A rich compendium of historical texts that reflect the English spoken by ordinary citizens of the early modern period

This book analyses speech-related genres in Early Modern English, providing ideas of what spoken interaction in earlier times might have been like.

This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.

This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that forms the tail end of the standardisation process (codification and prescription), during which important social changes such as the Industrial Revolution are reflected in the language. Late Modern English is currently receiving a lot of scholarly attention, mainly as a result of new developments in sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics. By drawing on such research the present book offers a much fuller account of the language of the period than was previously possible. It is designed for students and beginning scholars interested in Late Modern English. The volume includes: * a basis in recent research by which sociolinguistic models are applied to earlier stages of the language (1700-1900) * a focus on people as speakers (wherever possible) and writers of English* Research questions aimed at acquiring skills at working with important electronic research tools such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* Reference to electronically available texts and databases such as Martha Ballard's Diary, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

This volume is concerned with assessing fictional and non-fictional written texts as linguistic evidence for earlier forms of varieties of English. These range from Scotland to New Zealand, from Canada to South Africa, covering all the major forms of the English language around the world. Central to the volume is the question of how genuine written representations are. Here the emphasis is on the techniques and methodology which can be employed when analysing documents. The vernacular styles found in written documents and the use of these as a window on earlier spoken modes of different varieties represent a focal concern of the book. Studies of language in literature, which were offered in the past, have been revisited and their findings reassessed in the light of recent advances in variationist linguistics.

English historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics which has developed theories and methods for exploring the history of the English language. This Handbook provides an account of state-of-the-art research on this history. It offers an in-depth survey of materials, methods, and language-theoretical models used to study the long diachrony of English. The frameworks covered include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and manuscript studies, among others. The chapters, by leading experts, examine the interplay of language theory and empirical data throughout, critically assessing the work in the field. Of particular importance are the diverse data sources which have become increasingly available in electronic form, allowing the discipline to develop in new directions. The Handbook offers access to the rich and many-faceted spectrum of work in English historical linguistics, past and present, and will be useful for researchers and students interested in hands-on research on the history of English.

Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.

Shakespeare: Helping an Actor Prepare by Mary Braaten This is a method to help actors prepare Shakespeare. Edith Skinner taught Shakespeare text analysis to the acting students in the Drama Department at Carnegie Mellon University. This book was written in order to pass on her method of teaching Shakespeare for actors. It teaches how to prepare an actor’s worksheet of Shakespeare’s monologs and sonnets. You will learn how to do a text analysis: of the sentences, phrases and meter, of adjustments to maintain meter, and of poetic devices such as sounds, figurative and rhetorical language. It describes how to work with long and complex sentences. You will organize, subordinate and build information using the pitch range of your speaking voice, inflection, phrases and pauses, and stress. It has monologs and dialogs from Shakespeare to illustrate variations in meter, variations in lines, lines that are meant to include business, and shared and overlapping lines. Each section includes examples from Shakespeare for practicing the techniques that are introduced. There is a brief discussion of Shakespeare’s punctuation and editorial practices.

The third edition of this successful textbook has been fully revised and updated. Essentials of Early English is a practical and highly accessible introduction to the early stages of the English language: Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. Designed specifically as a handbook for students beginning the study of Early English language, whether for linguistic or literary purposes, it presumes little or no prior knowledge of the history of English. Features of this new edition include: Comprehensive updating of the contents to take account of new developments in the subject Newly added sample texts and accompanying notes Links to images of many of the illustrative texts An updated annotated bibliography. A contextual introduction of the history of English is provided, which includes an outline of English in relation to its origins. A deeper analysis is then given on each of the key stages of Early English, using the language of King Alfred, Chaucer, and Shakespeare respectively to illustrate points. Thus, the essential characteristics of each stage of the language are provided to create the ideal course book for History of English courses and to give the student a firm foundation of basic linguistic knowledge which can be applied to further study.