Prof. Daniel McIntyre (University of Huddersfield)

Read all about it! Reporting the news in Early Modern English

 

In this paper I report on a corpus-based project investigating the presentation of speech, writing and thought in Early Modern English prose fiction and news writing. The aim of the project is to determine how discourse presentation develops over time. To study this we have built and annotated a small corpus of Early Modern English using the model of speech, writing and thought presentation outlined in Semino and Short (2004). We are thus able to compare our findings against those of Semino and Short for Present Day English writing. In this talk I will discuss the construction of the corpus, tagging issues, and what the quantitative results suggest about news reporting techniques in the Early Modern period.