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.
A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED). 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
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Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
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2024. The Reaction Object Construction in the Leech and Short’s model: A new strategy of discourse presentation in the nineteenth-century novel. Studia Neophilologica► pp. 1 ff.
2023. Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in theOld Bailey Corpus. English Language and Linguistics 27:3 ► pp. 517 ff.
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