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Article published In:
Dialogues in Diachrony: Celebrating Historical Corpora of Speech-related Texts
Edited by Merja Kytö and Terry Walker
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:2] 2018
► pp. 186–204

“Heav’n bess you, my Dear”

Using the ESDD corpus to investigate address terms in historical drama dialogue

| Uppsala University

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.

Keywords: address terms, drama dialogue, English, sociopragmatics, Swedish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Drama dialogue
    • 1.2Address terms
    • 1.3Aim and scope
  • 2.The ESDD corpus
    • 2.1Sociopragmatic tagging
    • 2.2Corpus makeup
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1 Sir
    • 4.2 Dear
    • 4.3 Brother / Bror
    • 4.4 Fool
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00018.ang
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