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Textbook The Linguistics of Spoken Communication in Early Modern English Writing Exploring Bess of Hardwicks Manuscript Letters 1St Edition Imogen Marcus Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook The Linguistics of Spoken Communication in Early Modern English Writing Exploring Bess of Hardwicks Manuscript Letters 1St Edition Imogen Marcus Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
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The Linguistics of
S p o k e n C o m m u n i c at i o n i n
E a r ly M o d e r n E n g l i s h W r i t i n g
Exploring Bess of Hardwick’s Manuscript Letters
Imogen Marcus
Series editors
Sara Pons-Sanz
School of English, Communication and Philosophy
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
Louise Sylvester
Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
University of Westminster
London, UK
The field of historical linguistics has traditionally been made up of the
theoretical study of the various levels of linguistic analysis: phonology,
morphology, syntax, vocabulary and semantics. However, scholars have
increasingly become aware of the significance of other methods of
applied/culturally aware research which were initially introduced to
examine present day English, e.g. stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics,
code-switching and other language contact phenomena. This has pro-
duced exciting new avenues for exploration but has inevitably led to spe-
cialization and fragmentation within the field.
This series brings together work in either one or several of these areas,
thus enabling a dialogue within the new conceptualization of language
study and English historical linguistics. The series includes descriptive
and/or theoretical work on the history of English and the way in which it
has been shaped by its contact with other languages in Britain and beyond.
Much of the work published in the series is engaged in redefining the
discipline and its boundaries.
The Linguistics
of Spoken
Communication
in Early Modern
English Writing
Exploring Bess of Hardwick’s
Manuscript Letters
Imogen Marcus
Department of English, History and Creative Writing
Edge Hill University
Ormskirk, UK
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Research Objectives 1
1.2 The Status of Speech and Writing Within Linguistics 8
1.3 Speech Versus Writing: A Grammatical Comparison 10
1.4 Investigating the Linguistics of Spoken Communication
in Early English Writing: My Conceptual Approach 12
1.5 Why Letters? 13
1.6 Why Bess’s Letters? 16
1.7 Historical Discourse Analysis 21
1.8 Overview of the Upcoming Chapters 28
References 31
ix
x Contents
3 Prose Structure 135
3.1 Introduction 135
3.2 The Notion of ‘the Sentence’ 136
3.3 Methodology 138
3.3.1 Identification of Clause-Level AND, SO,
FOR, BUT139
3.3.2 Differentiation of Discourse Connective and
Grammatical Connective Examples of
Clause-Level AND, BUT, SO and FOR 146
3.3.3 Discourse Connective Examples of AND, BUT,
SO and FOR Potentially Functioning as
Discourse Markers 150
3.4 Results 168
3.4.1 A Comparison of the Hands of the Six
Individual Copyists 168
3.4.1.1 Bess 171
3.4.1.2 Scribe 2185
3.4.1.3 Scribe 4190
3.4.1.4 Scribe 6192
3.4.1.5 Scribe 5194
3.4.1.6 Scribe 3197
3.4.2 A Comparison of the 17 Holograph Letters
and 17 Scribal Letters 201
3.4.3 Discussion of Results 206
3.5 Summary and Concluding Remarks 217
References 220
Contents
xi
5 Lexical Bundles 255
5.1 Introduction 255
5.2 Previous Studies of Lexical Bundles in English 258
5.2.1 Terminology 258
5.2.2 Grammatical and Structural Characteristics
of Lexical Bundles 260
5.2.3 A Functional Taxonomy 262
5.3 Data and Methodology 264
5.3.1 Corpora Used for the Study 264
5.3.2 Methodology 265
5.4 Results and Discussion 267
5.4.1 Lexical Bundles in the Bess Corpus: Scribal
Variation267
5.4.2 Lexical Bundles in the Bess Corpus: Social
Variation274
5.4.2.1 Variation of Frequent Lexical Bundles
in the Bess Corpus, by Letter Recipient 274
5.4.2.2 Variation of Frequent Lexical Bundles
in the Bess Corpus, by Primary
Communicative Function 283
xii Contents
6 Vocatives 299
6.1 Introduction 299
6.2 What Is a Vocative? 300
6.2.1 Vocatives in Early Modern English Letters 301
6.3 Methodology 302
6.4 Results and Discussion 304
6.4.1 Scribal Variation 304
6.4.2 Social Variation 310
6.4.3 Comparison with Other Early Modern
Epistolary Material in CEEC 316
6.5 Conclusion 317
References 318
7 Conclusion 321
7.1 Summary of Findings 321
7.2 Directions for Future Research 326
References 330
Manuscript Sources 333
References 335
Index 351
Abbreviations
xiii
List of Figures
xv
xvi List of Figures
xvii
xviii List of Tables
The written prose in this letter transcript is, like much early modern
English written prose, somewhat difficult for a present day silent reader
to process. The present day silent reader will automatically look for clear
visual markers of where sentences begin and end in a written piece of
text. They will then use these markers to aid their comprehension of the
text. However, there is no clear, regularized, visual signposting of sen-
tence boundaries in the above letter transcript. It is therefore not entirely
clear to the present day silent reader where the sentences in the transcript
begin and end. For example, is ‘thynkeng[e] yt my parte’ on line 5 the
start of a single sentence? If so, does this sentence end with the full stop
following the word ‘of ’ on line 15? Furthermore, if this is a single sen-
tence, why is its beginning not marked with a capital letter, and why does
it contain such a large number of subordinate clauses?
Scholars have occasionally described early modern English (henceforth
EModE) written sentences in relatively pejorative terms. Houston
Introduction 3
as far as the use of AND is concerned, there has been a move away from
oral style to visual or literate style, due to the evolving concept of the sen-
tence and the role played by AND in relation to it. (2010: 168–9)
Culpeper and Kytö suggest this trend is a development ‘in the opposite
direction of the general pattern of drift towards more oral styles described
by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1992)’ (2010: 168). Chapter 3 engages with
the differing views of Culpeper and Kytö and Biber and Finegan regard-
ing what both sets of researchers refer to as ‘oral style’. It asks: Was there
a move away from an oral style towards a more visual style in English due
to the evolving concept of the sentence? If so, why do Culpeper and Kytö
seem to find the opposite to Biber and Finegan?
In order to fully explore the presence of oral features in English episto-
lary prose dating from the early modern period, Chap. 5 will look into
the presence of lexical bundles, recurrent multi-word expressions that are
Introduction 7
In terms of the language proper, rather than its written representation, our
period is marked by a series of major transformations that define the transi-
tion to ‘modern’ English. (1999:11)
ever, particularly within the last twenty years, there has been a shift within
historical linguistics, towards an acknowledgement that ‘real’ language
use and the factors that influence it should be taken into account, and the
sub-fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics fields
with which my study is aligned, have becoming increasingly well
established. In historical sociolinguistics, studying language variation and
change within its social context is central (cf e.g. Nevalainen and
Raumolin-Brunberg 2016), as is a consideration of speaker identity, how
communities of speakers use particular forms, contemporary perceptions
of language use, multilingualism and language contact.
The related field of historical pragmatics also sees language as a societal
phenomenon and crucially, as something that should be seen within its
context, regardless of whether it is communicated verbally or in writing.
Indeed, for Levinson, a key aspect of pragmatics is the study of ‘the utter-
ance’, which he views as ‘the issuance of a sentence, a sentence-analogue,
or sentence fragment, in an actual context (1983: 18). He does not state
that spoken language is primary; he states that context is primary.
Historical pragmatics investigates the socio-historical and pragmatic
aspects of historical texts, focusing on aspects such as conversational prin-
ciples or on diachronic processes across time that often have pragmatic
dimensions, such as grammaticalization. It therefore does not see writing
or the written mode as secondary or in any way less worthy of study. On
the contrary, many studies within the field are explicitly concerned with
what Williams (2013: 221) calls the ‘communicative spaces within writ-
ing’. They are interested in the complex, fragmentary nature of early writ-
ing, in inter-sentential relations, and in the context within which the text
or texts emerged.
Pragmatics has often taken a much more functionalist approach to
grammar, as opposed to the formalist approach adopted by generative
linguists such as Chomsky. Whilst Leech (1995 [1983] Chap. 3) con-
ceives of grammar as essentially formalist and pragmatics is functionalist,
the present study takes a Hallidayian view that function is to be:
C Graphic D
Communicative Communicative
immediacy A Phonic B distance
Fig. 1.1 Phonic/graphic medium and conceptual continuum (Koch 1999: 400).
The figure as it appears here is taken Jucker (2000: 20) and is also included in
Culpeper and Kytö (2010: 11)
12 I. Marcus
INDIANA.
116 Apr
571 Allen Jesse, Cor 64
K 15