Description, Evaluation and Stance: Exploring the Forms and Functions of Speech Descriptors in Early Modern English

Abstract

This article explores the form and function of "speech descriptors". These features describe in some way what a speech event that is being represented was like, such as loudly in She said loudly that she was unhappy. Based on data from Early Modern English witness depositions, the study reveals that a number of aspects of represented speech can be described by speech descriptors and that such descriptors come in a number of linguistic forms. Prepositional phrases, adverbs, and adjective constructions are the most common forms, and speech descriptors can signal aspects of evaluation (e.g., angrily), clarification (e.g., meaning), and formulation hedging (e.g., or words to that effect), among other features. The article underscores the importance of further attention to these descriptors in order to gain a full understanding of the dynamics of speech representation in historical periods.

Epistemic space and key concepts in early and late modern medical discourse: an exploration of two genres

“…By starting with lockwords, one can uncover all forms of epistemic stance marking within range of particular key concepts, so maybe the diachronic change is not as stark or clear-cut as previously suggested. This investigation has also shown how such meaning can be pragmatically indicated or implied through scoping not restricted to the immediate syntactic context of the proposition in question (see also Grund 2017Grund , 2021. Even though this phenomenon is nowhere near as frequent as the oft discussed explicit marking of epistemic stance, it does show how general textual conventions and the broader discourse context play just as significant a role as the immediate syntactic or sentential environment (as found, for example, with matrix clauses).…”

“…That is, markers of epistemic stance are not searched for directly but are rather located in the immediate or near-immediate textual vicinity of the lockwords in question. A similar approach to speech descriptors in witness depositions from the Salem witch trials is taken by Grund (2017), who locates these speech descriptors in the immediate vicinity of overt markers of speech acts, while Landert (2019)by initially searching for well-known stance markersattempts to uncover lesser-known stance markers, knowing that such markers tend to cluster together in texts (as is also seen in the examples above). Initially, a search for frequent clusters or collocates was conducted (following Plappert's (2017Plappert's ( , 2019 bottom-up approach to epistemic implicature), but this turned up only a number of low-frequency grammatical constructions (of the uterus, the child and), nothing comparable to the kinds of lexical clusters uncovered in Plappert's work (admittedly based on a much larger dataset).…”

“…These studies have certainly made valuable contributions to the history of scientific discourse, but the more nuanced role played by particular phrases and collocations in the expression of epistemic meaning has generally been overlooked (even though Susan Hunston has long stressed the multifaceted nature of epistemic stance and the myriad forms it can take; see, e.g., Hunston & Sinclair 2000, Hunston 2007; see also Englebretson 2007b, Jaffe 2009. Two exceptions to this trend in historical stance research are the work of Grund (2012Grund ( , 2013Grund ( , 2017Grund ( , 2021 and Landert (2019), both of whom adopt a function-to-form approach (Taavitsainen & Jucker 2010: 16-18) to their dataseeking all relevant expressions of stance they can find, whatever form they may take. Neither Grund nor Landert, however, concentrate on medical discourse.…”

“…Boye's main concern, for instance, is differentiating the proposition from 'states-of-affairs' (or verifiable/ falsifiable facts from events that are said to occur), 6 and broader questions of scope on a textual scaleevidenced in examples (3) and (4)lie beyond the confines of his discussion. Both Grund (2017Grund ( , 2021 and Whitt (2018) have noted that work such as Boye's (2010Boye's ( , 2012 tends to be based on decontextualised examples and they provide data that reveal more discursive-level scoping between epistemic stance markers and their respective propositions. Grund, in particular, conceives of the notion of pragmatic scope to cover such cases.…”

Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in theOld Bailey Corpus

“…Specifically, I explore how speech reporters (whether witnesses, the scribes taking down the records, court officials or others) evaluate, frame and position the speech that they represent in the court records in the Old Bailey Corpus , which covers the late Early Modern English and especially the Late Modern English periods (1720–1913). In this article (as part of a broader interest and project), I investigate speech descriptors (Grund 2017, 2018), which are metalinguistic features of the kind seen in (1) and (2). It was said exultingly (t18210411-64) 2 he used most disgusting language (t18460706-1443) …”