Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing »

"Language is largely comprised of face-to-face spoken interaction; however, the method, description and theory of traditional historical accounts of English have been largely based on scholarly and literarywritings. Using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, Culpeper and Kyt o offer a unique account of the linguistic features in several speech-related written genres, comprising Trial proceedings, Witness depositions, Plays, Fiction and Didactic works. The volume is the first to provide innovative analyses of several neglected written genres, demonstrating how they might be researched, and highlighting the theories which are needed to underpin this research. Through this, the authors are able to create a fascinating insight into what spoken interaction in Early Modern English might have been like, providing an alternative perspective to that often presented in traditional historical accounts of English"--Provided by publisher.

List of plates

List of figures

List of tables

1 Introduction 1

2 Dialogic genres and their contexts 21

3 The multiple contexts and multiple discourses of dialogic genres 61

4 The structures of spoken face-to-face interaction and writing 88

5 Lexical bundles 103

6 Lexical repetitions 142

7 Cohesion: the case of and 158

8 Grammatical variation 184

9 An introduction to pragmatic noise 199

10 Pragmatic noise: a survey of functions and contexts in Early Modern English Comedy plays 224

11 Pragmatic noise: variation and change in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 260

12 Pragmatic noise: meanings and their development 284

13 Social variation in interaction: representing identities 306

14 The distribution of talk: social roles in Trial proceedings and Play-texts 326

15 Pragmatic markers 361

16 Summary and concluding remarks 398

Appendix I 406

Appendix II 412

References 434

Author index 462

Subject index 467