12 Pragmatic Markers: Synchronic and Diachronic
1.3 Problems for the Diachronic Study of Pragmatic Markers
Because of the primarily oral nature of pragmatic markers, the study of these
forms in Present- day English has typically relied on naturally occurring, spon-
taneous, face- to- face conversation and on oral narratives for its data. Our lack
of such material for earlier periods could be seen as a major impediment for
the historical study of pragmatic markers. However, this problem has been met
in a number of ways.
First, it is well known that medieval texts have many “oral” features, so
that the further we go back in time – for example to Old English and Middle
English (ME) texts – the closer we may come to uncovering colloquial forms
of the language.
Second, we have come to recognize that although speech from the past is
unavailable, many “speech- based” or “speech- related” sources do exist, such
as witness depositions and trial transcripts, parliamentary proceedings, dia-
logue in dramas, represented speech in narrative fi ction and poetry, and didactic
works in dialogic form. We also have a variety of colloquial and dialogic forms
of written language, including diaries, letters, sermons, pamphlets, and recipes.
In recent years, electronic corpora compiling these speech- based sources have
become available for the researcher, leading to easier means of data retrieval.
Some of these corpora include the following:
- A corpus of English dialogues 1560– 1760 (CED) – both “authentic dia-
logue” such as trial proceedings and witness depositions, and “constructed
dialogue” such as drama, fi ction, and didactic works in conversational form; - Corpus of early English correspondence sampler (1418– 1680) (CEECS) – a
selection of sociolinguistically annotated personal letters; - English drama corpus (ED) – 3,900 plays dating from the thirteenth to the
early nineteenth century;^15 - The Old Bailey proceedings online, 1674– 1913 (OBPO) – transcripts of
almost 200,000 trials from London’s central criminal court; and - A corpus of late Modern English prose – informal private letters by British
writers, covering the period 1861 to 1919.
Moreover, certain corpora, while not specifi cally designed to highlight
“speech- based” English, nonetheless contain large proportions of such relevant
data, such as represented speech in the Corpus of English novels (CEN; 26 mil-
lion words of prose from 25 novelists, dating from 1881– 1922). Of course,
these “speech- based” sources must be approached with caution, as they may be
heavily edited or redacted, but we may nonetheless glean a sense of the every-
day colloquial language of the past – and its use of pragmatic markers.
15 Culpeper and Kytö ( 2000 ) have shown that there is a “strong case” for seeing drama (compared
to witness depositions, trial proceedings, and prose fi ction) as closest to real speech.