Historical Corpus Pragmatics: Stance in Early Modern English

The methodological focus of this project lies on corpus pragmatics and, especially, historical corpus pragmatics. As part of the project, new methods have been developed that make it possible to automatically retrieve passages that can reveal new insight on the use of pragmatic features in historical periods from corpus data. This is especially valuable for identifying linguistic patterns that have not been studied before and that are not part of the known inventory of forms used to express a given pragmatic function. The analysis is based on several existing historical corpora.

On the descriptive level, this project investigates how speakers and writers in the period from 1500 to 1700 expressed their attitudes concerning the certainty and reliability of the information they present. This includes expressions that are still used today, such as think, it seems and certainly, alongside expressions that are more period-specific, such as verily and forsooth, as well as expressions that rely on an interpretation in the context in which they are used. The focus of the study lies on how different factors of the context in which texts were produced – such as genre and text type, the situational roles of speakers and writers, the identity of speakers and writers – affect the way in which stance is expressed.

Research Funding

The project was supported with a research grant Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich for the duration of 24 months (1.7.2014–30.6.2016 / CHF 173,823).

Published Research

• Landert, Daniela. 2024. Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics. Epistemic stance in Early Modern English. (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Landert, Daniela, Daria Dayter, Thomas C. Messerli & Miriam A. Locher. 2023. 

  Corpus Pragmatics (Elements in Pragmatics)

  . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Landert, Daniela. 2019. “Function-to-form mapping in corpora: Historical corpus pragmatics and the study of stance expressions”. In Carla Suhr, Terttu Nevalainen & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), From Data to Evidence in English Language Research, 169–190. Leiden / Boston: Brill.
• Landert, Daniela. 2017a. 

  “Meta-communicative expressions and situational variation of stance marking: 

  . Nordic Journal of English Studies 16(1). 120–144.
• Landert, Daniela. 2017b. “Stance in fiction”. In Miriam A. Locher & Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Pragmatics of Fiction (Handbooks of Pragmatics 12), 489–514. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.