Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

The Linguistics of Spoken Communication in Early Modern English Writing

Exploring Bess of Hardwick's Manuscript Letters

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Imogen Marcus

    1. Department of English, History and Creative Writing, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Provides a fresh perspective on debates surrounding linguistic change in the Early Modern Period
  • Problematizes existing research about the evolution of prose writing and challenges assumptions about the process of standardization in English
  • Takes a discourse-analytic approach to prose structure that takes orality manifested in textual material into account
  • Accounts for the complex nature of historical data sources by considering Bess of Hardwick's use of scribes

Part of the book series: New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics (NAEHL)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xviii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 1-38

  3. Early Modern English Manuscript Letters as Data: Distinguishing Between Holograph and Scribal Writing

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 39-134

  4. Prose Structure

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 135-224

  5. Prose Structure in Its Social Context

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 225-253

  6. Lexical Bundles

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 255-298

  7. Vocatives

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 299-319

  8. Conclusion

    • Imogen Marcus
    Pages 321-331

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 333-357
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

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.

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) “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)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, History and Creative Writing, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom

    Imogen Marcus

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.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation