Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England PDF Download

Author: Merja Kytö
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789027211804
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
"Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England" examines various aspects of the witness depositions comprising "An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560 1760" (ETED) on the accompanying CD-ROM.ETED combines modern corpus linguistic methodology and editorial theory, and makes available faithful transcriptions of 905 depositions drawn from manuscripts from different areas of early modern England. The depositions, which total c. 267,000 words, cover testimony by men and women of different ages and social strata. In order to cater to a variety of uses and users, the ETED CD-ROM provides the depositions in five electronic formats (XML, resolved XML, HTML, TXT and PDF), as well as a data retrieval program and a number of support files. The book explores the genre, the socio-historical and legal background, and the language of depositions. Together with the book, ETED constitutes a significant resource for researchers of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics, and for social and legal historians."

Author: Ursula Lutzky
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027273286
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This volume provides new insights into the nature of the Early Modern English discourse markers marry, well and why through the analysis of three corpora (A Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560-1760, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English). By combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of pragmatic markers, innovative findings are reached about their distribution throughout the period 1500-1760, their attestation in different speech-related text types as well as similarities and differences in their functions. Additionally, this work engages in a sociopragmatic study, based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus of almost a quarter of a million words, to enhance our understanding about their use by characters of different social status and gender. This volume therefore constitutes an essential piece of the puzzle in our attempt to gain a full picture of discourse marker use.

Author: Imogen Marcus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331966008X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

Author: Don Chapman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311049423X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book looks at how historical linguists accommodate the written records used for evidence. The limitations of the written record restrict our view of the past and the conclusions that we can draw about its language. However, the same limitations force us to be aware of the particularities of language. This collection blends the philological with the linguistic, combining questions of the particular with generalizations about language change.

Author: Marco Condorelli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009090747
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The standardisation of English spelling that resulted from the advent of printing is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of English. This pioneering book explores new avenues of investigation into spelling development by looking at the Early Modern English period, when irregular features across graphemes became standardised. It traces the development of the English spelling system through a number of 'competing' standards, raising questions about the meaning of 'standardisation'. It introduces a new model for the analysis of large-scale graphemic developments from a diachronic perspective, and provides a new empirical method geared specifically to the study of spelling standardisation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The method is applied to four interconnected case studies, focusing on the standardisation of positional spellings, i and y, etymological spelling and vowel diacritic spelling. This book is essential reading for researchers of writing systems and the history of English.

Author: Merja Kytö
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316472914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1092

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Book Description
English historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics which has developed theories and methods for exploring the history of the English language. This Handbook provides an account of state-of-the-art research on this history. It offers an in-depth survey of materials, methods, and language-theoretical models used to study the long diachrony of English. The frameworks covered include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and manuscript studies, among others. The chapters, by leading experts, examine the interplay of language theory and empirical data throughout, critically assessing the work in the field. Of particular importance are the diverse data sources which have become increasingly available in electronic form, allowing the discipline to develop in new directions. The Handbook offers access to the rich and many-faceted spectrum of work in English historical linguistics, past and present, and will be useful for researchers and students interested in hands-on research on the history of English.

Author: Marco Condorelli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108801412
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1075

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Book Description
Written by a team of global scholars, this is the first Handbook covering the rapidly growing field of historical orthography. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in the field, and in related areas such as morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and sociolinguistics.

Author: Natalie Braber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137562889
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This book presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in England. Showcasing developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, the chapters examine sociolinguistic topics on different linguistic levels and in different geographical areas across the country. Allowing the reader to engage with contemporary research in the field, each chapter is unique in the topic or geographical area explored. Topics include historical sociolinguistics, British Sign Language, lexical variation, life-span change, and variation and innovation in urban and peripheral areas; while the regions covered range from Cornwall to West Cumbria. Edited and authored by a range of international scholars, this is sure to be a key research resource for students and scholars interested in language use in England.

Author: Peter Grund
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110639858
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This volume collects essays that approach notions of creating, maintaining, and crossing boundaries in the history of the English language. The concept of boundaries is variously defined within linguistics depending on the theoretical framework, from formal and theoretical perspectives to specific fields and more empirical, physical, and perceptual angles. The contributions to this volume do not take one particular theoretical or methodological approach but, instead, explore how examining various types of boundaries—linguistic, conceptual, analytical, generic, physical—helps us illuminate and account for historical use, variation, and change in English. In their exploration of various topics in the history of English, contributions ask a range of questions: what does it mean to set up boundaries between time periods? When do language varieties have distinct boundaries and when do they overlap? Where do language users draw up clausal, constructional, semantic, phonetic/phonological boundaries? Thus, the chapters explore not only how boundaries illustrate synchronic and diachronic features in the history of the English language but also what we can discover by questioning perceived or actual boundaries.

Author: Michael Cawood Green
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1906897980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
A novel that tells a four-hundred-year-old tale of witchcraft and intrigue, reimagining the life of a servant girl who accuses her neighbors of being witches. Michael Cawood Green's novel The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong calls up the lost voice of a fourteen-year-old girl who, between January and May 1673, made some of the most dramatic accusations in the history of English witchcraft and then disappeared, leaving behind the mystery of what drove her to insist, in the face of rejection after rejection, on telling so strange a story—ultimately at the cost of her own life. Fantastic yet compelling, Anne Armstrong's accusations against her neighbors in an isolated part of the Tyne Valley were recorded in the court depositions that form the basis for this literary thriller from Goldsmiths Press. Following a fictional historian who becomes obsessed with tracking Anne through each twist and turn of the legal proceedings, the reader is drawn ineluctably into the shadowy world where Anne's dark tale plays out to its devastating end. T he narrative is shot through with questions: Why does Anne risk being suspected of witchcraft herself as she accuses an ever-increasing number of others? Is she seeking revenge, or does she want to earn money as a witch finder? How does a young, illiterate woman have such detailed knowledge of esoteric forms of witchcraft? How does she learn to understand and manipulate the legal process? Is she a victim of her own hallucinations? Or is she telling the truth—the truth as she sees it, as perhaps only she can see it? And, finally, how does she meet her lonely death in the building which—if reports about appearances of her ghost are to be believed—she has never left?