The Linguistics of Spoken Communication in Early Modern English Writing: Exploring Bess of Hardwick's Manuscript Letters

by Imogen Marcus

Overview

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a  unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319660080
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	11/20/2017
Series:	New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Imogen Marcus is Lecturer in English Language at Edge Hill University, UK. She has published on the scribal profiling of early modern English letters, linguistic borrowing from French into English during the Middle English period and the interface between historical semantics and lexicography. She has also participated in the creation of two historical thesauruses.

Table of Contents

​Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Early Modern English manuscript letters as data: distinguishing between holograph and scribal writing.- Chapter 3: Prose structure.- Chapter 4: Prose structure in its social context.- Chapter 5: Lexical bundles.- Chapter 6: Vocatives.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“We have many reasons to be grateful to Imogen Marcus for this thoughtful, well-researched and engaging study of the letters of the socially-aspirant and socially mobile Bess of Hardwick. But above all, Marcus should be praised for her innovation in the area of scribal profiling and the confident ease in which she brings together discourse analysis and palaeography. Her close reading of the distinctive features of Bess’s language and the letter-forms of the numerous scribes who wrote them out – including one that she identifies as Bess herself – is impressive, and the methodology Marcus offers for those studying historical linguistics and palaeography has the potential to be transformative to both fields. That this has not been done before is tribute to Marcus’s wide-ranging expertise and fearless scholarship.” (Stewart J. Brookes, University of Cambridge, UK)

“This book brilliantly advances research on the relation between spoken and written language in the Early Modern English period. Its fine-grained analysis of previously unedited data provides a fresh outlook on historical discourse analysis, combined with rigorous philological investigation. Imogen Marcus critically engages with current theoretical models as much as with palaeographic analysis to arrive at innovative results on topics such as sentence boundaries, lexical bundles and vocatives. The book provides a highly readable account that will become a crucial reference in the whole field of studies on Early Modern English.” (Gabriella Mazzon, University of Innsbruck, Austria)

Editorial Reviews

With the wealth of detail covered, the volume is not necessarily an easy read. The text is richly illustrated by examples ... . The book can be recommended to anyone who is seriously interested in the study of Early Modern English ... .” (Terttu Nevalainen, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Vol. 22 (1), 2021)

From the Publisher