Abstract
In my paper, I shall be examining how the voracity for news which characterises Tudor and―to a larger extent―Stuart England can be mapped on the spoken discourse of society in Early Modern England. To do so I shall analyse the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 as representative of the spoken interaction of the past in the categories of authentic and constructed dialogues. By applying tools of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington 2004, 2009), I shall provide a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the word NEWS in the attempt to grasp the impact of news on people’s everyday life. While quantitative evidence will help us establish possible patterns of news vocabulary distribution from 1560 to 1760, the qualitative analysis of keywords in context will allow us to uncover collocational sets which can be interpreted in light of the evolving relationship between society and news in the historical period examined. The paper will also aim to provide an example of how corpus-assisted research in historical sociolinguistics can help us trace relations between language practices and context.
Highlights
The sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries are considered both by contemporaries and historians as the centuries of news (Zaret 2000)
Though the need to be informed is as old as human society itself, it is only from the sixteenth century that an unprecedented news culture takes shape in Early Modern Britain and it is in the course of the seventeenth century that it reaches its full realisation
My study can be placed within that research trend in historical news discourse which examines the distribution and collocation of newsrelated words in historical news corpora (Brownlees 2015; Bȍs 2015)
Summary
The sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries are considered both by contemporaries and historians as the centuries of news (Zaret 2000). The corpus only attests the presence of written news, scribal communication, especially in the form of private letters, was a very common practice in Early Modern England (Zaret 2000; Fox 2000) It presupposed the literacy of both writer and reader, though the content of the correspondence had the potential to reach a wider audience through the custom of reading letters aloud. Print mode Though the print mode of news transmission was on the market from the early sixteenth century, the CED records its presence no earlier than in period 4 (1680-1719) This time gap can be explained by assuming that a cultural phenomenon may take some time to be recognised and fully attested in the (fictional or real-life) spoken discourse of contemporaries. From occasional broadsides and pamphlets to newsbooks and early newspapers. (Cecconi 2009; Bȍs 2015)
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