Free Indirect Speech, Slipping, or a System in Flux? Exploring the Continuum between Direct and Indirect Speech in Early Modern English

2020 ◽  
pp. 156-182
Author(s):  
Terry Walker ◽  
Peter J. Grund
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Electronic Text ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Person Reference ◽  
Speech Representation ◽  
Third Person ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Continuum

This chapter explores speech representation structures in Early Modern English that exhibit a mixture of direct speech and indirect speech. Drawing data from an Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED), we chart the frequency and characteristics of different types of speech representation that overlap between direct and indirect speech (such as the mixture of third-person and first-person reference, and the use of reporting expression + that + direct speech representation). We show that accounting for such uses as “slipping,” free indirect speech, and/or signs of a system under development is less convincing. Instead, we argue that the mixture should be seen as exploitation of speech representation resources for various sociopragmatic and communicative purposes, such as disambiguating voices and shifting responsibilities for the speech report. The chapter thus contributes to the broader goal of enhancing our understanding of the sociopragmatics of speech representation in the history of English.

Parenthetical reporting clauses in the history of English: the development of quotative inversion

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA CICHOSZ
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Annotated Corpora

This study is a corpus-based diachronic analysis of English reporting parentheticals, i.e. clauses introducing direct speech, placed after or in the middle of the reported message. The aim of the investigation is to trace the development of the construction throughout the history of English, establishing the main factors influencing the choice between VS and SV patterns (i.e. with and without quotative inversion respectively), showing how various reporting verbs were increasingly attracted to the construction, and demonstrating the gradual morphological reduction of the main reporting verbs: quoth and say. The study is based on syntactically annotated corpora of Old, Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern English, and uses other corpora to illustrate more recent changes. The study reveals that reporting clauses do not show regular quotative inversion with all subject types until the Early Modern English period and links this development to the emergence of the comment clause with say. It is also claimed that quotative inversion is not directly derived from the V-2 rule and that parenthetical reporting clauses have functioned as a separate construction since the Old English period.

Beyond speech representation

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Grund
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Speech Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

Abstract 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.

Direct and indirect speech in Mambila

1974 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Perrin
Keyword(s):  
Main Clause ◽  
Summer Institute ◽  
First Person ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Person Pronoun ◽  
Summer Institute Of Linguistics ◽  
Person Reference ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Embedded Clause

The categories of DIRECT SPEECH and INDIRECT SPEECH may be distinguished by differing policies of pronoun reference. Direct speech takes its pronoun orientation from the clause in which it is immediately embedded: for example, in the following sentence: (I) John Said to Peter, ‘I Can see you’, the first person pronoun I refers to the participant who is identified as speaker in the preceding clause (John said to peter) and the seconf person you refers to the participant identified as addressee. Of the two clauses involved, the second or embedded clause (‘I can see you’) May conveniently be referred to as the quotation content. The first or main clause may be referred to as the Reporting Clause; this correspondes ti the use of the term Margin in recent studies from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Lowe, 1969; Pike, 1966; Pike & Lowe, 1969) from which the inspiration for this paper has been taken. Any third person reference in the quotation content in direct speech must refer to a participant who is neither speaker nor addressee in the reporting clause.

scholarly journals Word-entries and Big Data in Lexicons of Early Modern English

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Ian Lancashire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Online Database ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Survival And Growth ◽  
The University

This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely online in 1996 as the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. Ten years later, in a seventh-floor lab also in the Robarts Library, it came out as LEME, thanks to support from TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and the University of Toronto Press and Library. No other modern language has such a resource. The most important reason for the emergence, survival, and growth of LEME is that its contemporary lexicographers understood their language differently from how we, our many advantages notwithstanding, have conceived it over the past two centuries. Cette brève histoire des trente ans du Lexicons of Early Modern English, une base de données en ligne de glossaires et de dictionnaires de l’époque, commence en 1986 dans le laboratoire du Centre for Computing and the Humanities, au quatorzième étage de la bibliothèque Robarts de l’Université de Toronto. Cette base de données a été publiée gratuitement en ligne premièrement en 1996, sous le titre Early Modern English Dictionnaires Database. Dix ans plus tard, elle était publiée sous le sigle LEME, à partir du septième étage de la même bibliothèque Robarts, grâce au soutien du TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), de la bibliothèque et des presses de l’Université de Toronto. Aucune autre langue vivante ne dispose d’une telle ressource. La principale raison expliquant l’émergence, la survie et la croissance du LEME est que les lexicographes qui font l’objet du LEME comprenaient leur langue très différemment que nous la concevons depuis deux siècles, et ce nonobstant plusieurs de nos avantages.

Constraints on ellipsis alternation: A view from the history of English

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Nykiel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Form Processing ◽  
Argument Ellipsis ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Construction Type ◽  
Semantic Dependencies ◽  
Late Modern

AbstractI offer a diachronic perspective on English ellipsis alternation, or the alternation between inclusion and omission of prepositions from remnants under sluicing and bare argument ellipsis. The relative freedom to omit prepositions from remnants has not been stable in English; this freedom is connected to the strength of semantic dependencies between prepositions and verbs. Remnants without prepositions are first attested, but remain less frequent than remnants with prepositions, as late as Early Modern English and gain in frequency following this period. I demonstrate that three constraints—correlate informativity, structural persistence, and construction type—predict ellipsis alternation in Early and Late Modern English. However, predicting ellipsis alternation in present-day English requires semantic dependencies in addition to the three constraints. The constraints can be subsumed under principles of language processing and production (considerations of accessibility, a tendency to reuse structure, and a conventionalized performance preference for efficiently accessing constituents that form processing domains), permitting a unified processing account of ellipsis alternation with cross-linguistic coverage.

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 542
Author(s):  
Seiwoong Oh ◽  
David Lowenstein ◽  
Janel Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Early Modern English Literature ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Special issue on cognitive approaches to the history of English: introduction

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER BERGS ◽  
THOMAS HOFFMANN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Degree Of Certainty ◽  
Third Person ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
High Degree

What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was nodo-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions.

scholarly journals Supralocalisation Processes in Early Modern English Urban Vernaculars

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Moragh Gordon ◽  
Tino Oudesluijs ◽  
Anita Auer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Unique Distribution ◽  
Internal And External Factors ◽  
Insight Into

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500–1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural zero. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.

Speech Representation in the History of English

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Speech Event ◽  
Speech Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Modern

This volume explores the speech representation of the past, comprising in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech in the history of English. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods, the chapters are concerned with topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of BE like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Various social contexts and genres are covered, including witness depositions, literary texts, letters, histories, and the spoken language of the recent past. The chapters draw on historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and corpus linguistics in showing a wide array of approaches to the study of speech representation in the history of English.

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