Daniela Landert. 2024. Methods in historical corpus pragmatics: Epistemic stance in Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 332 pp. ISBN 978-1-009-23741-3 (Hardback).

The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. It is also easy to remember. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word-stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon.

The Early Modern English cultural scene The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476 . This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492 . While its effect on our word stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon. The end-point of Early Middle English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. We have already mentioned the appearance of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes by Samuel Johnson in 1755 . That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicographical research.

Based on an extensive corpus-based study, this revealing book explores how epistemic stance is expressed in the early modern period, and in doing so, presents new methodologies for using corpora to investigate issues in historical pragmatics. It provides a new, corpus-driven method for the analysis of pragmatic functions that rely on context-dependent interpretations. By retrieving passages that include a high-density of the pragmatic function under investigation, the subsequent analysis can reveal previously neglected forms and context-dependent factors. It includes four empirical studies that apply the method to the analysis of epistemic stance in four Early Modern English corpora, the result of which emphasise the importance of context for the expression of stance. It also includes an appendix with inventories of Early Modern English stance expressions, offering starting points for further research studies. It is essential reading for researchers and students in historical pragmatics and corpus pragmatics.

This article presents a historical cognitive analysis of the development of phrasal verbs (PVs) with out and away in Early and Late Modern English. Semantically, PVs in Present-Day English can be classified as being (a) fully compositional (e.g. go out), (b) partially idiomatic, with the particle having an aspectual (i.e. grammatical) function (e.g. work away) and (c) (fully or highly) idiomatic (e.g. make out ‘understand’; see Quirk et al. 1985, Jackendoff 2010). As is clear from this classification, the development of PVs has, at least, involved grammaticalization and idiomatization. However, there is no consensus in recent grammaticalization research on how these two kinds of changes are related.The literature suggests that the particles used in the partially idiomatic PVs were undergoing grammaticalization in the Old and Middle English periods. Therefore, to understand the semantic and conceptual relationships between partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs, a closer investigation of the uses of PVs after Early Modern English is in order. In this article, focusing on the distributions of away and out taken from colloquial corpora of Early and Late Modern English, namely, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), it is shown through descriptive characterizations that the partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs are instances of idiomatization caused by grammaticalization and by lexicalization, respectively. Based on these observations, the developments of these two types of PVs can be explained by a Usage-Based Model put forth mainly by Langacker (2000) and Bybee (2006, 2010). Specifically, the idiomatization of partially idiomatic PVs involves repeated schema extractions leading to productivity, whereas the idiomatization of fully or highly idiomatic PVs involves the ‘conserving effect’, whereby a highly entrenched linguistic expression with high frequency resists further language change.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHannah August is a lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. She undertook her postgraduate study at King's College London, where she specialized in the reception of early modern drama in print and performance. Her work on this topic has appeared in the collection The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (Manchester University Press, 2015); she is also preparing a chapter for the forthcoming collection Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (Arden Shakespeare Intersections, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph on the history of reading commercial drama in quarto, entitled Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England.Jane Hwang Degenhardt is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, constructions of the “human,” and the intersecting histories of race and religion. She is completing a book that explores new understandings of “fortune” that developed in relation to early modern English global expansion. She is also working on a collaborative book project with Henry Turner that explores pluralistic understandings of the concept of “world” in Shakespeare’s plays as a means to imagining alternatives to globalization and an anthropocentric future.Alexander Paulsson Lash is assistant professor at National Taiwan University. His current book project, Theater Worlds: Staging Global London, 1576–1688, shows how early modern theaters shaped the spatial perceptions of playgoers, capturing their experience of disorientation and excitement as London expanded into a global city.Jane Rickard is an associate professor in seventeenth-century English literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, 2007), and coeditor (with Martin Butler) of Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph on Ben Jonson and his early readers.Lauren Robertson is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is currently completing her first book, Entertaining Uncertainty: The Phenomenology of the Early Modern English Commercial Theater. In it, she argues that the theater actively cultivated experiences of ambiguity and confusion for its spectators, transforming the period's multifarious cultural confrontations with doubt into deeply satisfactory objects of attention.Suzanne Tartamella is associate professor of English at Henderson State University, where she teaches courses in Renaissance and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays (Duquesne University Press, 2014), as well as articles appearing in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Her recent projects include a comparative essay on silent women in Jonson and Shakespeare and a monograph on Christian self-identity and the aesthetics of foreignness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 48, Number 1Spring 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709974 Views: 172 © 2020 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Victoria Moul, Jonson Horace and the Classical TraditionJonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Victoria Moul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vii+248.

Review of Landert (2024): Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics: Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.Constance JordanConstance JordanClaremont Graduate University Search for more articles by this author Claremont Graduate UniversityPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorna Hutson's comprehensive and deftly executed study of early modern English drama and its engagement with legal texts and concepts represents two closely related subjects: English law as it moves from a medieval modality reflecting Roman inquisitorial law to early modern common law practices centered on the evaluation of evidence; and contemporary English theater as it reflects both institutions but emphasizes, over time, such common law practices as the testimony of witnesses, the jury as determiners of fact, and the forensic oratory required to convince a court that what is represented to it is true. The Invention of Suspicion places the largely benign development of common law in perspectives that both illuminate and shadow its effects. Evidential practices tended to obviate the tyranny of the inquisitor, but they also allowed for prosecutorial or judicial error, whether intentional or accidental. As Hutson shows, early modern English plays dramatize such error, often the product of the deft uses of language that law promotes and even celebrates.The juridical character of the medieval morality play illustrates perhaps the most important feature of the inquisitor's court: its reliance on conscience. The action of a morality play moves through rituals of confession, penance, and then absolution; it features a jurisdiction, Hutson observes, that has a demonic aspect—once absolved, the criminal can never be innocent. In A treatise concernynge the division betwene the spirytualtie and temporaltie (1532), Christopher St. German argues that a jurisprudence centered on conscience needs to be tempered by a consideration of evidence. Specifically, he proposes that culpability at law is not to be answered by ready restitution—assuming wrongdoing—but rather by examination of “‘the due evidence that is required for making of restitutions', that is, the examination of evidence of a moral obligation to repay” (53). By contrast, Thomas More, St. German's opponent in this debate, regards the judge conscientiously as God's proxy and the jury as incapable of determining fact; for St. German, the jury's only and all important role is to determine fact (61). Their positions reflect their respective practices: inquisitorial justice gets what the judge regards as proof; evidential justice determines fact, which being subject to pro and contra argument necessarily remains “a contentious conjectural issue,” in other words, not a truth but an act (77). Hutson establishes that Titus Andronicus (1594) dramatizes “the refusal of an open hearing of evidence” as incident to “political tyranny” (91). The evidence that it presents is not examined as more or less probable but rather taken as proof the emperor Saturninus chooses to accept (96). But she also suggests why evidence, however gathered but necessarily rendered in descriptive terms before a court, should itself be subject to critical review. The actions of Titivillus, the delightful amanuensis demon in Mankind (1465), reveal how words and thus the evidence they report can be manipulated and misconstrued, by contrast to Mercy's infallible words at the Last Judgment, as he “schall rewle the mater wythowte contrauersye” (42).Narrative and its rhetorical construction therefore become issues in the investigation of evidential justice. Central to its representation in drama is Hutson's analysis of mimesis, specifically, the imitation of the action that constitutes the dramatic narrative. Conventionally, actions under legal scrutiny are to be skeptically examined, most especially when searching for their causes: do the circumstances of place, time, occasion, and means have significance? But the brilliance of the theater Hutson goes on to examine resides precisely in the possibilities it creates for moral inversion: the rhetoric used to describe dramatic action transforms it; rather than what is “really there,” we the audience see what the “words persuade us to see,” even to the point of our inferring “inward and psychological causes” for what characters wish or hope to do (137, 155–56). Such is the ars occulta that reshapes the elements of dramatic intrigue so that it becomes an image of a fallible jurisprudence. Modeled on the works of Terence and Plautus, English comedies of the midcentury associate evidential procedures with “illusion-producing power” (177). Audiences at John Foxe's Titus and Gesippus (1544), Jacke Jugeler (1562), Gammer Gurton's Needle (1562–63), and Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1552) could see such power at work, fashioning an antimorality from the drama's exercise of justice. Latent certainly in the practice of evidential justice in which mistakes really do occur, a fallible jurisprudence becomes explicit in theater. Hutson instances Gascoigne's Supposes (1566), whose false inferences Gascoigne explicitly notes in the margins of his revision of the play The Posies (1575).Hutson then considers whether early modern English plays stage a counterargument to their satirical representations of evidential justice gone awry. Do they dramatize the fundamental equities inherent in evidential justice as the basis for political and social stability? In response, she analyzes a brilliantly evocative example of such counterargument in The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster or 2 Henry VI (1594), which begins as the play's citizens noisily intervene to demand an investigation of the death of Duke Humphrey. This effectively supports Warwick's coroner-like examination of Humphrey's body, whose signs he reads as indicating violence resulting in murder, and makes the commons, in Hutson's words, “a kind of jury.” The action as a whole becomes “cathartic,” dispelling “the sense of judicial procedure as the plaything of those in power in the regime” (245). It is worth noting, because Shakespeare's audience certainly would have, how deeply this scene evokes an image of public participation in the evidential practices of common law. A look at such handbooks as William Lambarde's Eirenarcha, or of the Office of the Justices of Peace in foure Bookes (London, 1614); Michael Dalton's The Countrey Justice, conteyning the practise of the Iustices of the Peace out of their Sessions (London, 1618); and William Sheppard's An Epitome of all the Common & Statute Lawes of this Nation Now in force (1656) confirms the vital role of the citizenry, persons on whom officers enforcing the law could and did count. Sir Thomas Smith, describing the workings of the commonwealth in De republica Anglorum (1583), observes that a constable in search of a “theefe” “ought to raise the parish to aid him.…[Thus] euerie English man is a sergiant to take the theefe” (ed. Mary Dewar [Cambridge University Press, 1982], bk. 2, chap. 7, 107), a dictum that Dalton's Countrey Justice states as a rule: “Euery Private man may arrest another, whom he knoweth to have committed Robbery, Manslaughter, or other felony, and may deliuer him to the Constable of the towne where such an offender is apprehended” (Countrey Justice, 295). The citizens of 2 Henry VI are therefore behaving responsibly in raising a hue and cry. As Hutson notes, Cynthia Herrup, Malcolm Gaskill, John Langbein, Barbara Shapiro, and others have shown that the integrity of the citizen was—and indeed had to be—assumed in situations more deliberative than those requiring unofficial police power, namely, in the conduct of jury trials establishing the facts of a case.Hutson's final chapters on revenge tragedy and the treatment of suspicion in Shakespeare and Jonson focus on the challenge implicit in the interpretation of evidence. To begin with, evidence must be looked for and, in order to have probative value, must correlate with circumstance. Advising justices of the peace how to identify a person whose behavior is suspect prior to presenting the court with a “bil of Enditement,” William Lambarde, paraphrasing Cicero's directives in De inventio that are designed to instruct counsel how to argue a case, takes note of “what things be materiall to induce Suspicion.” I quote those covered as “present” or “subsequent” circumstance: “Time: as being very early or late which be fit for the doing of evuill that will not abide the light; Space sufficient to performe the feate; Place, conuenient & meete for the act as a Wood, Dale, house or other place of aduantage; Occasion, rightly taken, as which being omitted, the fact could not follow; Comparison, as that none but hee, or none so commodiously as hee, could commit the fact; Hope, to haue it concealed by these aduantages, or to escape with it” (Eirenarcha, 217–19). Beyond the determination of suspicious behavior, the Justice here acquires both the terms and an organization of topics suitable for the narrative he will need to construct when he takes the person he has arrested before a jury. Given these suggestive instructions, however, it is also clear that the Justice's narrative and the facts it purports to establish is sometimes never more than good enough—good enough perhaps to bring a case but not absolutely incontrovertible. In her discussion of Love's Labor's Lost (1595), Hutson concludes by observing that some cases, typically those involving promises, will be resolved rather than decided and will depend on what she terms “the risky extension of faith” (302). Jonson's comedies, the subject of Hutson's concluding pages, dramatize interpretations of evidence that are patently abusive. They become pretexts for calculating risk. In her words, probability is now “future-oriented” (333).Literary historians have increasingly accepted the invitation to read literature, especially the drama of early modern England and Shakespeare, as representing kinds of law and therefore to take critical account of more specialized kinds of literary analysis. This is not to say that such older studies as Edward J. White's Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare, with Explanations of the Legal Terms Used in the Plays, Poems, and Sonnets, and a Consideration of the Criminal Types Presented (St. Louis: Thomas Law Book, 1913) have lost their interest or usefulness. Hutson's The Invention of Suspicion is, however, uniquely conceived and configured. Engaging multiple perspectives not only on relevant play texts but also on their extradramatic contexts, legal and critical, it situates our understanding of early modern English drama in the deep legal structures that both permitted and resolved the conflicts within society as well as promoted their transposition to the stage. Its method is dialogic: it identifies the rhetorical strategies and their sources in Cicero and Quintilian that make early modern English drama persuasive and moving; it reveals the significance of the legal texts that inform the law the plays dramatize; and it draws on, not without contesting, recent dramatic and historical criticism of the early modern period to further make its points. The Invention of Suspicion is a superbly conceived and executed book, offering readers new insights into the complex relationships that determined the character of legal and dramatic literature in early modern England. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659616 Views: 34Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Charts the historical development of the English phonological system GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup(['ISBN:9780748634682','ISBN:9780748634699','ISBN:9780748634975','ISBN:9780748677559','ISBN:9780748677542']); A thorough and fascinating exploration of the evolution of English’ phonological structure, this book traces the history of individual sounds and their representation through Old, Middle, Early Modern and Present Day English. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book covers the sounds of English, consonantal histories, Middle English dialects, vowel quality and quantity in Early Modern English, the English stress system and Early English verse forms to demonstrate how the present form of the language is indebted to its past. Key Features Places linguistic findings into historical, literary and social contexts Explains Modern English’s phonological features in terms of its development Please click on the following link to download the online companion to be used together with the book: Online Companion to A Historical Phonology of English "

Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. In this article, she provides a detailed accounting of the role of register in research on the historical development of language. Her substantial body of work has focused on both the historical development of specific registers, as well as how historical change has been mediated by register. Her research has encompassed a range of time periods (from Early Modern English to the 19th century) and registers (for example, depositions, Salem witchcraft records, and dialogues). Her many edited collections have brought historical linguists together into comprehensive and rigorous volumes, including theCambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics(Kytö & Pahta 2016, Cambridge University Press),English in Transition: Corpus-Based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles(Rissanen, Kytö, & Heikkonen 1997, De Gruyter), andDevelopments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence(Taavitsainen, Kytö, Claridge, & Smith 2014, Cambridge University Press). She has been a key contributor to the development of principled historical corpora, such as theHelsinki Corpus of English Textsproject, which represents a range of registers from Old and Middle English to Early Modern English. Merja Kytö has long been a leader in demonstrating how systematic attention to register can result in rich profiles of historical development, and in addressing the inherent challenges involved in utilizing historical documents for linguistic research.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreKimberly Huth is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and genre theory in Studies in Philology and Cahiers Elisabethains. Currently she is researching the representation of war veterans in Shakespeare’s vision of Rome.Thomas J. Moretti is assistant professor of English and editor of The Shakespeare Newsletter at Iona College. His current work focuses on the interplay between religion and gender in early modern English drama. His writings include essays on religious mediation in such plays as John Webster’s The White Devil and on the linkages between theater, hospitality, and time in King Lear. He received the Renascence journal’s Dr. Joseph M. Schwartz Memorial Prize for his essay on the tensions between gender ideology and Christian rule in Henry VI, Part 3.Jennifer Panek is associate professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), a Norton Critical Edition of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, and recent articles in English Literary Renaissance and English Literary History on masculinity and male sexuality on the early modern stage. She is currently working on a book-length project on sexuality and shame in early modern drama.Chloe Preedy is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Exeter (Penryn campus). This article extends her previous research into the “politic” appropriation of religious rhetoric for personal, political, or financial gain, as explored in her monograph Marlowe’s Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Arden, 2013). The article’s focus upon the question of how Ben Jonson conceived of and represented theatrical value in his comedies also anticipates her next book project, which investigates how early modern dramatists negotiated issues of theatrical authority within the open-air play-houses.Bradley D. Ryner is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University. His first book, Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600–1642 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), examines the generative relationship between dramatic form and economic thought. He is also the coeditor, along with Darlene Farabee and Mark Netzloff, of Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on a monograph on questions of ontology and agency in early English drama. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 42, Number 2Fall 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679457 © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatreed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison Frank Swannack Uman, Deborah and Sara Morrison, eds, Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre( Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 232; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781409449003. Editors Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison claim the essays collected in this volume ‘complicate what has become a standard reading of the blazon’ (p. 3). However, the blazonic dismembering of the female body is a somewhat over-familiar trope in early modern studies. Perhaps in recognition of the difficulty of providing fresh insights into the subject, the editors admit that the anthology is indebted to the critical work of Nancy Vickers and Jonathan Sawday. The essays also draw heavily upon Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Grant Williams’s essay uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories and early modern notions of lovesickness to interesting effect. Unfortunately they lack clarification, and the essay seems rushed. A far more accomplished piece is Katherine R. Kellett’s analysis of the underappreciated female ghosts in the complaint poems of the 1590s. She finds an affinity with these female ghosts in Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. Hermione’s uncertain state between living and dead allows Kellett to explore the blazon through an incorporeal body. Elizabeth Williamson examines courtly love in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The confusion of gendered identities and bodies caused by a boy actor playing Julia finds its expression with a sympathetic audience. Lisa S. Starks-Estes investigates the blazon being staged literally in Titus Andronicus. She argues that [End Page 257]Shakespeare uses ‘a fresh, new, innovative Ovid’ to reinvent the Petrarchan sonnet (p. 54). Her reading of Lavinia being played by a boy actor and the conceit’s resonance with Ovid’s Metamorphosesis fascinating. Sara Morrison finds a refreshing change in the use of blazonic language by female characters in Measure for Measureand The Duchess of Malfi. In particular, she gives details of how Petrarchan conventions are used to depict scars on the female body that represent pain on stage. Patricia Marchesi’s captivating essay examines how theatrical props and human limbs become interchangeable in the B-text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The fact that traitors’ dismembered limbs were displayed in Elizabethan society finds an intriguing correlation with the way Faustus’s body is easily pulled apart. Added to this is Marchesi’s insight that Faustus is comparable to the objectified beloved of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ariane M. Balizet’s subject is cuckoldry in Arden of Favershamand A Woman Killed with Kindness. More specifically, she looks at ‘blazons ofmen bymen’ (p. 98). Balizet argues that the dehumanising effect of the cuckold’s horns erodes the husband’s role as the head of the household. Thomas P. Anderson explores Julie Taymor’s Titus(1999), a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus. He argues that Lavinia’s fragmented body in the film ‘offers a form of corporeal feminism’ (p. 111). The most fascinating section of Anderson’s essay is his exploration of the artificial limbs and how Lavinia attempts to make her dismembered body whole again. Joseph M. Ortiz investigates other uses for the blazon apart from erotic desire. In Shakespeare’s history plays, he finds faces being scrutinised for signs of royal legitimacy. His impressive close reading of Henry Vfinds an allusion to printed history books. Lisa Dickson examines scenes of fragmented and dismembered bodies and texts in The War of the Rosesand The Plantagenets. Erin E. Kelly argues that The Rebellion of Naplesshould be regarded as a play rather than a play-pamphlet. Its graphic depictions of violence imitate the falling apart of Charles I’s body politic. The ending to Kelly’s essay is the most enigmatic and chilling in the anthology. The problems of blazoning the female reproductive body in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whoreare investigated by Sara D. Luttfring. In particular, she examines Giovanni’s anxieties over his sister’s sinful womb. Nancy Simpson-Younger explores identity in the sleeping or dead characters...

English Literary Renaissance (Winter, 2017, pp. 1–192; Spring, 2017, pp. 193–323; Autumn, 2017, pp. 325–448)

We argue that traditional breaking of the historical long vowels in the predecessor of Southern Standard British English (e.g. Wells 1982, 213ff) is in fact ongliding to (or prevocalisation of) r in jr/wr which has been ongoing starting with (at least) Middle English, continued into Early Modern English and Southern Standard British English. It can be captured as prevocalisation of pharyngeal r before j/w-final diphthongs in terms of gestural phonology, producing sequences like fijər fear, fejər fare. This schwa-like onglide to r allows us to look at Middle English from a different perspective, from the point of view of a ‘tug of war’ between the long monophthongs and diphthongs (inherited from Old English, to which we can add Old French and Norse words) with identical stressed peaks (e.g. ij tile vs iː life, nice; uː shower vs uw power, etc.). This resulted in a merger favouring a diphthongal basis in the southern varieties of Middle English (as opposed to its northern counterparts, in which a monophthongal basis was established), resulting in fire/shower (< Old English fȳr/scūr) having ij and uw, respectively, setting the stage for prevocalisation in jr/wr (merging them with original ijə(r)/uwə(r)). We explore some of the consequences of such a supposition.

This chapter seeks to establish if the Transitivity Hypothesis (Hopper & Thompson 1980) can explain the variation in the use of two reflexive strategies with the verb sit in Early Modern English (e.g. I sat me down/I sat myself down) and the verb’s subsequent transitivization (e.g. he sat me down). By studying data from large historical corpora, we will re-evaluate the results of earlier research and establish why sit continued to be used with the simple reflexive strategy (i.e. with object pronouns) until the Late Modern period. In our analysis of the transitivization of sit (down), we focus on both micro-level semantic and syntactic factors and more general developments that have supported the transitivization of verbs in Late Modern English.