This study concentrates on the development of the third-person indicative present singular verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English. Within the framework of sociohistorical variation analysis, corpus-based comparisons focus on a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of the forms over successive periods of time. During the period studied, the main line of development is the replacement of the -th by the -s ending; the zero from is clearly in decline, as is the use of the -s and the -th endings in the third-person present plural inflection. The type of the verb (notably have and do vs. other verbs) and stem-final sounds play an important role in the choice of the form. The text type, the level of formality, and the sex of the author can also be seen to influence the distribution patterns. The -s ending had already been firmly established in everyday usage before the settlers left for the New World. Contrary to what has usually been attributed to the phenomenon of “colonial lag,” the rate of change was more rapid in the colonies than in the mother country.
In this paper we examine four speech-related text types in terms of how linguistically close they are to spoken face-to-face interaction. Our “conversational” diagnostics include lexical repetitions, question marks (as an indicator of question-answer adjacency pairs), interruptions, and several single word interactive features (first- and second-person pronouns, private verbs and demonstrative pronouns). We discuss the nature of these diagnostics and then consider their distribution across our text types and across the period 1600 to 1720. We reveal: (1) a differential distribution across our text types (and suggest a number of explanatory factors), and (2) a shift over our period towards features associated with spoken face-to-face interaction (and make the tentative suggestion that this finding may be due to the development of “popular” literatures). We also make some preliminary remarks about our Shakespeare sample.
The historical linguist has to rely on written records of a speech event for evidence regarding spoken interaction of the past. The authors consider records of trial proceedings and witness depositions, two genres that are included in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (currently under compilation). They present evidence both for and against the reliability of these written records as representations of past speech. The role of the scribe, as well as the printer and editor, is discussed. The authors also offer evidence to suggest that records that are contemporaneous with the speech event are preferable to later printings and editions for linguistic research. They conclude that the study of speech-related texts is of value in its own right, although these texts cannot be equated with present-day audio recordings of spoken interaction.Texts purporting to record spoken dialogue are especially important for the historical linguist as they give access to perhaps the closest thing we have to authentic interaction between speakers from a cross section of society in the days before audio recordings. Among these speech-related texts are trial proceedings presented in dialogue format and witness depositions-which are the focus of this study-as well as trial reports and minutes (which sometimes include language presented as dialogue), parliamentary debates, church council proceedings, and the like. We now have access to such texts in English, dating mainly from the sixteenth century onwards, in formats ranging from manuscripts, early imprints, later imprints, reprints, facsimiles, and text editions. The problems of working on historical linguistic data are well known to us, but additional complicating factors must be taken into AUTHORS' NOTE: We would like to thank Anne Curzan, Jonathan Culpeper, Peter Grund, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the draft version of this article.
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