This volume explores how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech in historical periods. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods, the book covers multiple genres including witness depositions, literary texts, letters, histories, and spoken language. The chapters draw on historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and corpus linguistics to show a wide array of approaches to the study of speech representation in the history of English.

Peter J. Grund is Associate Professor of English Language Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the co-author of Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England (2011), and co-editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009). He serves as co-editor of Journal of English Linguistics. His research interests include stance, evidentiality, and speech representation in historical periods.
Terry Walker is Professor of English Linguistics at Mid-Sweden University. Her interest in corpus linguistics, philology, and historical socio-pragmatics is reflected in her monograph Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions and Drama Comedy (2007), as well as the co-authored books Guide to a Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760 (2006) and Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England (2011). Her current projects include work on speech representation in historical texts and on language variation and change in Early Modern English.

• List of Figures and Tables


• Notes on Contributors


• Acknowledgments


• Chapter 1 Speech Representation in the History of English: Introduction


• Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker


• Chapter 2 Before Quotation Marks: Quotative Parentheses in Early Printed Books


• Colette Moore


• Chapter 3 Initiating Direct Speech in Early Modern English Prose Fiction and Witness Depositions


• Ursula Lutzky


• Chapter 4 Reconfiguring Quotation over Time and the System-Internal Rise of Be Like


• Alexandra D'Arcy


• Chapter 5 The Metalinguistic Description of Speech and Fictional Language: Exploring Speech Reporting Verbs and Speech Descriptors in Late Modern English


• Peter J. Grund


• Chapter 6 Clearer Contours: The Stylization of Free Indirect Speech in Nineteenth-Century Fiction


• Lieven Vandelanotte


• Chapter 7 Free Indirect Speech, Slipping, or a System in Flux Exploring the Continuum between Direct and Indirect Speech in Early Modern English


• Terry Walker and Peter J. Grund


• Chapter 8 "Saying thes woordes or the lyke": Speech Representation in Sixteenth-Century Correspondence


• Mel Evans


• Chapter 9 Discourse Representation in Early Modern English Historiography


• Claudia Claridge