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

The Linguistics of Keyboard-to-screen Communication: A New Terminological Framework

New forms of communication that have recently developed in the context of Web 2.0 make it necessary to reconsider some of the analytical tools of linguistic analysis. In the context of keyboard-to-screen communication (KSC), as we shall call it, a range of old dichotomies have become blurred or cease to be useful altogether, e. g. "asynchronous" versus "synchronous", "written" versus "spoken", "monologic" versus "dialogic", and in particular "text" versus "utterance". We propose alternative terminologies ("communicative act" and "communicative act sequence") that are more adequate to describe the new realities of online communication and can usefully be applied to such diverse entities as weblog entries, tweets, status updates on social network sites, comments on other postings and to sequences of such entities. Furthermore, in the context of social network sites, different forms of communication traditionally separated (i. e. blog, chat, email and so on) seem to converge. We illustrate and discuss these phenomena with data from Twitter and Facebook

“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

The diachrony of im/politeness in American and British movies (1930-2019)

In this paper, we use a relatively new source of data, the Movie Corpus, to explore the common stereotype that politeness standards keep falling. In this data, which contains transcripts of movies from 1930 to 2019, we trace a range of elements that have relatively clear default politeness or impoliteness values (e.g. please, could you and a range of title nouns versus swear words). And we introduce a terminological distinction between conduct politeness and etiquette politeness. The results suggest a complex picture of some “polite” expressions that are indeed declining (e.g. title nouns, would you (please)) while others are rising (e.g. can you (please)). Many “impolite” swear words have increased considerably over the last five decades. We carefully discuss the reliability of these results, which fully depend on the composition of the corpus and its consistency over time as well as on the reliability of the chosen elements as im/politeness indicators. We compare the results for American/Canadian and for British/Irish movies (following the distinction of the Movie Corpus), and we discuss the extent to which movies can be taken as indicators of language change in general

“The uh deconstructed pumpkin pie”: the use of 'uh' and 'um' in Los Angeles restaurant server talk

Recent work on the elements uh and um has focused both on their functional profile and on the sociodemographic patterns of use. They have been shown to be more than just a signal of some trouble in the speech production process; they also perform text structuring functions that are usually ascribed to discourse markers. And their use has been shown to stratify according to gender, age and level of education (e.g. Tottie 2011, 2014). However, such work has not always been sufficiently controlled for context. Differences that were identified for specific speaker groups may ultimately have been caused by different speaker roles or by differences in the formality or privacy of the communicative situation. For this reason, we focus on one single communicative situation, service encounters in selected and socially stratified Los Angeles restaurants. And we focus on one single speaker role, the role of the server. This allows us to test hypotheses about gender differences and socio-economic stratification in a much more controlled environment. In addition, we provide a functional profile of uh and um in this carefully delimited context, and we show that they are not only used in their often-described functions as planners, hesitators or repair managers but also with a highlighting or a face-mitigating function. The highlighting function turns out to be particularly prominent to emphasize food terminology when servers present menu items to their guests

Translating Middle English (Im)politeness: The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale

Some of the bawdy details of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales continue to pose challenges to translators, who must find renderings that are both descriptively and stylistically adequate. The Miller’s Tale provides an illustrative case study, in which the drunken narrator describes Nicholas’s rather physical wooing of the carpenter’s wife Alisoun in graphic detail. Existing translations of the key term queynte range from the flowery euphemism to the straightforward vulgarism. An appropriate translation into present-day English needs to be based not only on sound philological analysis, but also on a careful evaluation of the register of the original Middle English expression. This article offers a corpus-based assessment of relevant candidate expressions in order to propose a translation that captures the appropriate level of (im)politeness, both of the narrator towards his fellow pilgrims and of Chaucer towards his readers

The diachrony of im/politeness in American and British movies (1930–2019)

In this paper, we use a relatively new source of data, the Movie Corpus, to explore the common stereotype that politeness standards keep falling. In this data, which contains transcripts of movies from 1930 to 2019, we trace a range of elements that have relatively clear default politeness or impoliteness values (e.g. please, could you and a range of title nouns versus swear words). And we introduce a terminological distinction between conduct politeness and etiquette politeness. The results suggest a complex picture of some “polite” expressions that are indeed declining (e.g. title nouns, would you (please)) while others are rising (e.g. can you (please)). Many “impolite” swear words have increased considerably over the last five decades. We carefully discuss the reliability of these results, which fully depend on the composition of the corpus and its consistency over time as well as on the reliability of the chosen elements as im/politeness indicators. We compare the results for American/Canadian and for British/Irish movies (following the distinction of the Movie Corpus), and we discuss the extent to which movies can be taken as indicators of language change in general

Speech acts and speech act sequences: greetings and farewells in the history of American English

Greetings and farewells mark the boundaries of conversations; they are often formulaic and are generally claimed to be devoid of propositional content. However, they are often embedded in longer exchanges, and within such exchanges individual expressions may or may not have propositional content. This contribution discusses some of the inherent problems of retrieving speech acts, such as greetings and farewells, from a corpus. This is illustrated with a diachronic analysis of greetings and farewells in two hundred years of American English as documented in the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). In the nineteenth century, the most frequent greetings were “good morning” and “how are you?” and the most frequent leave-taking expression was farewell while in Present-day American English the expressions hi and hello dominate as greetings and goodbye and “bye bye” as leave-taking expressions. The two phrases “how do you do?” and “how are you?” serve as examples that show how formulaic and literal uses have coexisted over the entire period covered by COHA, with a shift from a predominance of literal uses to a predominance of formulaic uses, particularly in the case of “how do you do?”. However, both phrases remain ambiguous in their uses. The interactants discursively assign a more literal or more formulaic force to them