scholarly journals Affirmatives in Early Modern English

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-264
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Negative Questions

Abstract 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.

scholarly journals Transparently Hierarchical

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-30
Author(s):  
Jacob Thaisen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Principal Function ◽  
Structural Hierarchy ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
English Manuscript

The three scribes of a mid-seventeenth-century collection of medical recipes resemble each other in how they have punctuated the recipes, although they did not work simultaneously. They draw on similar repertoires of marks and they mark similar functions, but they do not use the same marks for the same functions. The principal function is the global one of indicating where the constitutive elements of the recipes begin and end. This function of indicating a text’s structural hierarchy goes back centuries and can seem old-fashioned for an Early Modern English manuscript produced when grammarians had started to discuss whether punctuation should mark syntactic units. A key observation is that recipes stand out among text-types by having a fixed, transparently hierarchical structure. This feature of them facilitates the researcher’s appreciation of how the punctuation functions and dismisses any impression of the scribes having deployed the marks haphazardly.

scholarly journals Linguistic Complexity across Two Early Modern English Scientific Text Types

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
Jesús Romero-Barranco
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Early English

In linguistics the concept of complexity has been analysed from various perspectives, among them language typology and the speech/writing distinction. Within intralinguistic studies, certain key linguistic features associated with reduced or increased complexity have been identified. These features occur in different patterns across various registers and their frequency is an indicator of the level of complexity of different kinds of texts. The concept of complexity has not, to date, been evaluated in early English medical writing, especiallyin terms of different text types. Thus, the present article analyses linguistic complexity in two Early Modern English medical texts, a surgical treatise (ff. 34r-73v) and a collection of medical recipes (ff. 74r-121v) housed as MS Hunter 135 in Glasgow University Library. Since they represent two different types of medical text, they can be productively compared in terms of linguistic complexity. The results obtained confirm that the surgical treatise is more complex than the collection of medical recipes owing to the higher presence of linguistic features denoting increased complexity in the former and of those indicating reduced linguistic complexity in the latter.

scholarly journals Digital editing of Early Modern English medical manuscripts: scribal errors and corrections

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Esteban-Segura ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Specialized Texts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
University Of Manchester

An important philological question is how to edit texts. An edition always entails interpretation of the text and also of the sociocultural context in which the manuscript was created and used. In new philological theory, and contrary to more traditional approaches, the individual manuscript versions, i.e., the textual witnesses, are regarded as valuable in their own right, as every textual witness tells us something about the culture of manuscripts (Carlquist, 2004: 112). This is the approach followed for the digital editing of Early Modern English scientific writing in The Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that producing such type of edition pose. We will particularly focus on the issue of scribal errors and corrections and how the editor can treat and capture them in the edition. MS Wellcome 213, one of the texts included in the above-mentioned corpus, will be analysed for the purpose. The corpus consists of manuscripts from the Hunterian Collection (Glasgow University Library), the Wellcome Collection (London Wellcome Library) and the Rylands Collection (University of Manchester Library). With regard to text types, these manuscripts hold specialized texts, surgical and anatomical treatises, as well as recipe collections and materia medica

Epistemic Disjuncts in Early Modern English

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores González-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
High Probability ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
Low Probability

This paper offers a description of epistemic disjunct adverbs in Early Modern English. Section I outlines the development of epistemic disjuncts in the history of English, concentrating on the kinds of comment they could lexicalise.. Briefly, OE epistemic adverbs only encoded the speaker's comment on the high probability or importance of the proposition they related to. ME allowed a new type of comment, namely on the low probability of the adjoined proposition. In the second section, the data drawn from the computarised Helsinki Corpus suggest that though Early Modern English is a transitional period in epistemic disjunct development, it shows greater semantic diversification than OE and ME. Syntactic and distributional features are considered in every case. Finally, sociolinguistic variables and the registers and text types which favour the occurrence of these adverbs are also specified.

Initiating Direct Speech in Early Modern English Prose Fiction and Witness Depositions

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Ursula Lutzky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
English Language ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Text Types ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores direct speech representation in Early Modern English prose fiction and witness depositions. The focus is on the preface position in direct speech turns—that is, the very first position at speech onset. The aim is to discover how the beginning of direct speech was signalled in the presence or absence of speech-external quotatives, at a time when transitions in voice were not yet consistently marked by punctuation. I investigate similarities and differences between the two text types, drawn from A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, to understand how an impression of direct speech was created for literary purposes as opposed to (re)constructed in a legal context. This study thus provides new insights into the relationship between the construction and reconstruction of speech and thereby contributes to the research agenda of enhancing our understanding of speech (re)presentation during past periods of the English language.

scholarly journals Punctuation in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of Two Scientific Text Types in Gul, Ms Hunter 135

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Jesús Romero Barranco
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Different Levels

AbstractAmong the different topics studied by palaeography, punctuation has traditionally been disregarded by scholars for being considered arbitrary and unsystematic (Salmon 1988: 285). However, some studies carried out over the last few decades have demonstrated that the English punctuation system underwent a process of standardisation which started in the Middle English period, from a purely rhetorical to a grammatical function. Moreover, it was towards the sixteenth century when a set of punctuation marks was introduced (i.e. the semicolon), a fact that restricted the functions of major punctuation marks up to that time, such as the period and the comma (Salmon 1999: 40). The present paper analyses the punctuation system in Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 135 (ff. 34r–121v), a volume that is most suitable for such a study as it contains two different text types belonging to the genre of medical writing: a surgical treatise and a collection of medical recipes. The results confirm that the different punctuation marks are unevenly distributed in the texts under study and, more importantly, their main functions are found at different levels within the text.

“But it is not prov’d”

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ursula Lutzky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Low Frequencies ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Trial Participants ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
The Coordinator

Abstract Previous studies have found discourse markers to be represented with only low frequencies in Early Modern English trial proceedings, especially when compared to other dialogic and fictional text types from the same period. Nevertheless, they comprise certain classes of markers, such as contrastive markers, which operate on different levels of discourse. This study aims to provide further insights into the use of the coordinator but in a sociopragmatically annotated corpus of trial proceedings from the period 1560 to 1760. Drawing on contextual information, the analysis will assess the distribution of but throughout the Early Modern English period and address certain peaks in its use. In addition, the sociopragmatic information included in the corpus will be consulted to discover which trial participants used the form repeatedly in their speech and with which functions. Overall, this study will therefore offer an innovative sociopragmatic profile of but as a contrastive marker in Early Modern English trials.

scholarly journals A corpus-based study of abbreviations in early English medical writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Javier Calle-Martín
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Handwritten Documents ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Early English

The Early Middle English period witnessed the massive borrowing and adoption of the Latin system of abbreviations in England. Mediaeval writers appropriated those symbols that were directly transferable from Latin exemplars, especially suspensions and brevigraphs, while contractions and superior letters were incorporated somewhat later. The existing accounts of abbreviations in handwritten documents are fragmentary as they offer the picture of the literary compositions of the period, which have been traditionally taken as the source of evidence for handbooks on palaeography. In addition to this, most of these accounts are limited to the description of their use and typology in independent witnesses, being in many cases impossible to extrapolate the results beyond the practice of individual scribes. The present paper takes that step beyond individuality and pursues the study of abbreviations from a variationist perspective with the following objectives: a) to analyse the use and distribution of abbreviations in Late Middle English and Early Modern English (1350–1700), and b) to evaluate the relevance of these abbreviations across different text types of medical writing. The data used as source of evidence come from The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, both the Late Middle English and the Early Modern English components (1350–1500 and 1500–1700, respectively).

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