trend is often referred to as colloquialization. This paper presents a new perspective on colloquialization, with a special focus on the discourse marker well. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, we present new evidence of colloquialization on the basis of the TIME Magazine Corpus ( Davies 2007 ), which allows analyses of diachronic change in recent written American English. The focus of our analysis is on highly frequent “inserts” (Biber et al. 1999: 56), which are elements such as discourse markers (e.g., well and oh), backchannels (yeah, uh-huh, etc.), and hesitators (uh and um, etc.). We conclude that inserts significantly increase diachronically in TIME. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the element well in its function as a discourse marker. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical steps, we analyze its diachronic development in terms of its structural contexts and its pragmatic functions, fleshing out how the process of colloquialization has affected its usage in recent written American English. We argue that the integration of corpus linguistic and pragmatic methods in this case study represents a new step towards the field of corpus pragmatics, that is, “the rapprochement between corpus linguistics and pragmatics and an integration of their key methodologies” ( Rühlemann and Aijmer 2014 : 23).