Irma Taavitsainen

Päivi Pahta

Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.

Medical Writing in Early Modern English

Saara Nevanlinna

First publication of late medieval prose version of the legend of St Katherine of Alexandria.

The Late Middle English Prose Legend in Southwell Minster MS 7

St. Katherine of Alexandria

Uusfilologinen Yhdistys

Leena Kahlas-Tarkka

Mémoires

Andreas H. Jucker

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

Speech Acts in the History of English

Jukka Tuominen

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics

This volume traces the multifaceted concept of manners in the history of English from the late medieval through the early and late modern periods right up to the present day. It focuses in particular on transgressions of manners and norms of behaviour as an analytical tool to shed light on the discourse of polite conduct and styles of writing. The papers collected in this volume adopt both literary and linguistic perspectives. The fictional sources range from medieval romances and Shakespearean plays to eighteenth-century drama, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and present-day television comedy drama. The non-fictional data includes conduct books, medical debates and petitions written by lower class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributions focus in particular on the following questions: What are the social and political ideologies behind rules of etiquette and norms of interaction, and what can we learn from blunders and other transgressions?

Literary and linguistic approaches

Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English

Gunnel Melchers

This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest. The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.

Irma Taavitsainen

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