Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2018

This corpus study compares lexical bundles found in the language input of a selection of historical and current English language teaching materials to see what insights they can give into changes in spoken language use. English teaching texts published between 1905 and 1917 were used to construct a historical corpus, and a collection of English language self-study texts published between 2004 and 2014 were used for comparison. Both groups of texts focused on spoken language. The most frequent three-word lexical bundles extracted from each corpus varied considerably. The contemporary texts showed both a greater use of formulaic language and more syntactic complexity within it, while the historical texts relied on simpler structures. An exploratory analysis of the lexical bundles in the historical texts suggests, however, that viewed in conjunction with other historical sources, they can assist in building a picture of spoken language use of the period.

The English and Swedish Drama Dialogue (ESDD) corpus is a sociopragmatically tagged corpus of English and Swedish drama texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using this corpus, I investigated the use of the address terms Fool, Dear, Sir and Brother. The study focused on the contexts where these terms were found and traced diachronic usage patterns. The main questions asked in the investigation concerned, first, the speaker’s attitude towards the addressees when using the address phrases and whether attitudes connected with particular phrases changed over time; second, whether the phrases could be said to signal intimacy or distance between the interlocutors.

This paper draws upon three texts from the trial section of the Corpus of English Dialogues, in order to explore the tactical impression management strategies used by Early Modern English courtroom participants (defendants, judges, lawyers and witnesses). I will demonstrate that modern impression management strategies (identified with other activity types in mind) are in evidence in the texts, as are additional courtroom-specific strategies. I discuss the nuances of these impression management tactics, in light of (a) the obvious power differences between the participants involved, (b) the need to be perceived as credible in this legal setting, and (c) their convergence with particular types of face(work).

The investigation of the pragmatic marker now in trial proceedings from 1560 to 1800 shows a genre-specific usage profile with regard to its uses and functions. Courtroom “professionals” (lawyers, judges and other officials) use now significantly more frequently than lay speakers (witnesses, victims and defendants). The former use it to segment and highlight stages in the argumentation, as well as to control and to disalign with others’ interactive behaviour. Self-defending litigants share these functional preferences to some extent, while all other lay persons use now for structuring their answers and dominantly in direct-speech contexts. Now in professional legal speech thus functions as a strategic metapragmatic framing strategy.

This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English, more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. I examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates and their occurrence after positive and negative questions. The results challenge a number of issues and claims in the literature, including when the “Germanic pattern” (involving yes and yea after positive or negative questions) dissolved, whether yea or ay were dialectal, and the timing of the rise of ay and the fall of yea.

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.

In this paper, the use of two roughly synonymous temporal adverbial links, ere and before, will be discussed. The survey will cover the history of English, from Old to Present-day English. It is based on historical corpora, particularly on the Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760). Ere (Old English ær) was originally temporal, while before (Old English beforan) goes back to the spatial form. In Old English and Early Middle English ere is clearly more common than before; from Late Middle English on, before becomes the more favoured link. The Corpus of English Dialogues and later corpora indicate that the use of ere is remarkably restricted to informal and speech-related discourse.