A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language

Blake, N. F.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4039-1915-1

Cited by 48 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…Blake (: 281) observes that inverted epithet‐determiner order in terms of address (e.g. good my lord rather than my good lord ) is used in Shakespeare when a speaker requests a hearing or aims at attracting the sympathy of his/her interlocutor–who is normally a social superior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

González-Díaz

2017

Trans of the Philol Soc

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The present paper explores the synchronic distribution and historical development of an intensificatory construction that has so far received little attention in previous literature on English; i.e. what Huddleston and Pullum (2002) label as INTENSIFICATORY REPETITION (e.g. old old story, long long way). Synchronically, the paper records the existence of two functional subtypes of repetitive intensification (affection and degree) and expands previous accounts by showing the functional versatility of the degree intensificatory subtype. At the diachronic level, the paper dates the establishment of (degree) intensificatory repetition to the Late Modern English (LModE) period. It also suggests that (a) intensificatory affection was the first repetitive (sub)type to develop in the language, and (b) that its collocational expansion from Early Modern English (EModE) onwards may have paved the way for the establishment of its degree intensification counterpart.More generally, the paper shows that formulaic phraseology can contribute to the development of fully productive constructions and advocates the need for further study of 'minor' intensificatory constructions (such as the one explored here) and the way in which they may help to refine current standard descriptions of the English Noun Phrase. METHODOLOGYThe study is corpus-based. A range of single-and multi-genre compilations, both synchronic and diachronic, were consulted.The data for the PDE period comes from the British National Corpus (BNC). 4 All instances of intensificatory (adjectival) repetition were retrieved from the spoken BNC subcorpus. However, the size of the written BNC subcorpus (c. 98 million words) and the general nature of the string search performed (any two-adjective strings followed by a noun; see below on retrieval protocols) precluded the possibility of scrutinizing all tokens of the retrieved pattern (the query yielded 311,834 hits). In order to provide as reliable a solution as possible, all (written) BNC hits were randomised and the first 15,000 examples were selected for further analysis.Moving from present to past, the Middle English period (ME) was taken as the starting point of the diachronic investigation, as this is the period when complex premodifying NP strings (i.e. two or more adjectives) begin to be operative in English (see Fischer 2000;Fischer and Van der Wurff 2006). Although of course any data from previous periods of the language is by default written, care was taken to include compilations featuring text-types associated with 'speech-oriented' environments (e.g., private letters, drama, witness depositions and trials; Culpeper & Kyt€ o 2010: 17ff; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: 23; Lutzky 2012: 5).The PPCME2 5 was used as the main corpus for the ME period. For the EModE period, the PPCEME corpus, as well as a series of genre-specific diachronic compilations were consulted (i.e. the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), 6 the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) 7 and a self-compiled corpus of EModE drama 8 (CEMODEDRA...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

González-Díaz

2017

Trans of the Philol Soc

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“…In the interests of brevity, we omit a detailed comparison of adverbial clause structure in EME and present-day English; for grammatical descriptions, see Rissanen (1999) and Blake (2001). In the four sections that follow, we summarize particularly relevant sections of their explications.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Purpose clauses help to justify the meaning or import expressed in the main clause. In Blake (2001) and Rissanen (2011) they are referred to as "final" clauses. In our data, these clauses can start with so or so that, as in modern English.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverbial clauses and speaker and interlocutor gender in Shakespeare’s plays

McGarry

Kiser

2017

Palgrave Commun

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This study draws on previous findings regarding adverbial clauses in relation to speaker and interlocutor gender in a corpus of current actual speaker data. Our aim is to examine those same relations in a corpus of Shakespeare's comedies and histories. Mondorf (2004) investigated four types of adverbial clauses in a corpus of modern speech and found that the women used more causal, conditional and purpose clauses than the men, while the men used more concessive clauses. Mondorf's explanation for this difference is that women use the three clause types that mitigate the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition, while men tend to use more concessives, which strengthen the commitment. She also found that in mixed-gender conversations these trends were generally intensified. However, other analyses have indicated that these patterns do not hold across contexts. Much more research is called for to understand the localized relations among adverbial clause usage, speaker gender and context in particular settings. One question to pursue is whether we can see gendered patterns of adverbial usage in historical varieties of English. Accordingly, in this study we analyse dialogue in Shakespeare's plays to ascertain whether Mondorf's findings can be extrapolated to the language of these fictional speakers. The results indicate that Shakespeare generally does not use the adverbial clauses to portray the gender of the characters in ways similar to those of actual, modern speakers. Only small differences are found, regarding purpose clauses in the histories and conditional clauses in the comedies. The analysis indicates that female and male characters speak very similarly with regard to syntax, and adverbial clauses contribute to the construction of characters in very localized contexts.

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“…His rhetoric and his discourse tactics have been analyzed in depth with great sensitivity and keen literary awareness by esteemed literary scholars and linguists (among others, see Coulthard 1971;Widdowson 1982;Blake 2002;Keller 2009). My analysis of the above cited dialogue will not endeavor to offer aesthetic judgments, but will focus instead on obtaining information concerning possible modes of introduction and accomplishment of insinuation within the theoretical perspective sketched above.…”

Section: The Rhetorical Tools Of Insinuationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pragmatics of insinuation

Bertuccelli

2014

Intercultural Pragmatics

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In this paper, I focus on insinuation as a communicative strategy whereby\ud a speaker intends to make an addressee believe p, but does not want to be held\ud accountable for communicating p. In its micro- or macro-textual format, and in\ud its various degrees of nastiness, insinuation, I claim, is a complex process that\ud presupposes the mind’s capability to simultaneously activate and run multiple\ud parallel mental spaces, associated to different intentions. Through the analysis of\ud some examples, indirectness, manipulation, and deception will be shown to be\ud involved in the process to varying degrees. In the final section of the paper I discuss\ud how a Relevance-theoretic framework is able to accommodate the cognitive\ud aspects of insinuation highlighted in the text

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A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language

Cited by 48 publications

References 0 publications

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

Tracing The Development Of AnOld Old Story: Intensificatory Repetition In English

Adverbial clauses and speaker and interlocutor gender in Shakespeare’s plays

The pragmatics of insinuation

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