Features of orality in the language of fiction: A corpus-based investigation

This paper explores the pervasiveness of features of orality in the language of performed fiction. Features of orality are typical of spontaneous spoken conversations where they are the result of the ongoing planning process and the interaction between the interlocutors, but they also occur in the context of performed fiction (movies and plays) and in narrative fiction (e.g. novels). In these contexts, they are not the result of the spontaneous planning process but are generally produced to imitate such processes. In this paper, I explore a small range of such features (contractions, interjections, discourse markers, response forms and hesitators) in four corpora of performed fiction that have recently become available (Corpus of American Soap Operas, TV Corpus, Movies Corpus and Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue) and compare their frequency patterns with spontaneous face-to-face conversations in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and with narrative fiction and academic writing in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results confirm that the selected features of orality are used regularly in performed fiction but less frequently than in spontaneous face-to-face interactions while they are rare in narrative fiction and almost entirely absent in academic writing. The results also show that the status of the transcriptions contained in these corpora needs to be assessed very carefully if they are to be used for a study of pragmatic features

Bringing historical contexts and language use together, or how to do historical sociopragmatics: Historical sociopragmatics, by J. Culpeper (ed.) (2011)

No abstract available

Kommunikationsformen - über zeitliche und disziplinäre Grenzen hinweg

Der Sammelband Kommunikationsformen im Wandel der Zeit umfasst Aufsätze aus den Disziplinen Anglistik (Linguistik, Didaktik, Mediävistik, Literaturwissenschaft), Germanistik (Linguistik, Didaktik, Mediävistik), Romanistik (Linguistik, Didaktik) und Psychologie. Ziel der Herausgeber, Gerd Fritz und Andreas H. Jucker, ist es, die Struktur und Dimension von - häufig ineinander greifenden - Kommunikations-, Dialog- und Textentwicklungen in ihrer Tiefe darzustellen, besonders durch die Kontrastierung alter und neuer Kommunikationsformen: Letztere verbinden Tradition und Innovation, indem in ihnen alte Kommunikationsformen auf ein neues Medium übertragen und dabei sukzessive modifiziert werden. Der Sammelband präsentiert durchgehend eine evolutionäre Sichtweise der Geschichte von Kommunikationsformen

Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics

No abstract available

“I rede þou lerne wel þis of me”: Advice giving in Middle English medical discourse

Advice giving has been one of the main concerns of instructional medical discourse in the history of English. These texts tell their readers how they should behave in order to preserve or regain their health. In this contribution, we focus on the Middle English period up to 1500 with a brief look at some earlier manifestations in Old English. Our data comes from the digital corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT). We approach the speech act of advice giving through a careful analysis of relevant metaillocutionary expressions, i.e. terms that are used to either perform a speech act (performative uses) or to talk about them (narrative uses). In MEMT, only two lexical items are attested, rede, which goes back to Old English and occurs mainly in the older text tradition of remedy books, and counsel, which is more often attested in the specialized texts and in the surgical texts. The examples also show that advice giving in MEMT is not restricted to issues of preserving and regaining health but extends to courteous behavior in the interaction between the medical professionals and their patients