14. Quotations in Early Modern English Witness Depositions

Abstract

This chapter discusses the use of direct speech quotations in Early Modern English witness depositions, which are the official records of a witness's oral testimony. In particular, it focuses on the preface position in direct speech quotations in this text type, which typically takes the form of third person narratives in the past tense, reporting previous speech events in indirect form. The witness depositions included in A Corpus of Early English Dialogues 1560-1760 will be studied to discover which lexical means are attested at the beginning of direct speech quotations to signal shifts in speech reporting, considering that punctuation was not consistently used to this end at this time. The analysis will first focus on the preface position in general in order to investigate how direct speech quotations are introduced in the corpus and to discover to what extent attestations in this position are explicitly associated with direct speech reporting (and potentially spoken language). Then, a closer look will be taken at the role pragmatic markers play in this position and how their structural and interpersonal functions may be linked to the change in speech presentation. The aim is to gain further insights into the linguistic means attested in preface position in direct speech quotations of Early Modern English witness depositions. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.