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.