This book analyses speech-related genres in Early Modern English, providing ideas of what spoken interaction in earlier times might have been like.

Jonathan Culpeper is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. His previous publications include History of English, 2nd edition (2005) and Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts (2001). He was also co-editor for Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002) and Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (1998).

Acknowledgements; List of figures; List of tables; 1. Introduction; 2. Dialogic genres and their contexts; 3. The multiple contexts and multiple discourses of dialogic genres; 4. The structures of spoken face-to-face interaction and writing; 5. Lexical bundles; 6. Lexical repetitions; 7. Cohesion: the case of AND; 8. Grammatical variation; 9. An introduction to pragmatic noise; 10. Pragmatic noise: a survey of functions and contexts in Early Modern English comedy plays; 11. Pragmatic noise: variation and change in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760; 12. Pragmatic noise: meanings and their development; 13. Social variation in interaction: representing identities; 14. The distribution of talk: social roles in trial proceedings and play-texts; 15. Pragmatic markers; 16. Summary and concluding remarks; Appendix I; Appendix II; Indexes.