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47 results

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  • Entirely innocent: a historical sociopragmatic analysis of maximizers in the Old Bailey Corpus
  • CLAUDIA CLARIDGE, EWA JONSSON, MERJA KYTÖ
  • Journal: English Language & Linguistics / Volume 24 / Issue 4 / December 2020
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2019, pp. 855-874
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    Based on an investigation of the Old Bailey Corpus, this article explores the development and usage patterns of maximizers in Late Modern English (LModE). The maximizers to be considered for inclusion in the study are based on the lists provided in Quirk et al. (1985) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002). The aims of the study were to (i) document the frequency development of maximizers, (ii) investigate the sociolinguistic embedding of maximizers usage (gender, class) and (iii) analyze the sociopragmatics of maximizers based on the speakers’ roles, such as judge or witness, in the courtroom.

    Of the eleven maximizer types focused on in the investigation, perfectly and entirely were found to dominate in frequency. The whole group was found to rise over the period 1720 to 1913. In terms of gender, social class and speaker roles, there was variation in the use of maximizers across the different speaker groups. Prominently, defendants, but also judges and lawyers, maximized more than witnesses and victims; further, male speakers and higher-ranking speakers used more maximizers. The results were interpreted taking into account the courtroom context and its dialogue dynamics.

  • 8 - Discourse-based Approaches
  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: English Historical Linguistics
  • Published online: 06 August 2018
  • Print publication: 03 July 2017, pp 185-217
  • View extract

    Summary

    Introduction

    Consider the following two text-initial passages:

  • a. fire nut caged a psychopath was jailed for life yesterday for killing a mother and her two kids by torching their home. (2000 Sun; Rostock Newspaper Corpus)

  • b. One of the things we celebrate as we gather forworship week by week is God's ability to bring good out of evil.We often have to do so, don't we, in the teeth ofmuch evidence to the contrary. Evidence that God has lost the plot, as it were. For, as we look around our world we see a neverending catalogue of headline-grabbing events which, again and again, spell bad news. (c. 2000 David Stone; see Claridge and Wilson 2000)

    • We recognize these texts more or less immediately for what they are, i.e., what genres they represent, and to which larger discoursal and social contexts they belong – namely, newspaper reportage and a sermon, respectively. We can do this because texts consist of features that are not only functional, but also conventional, and because we have acquired textual competence by growing up in a given culture. Even with altered layout, the news report headline (with characteristic ellipsis; cf. was/has been caged) and the following lead, referring to the major journalistic questions in a nutshell (who, when, what, why), are probably easily recognizable as typical genre features of (1a). Similarly, the sermon beginning (1b), which we recognize by the reference to the communicative situation (gather for worship) and the topic (God), contains interactive features (the pronoun we, the tag question don't we, colloquial expressions such as lost the plot) typical of face-to-face communication. Now look at beginnings of the “same” discourse of earlier times for a contrast:

  • a. Newcastle, Dec. 29. Thursday arrived here, by the London Waggon, the Arms for the Northumberland Militia. (1760 London Evening Post; Rostock Newspaper Corpus)

  • b. The eternall HappineVsse of our immortall souls is to be found only in union and communion with Iesus Christ; Religion is that which gathers and binds up the spirit to close fellowship with Him; … “ (RelA1642; Lampeter Corpus)

    • (2a) contains neither a proper headline (but a dateline instead) nor a lead. While (1a) is followed by a report that spells out the lead in more detail, the older news text continues with different information on unrelated company movements and officer deaths (not cited here).

Developments in English
  • Developments in English
  • Expanding Electronic Evidence
  • Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge, Jeremy Smith
  • Published online: 05 November 2014
  • Print publication: 31 October 2014
  • View description
    The history of the English language is a vast and diverse area of research. In this volume, a team of leading historians of English come together to analyse 'real' language, drawing on corpus data to shed new light on long-established issues and debates in the field. Combining synchronic and diachronic analysis, the chapters address the major issues in corpus linguistics – methodological, theoretical and applied – and place special focus on the use of electronic resources in the research of English and the wider field of digital humanities. Topics covered include polemical articles on the optimal use of corpus linguistic methods, macro-level patterns of text and discourse organisation, and micro-features such as interjections and hesitators. Covering Englishes from the past and present, this book is designed specifically for graduate students and researchers working in fields of corpus linguistics, the history of the English language, and historical linguistics.

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