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The trial transcripts of the Old Bailey Court in London are not only an exciting socio-cultural information treasure, but also give a unique insight into spoken language use in the past. As such they are of particular interest for the study of language change (which often starts in speech) and for pragmatic inverstigations into specific speech behaviours. As to change we will look, for example, at changes in the verb phrase (e.g. progressive, passive), the emergence of new items (e..g the quantifier a lot of) or adjective inflections. Regarding pragmatics, the strategic uses of question-answer patterns are of interest, as well as, for instance, hedging and pragmatic marking in general, politeness features or the use of taboo language.
In this course we will use both the complete original documents as made accessible by historians (www.oldbaileyonline.org) and the corpuslinguistic resource based on the former (www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus). |
