Speech Representation in the History of English

Abstract

This volume explores the speech representation of the past, comprising in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech in the history of English. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods, the chapters are concerned with topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of BE like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Various social contexts and genres are covered, including witness depositions, literary texts, letters, histories, and the spoken language of the recent past. The chapters draw on historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and corpus linguistics in showing a wide array of approaches to the study of speech representation in the history of English.