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- Claridge, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
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A Little Something Goes a Long Way : Little in the Old Bailey Corpus
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of English Linguistics. - : Sage Publications. - 0075-4242 .- 1552-5457. ; 49:1, s. 61-89
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Even though intensifiers have received a good deal of attention over the past few decades, downtoners, comprising diminishers and minimizers, have remained by and large a neglected category (but cf. Brinton, this issue). Among downtoners, the adverb little or a little stands out as the most frequent item. It is multifunctional and serves as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier and also in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative. Therefore, the present paper is devoted to the structural and functional profile of (a) little in Late Modern English speech-related data. The data source is the socio-pragmatically annotated Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, version 2.0), which allows, among other things, the investigation of the usage of the item among different speaker groups. Our research charts the semantic and formal uses of adverbial little. Downtoner uses outnumber non-degree uses in the data, and diminishing uses are more common than minimizing uses. The formal realization is predominantly a little, with very rare determinerless or modified instances, such as very little. Little modifies a wide range of “targets,” but most frequently adjectives and prepositional phrases, focusing on human states and circumstantial detail. With regard to variation and change, adverbial little declines in use over the 200 years and is used more commonly by speakers from the lower social ranks and by the lay, non-professional participants in the courtroom.
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| 2. |
- Claridge, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
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Entirely innocent : A historical sociopragmatic analysis of maximizers in the Old Bailey Corpus
- 2020
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Ingår i: English Language and Linguistics. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1360-6743 .- 1469-4379. ; 24:4, s. 855-874
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
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| 5. |
- Hoffman, Angela, 1962-, et al.
(författare)
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Varying social roles and networks on a family farm : Evidence from Swedish immigrant letters, 1880s to 1930s
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. - : Walter de Gruyter. - 2199-2908 .- 2199-2894. ; 5:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study investigates patterns of language use in the ego documents written by three Swedish immigrants: Nils Blomberg (born in 1839), Mathilda Blomberg, (b. 1863), and Anton Blomberg (b. 1885), their eldest son. The empirical foundation of the investigation is a set of 32 family letters sent over a period of nearly fifty years (1885–1934) from the rural Smoky Valley in Kansas to Mathilda’s home village in Östergötland, Sweden. We analyze the writers’ lexis, discourse patterning (formulaic versus free-flowing), and re-current topics, and the social roles and networks that are manifest in their correspondence. The three writers continued to correspond in the Swedish language over the years. Our diachronic analysis of their lexis and discourse patterning reveals individual variation across the authors’ production. For example, Mathilda’s correspondence contains some evidence of heritage Swedish (i.e. Swedish that has diverged from the home country, due to geographical separation and language contact with English). Across her lifespan, Mathilda integrates some vocabulary for plants, places, and jobs that diverges from the lexis she recalls from her early years in Sweden, and she draws attention to this lexical divergence for the sake of her readers. Anton, a childhood bilingual in Swedish and English, systematically translates English lexis to Swedish in letters, presumably with the goal to bring his Kansas experiences closer to his Swedish relatives. In particular, the letters, especially those by Mathilda, reveal not only how the individuals communicate information about their social roles in rural Kansas, but also their desires to maintain the networks connecting their family farm in the U.S. to Mathilda’s home village in Sweden.
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| 8. |
- Kytö, Merja, et al.
(författare)
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A Standardization Process in its Final Stages : Mine and Thine in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Journal of English Studies (IJES). - : Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia. - 1578-7044 .- 1989-6131. ; 20:2, s. 95-116
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MYand THINE/THYin the Early Modern English period. The -Nforms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell intodisuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the N-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining N-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining MINEand THINE forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on MINE/MYand THINE/THY variation.
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- Berglind Söderqvist, Erika, 1985-
(författare)
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Evidential marking in spoken English : Linguistic functions and gender variation
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the marking of evidentiality in spoken British English. Evidentiality is the linguistic expression of whether and how a speaker/writer has access to evidence for or against the truth of a proposition, and it is usually manifested in the form of sensory evidentiality (e.g. I saw Sam leave), hearsay evidentiality (e.g. They say Sam left), or inferential evidentiality (e.g. Sam obviously left). In the examples, the bold words exemplify evidentiality markers. The aims of this thesis are to investigate whether there are quantitative differences between women and men in how often they mark evidentiality, and to analyze the functions of evidentiality in interaction in order to formulate an explanation of any gender differences.The material comes mainly from the spoken portion of the British National Corpus (BNC), but also from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English (DCPSE). In Article 1, women and men were compared with respect to how frequently they marked inferential evidentiality; gender preferences for specific markers were also analyzed. In Article 2, the effects of speaker gender and speaker age on how frequently evidentiality markers are used were investigated. In Article 3, the marking of evidentiality in conversation was analyzed to explore the potential of evidentiality to be instrumental in relational practice. In Article 4, speakers were ranked according to the extent to which their speech displayed stereotypically feminine or masculine features. The language of a subset of speakers was then analyzed to investigate whether evidential markers are used for different functions depending on gendered styles.In the studies of this thesis, women were found to mark evidentiality more frequently than men. Further, the language of women as well as language characterized by a feminine style were found more likely to feature evidential markers referencing evidence that is only accessible to the speaker, whereas the language of men and language characterized by a masculine style are more likely to feature evidential markers referencing evidence that is accessible to other interlocutors in addition to the speaker. Evidential marking was found to often perform relational functions; in particular, evidentiality enables the speaker to negotiate authority in a less face-threatening manner. Evidential marking seems likely to occur when the addressee’s interpretation of an utterance is important to the speaker. Since previous studies have found women’s language to display more often a concern for the experiences of others, this characteristic might partly explain the quantitative gender variation.
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