Word Order in Different Text Types in Early Modern English

2002 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bjørg Bækken
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-264
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper

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.


Language ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Eric Potsdam ◽  
Bjorg Baekken

Author(s):  
Javier Pérez-Guerra

AbstractThis paper examines the design of verb phrases and noun phrases, focusing on the diachronic tendencies observed in the data in Middle English, Early Modern, and Late Modern English. The approach is corpus-based and the data, representing different periods and text types, is taken from the


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-30
Author(s):  
Jacob Thaisen

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.


Author(s):  
Jesús Romero-Barranco

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.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Esteban-Segura ◽  

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


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Pérez-Guerra

Abstract Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores González-Álvarez

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document