My primary concerns are what vocatives were used and how they were used in Early Modern English 'gentry' comedies. As there are of course no authentic recorded data from the period, I have investigated a collection of drama texts in the Vocative-Focussed Socio-Pragmatic Corpus. Methodologically, I take a corpus-based approach, and combine quantitative and qualitative analyses in a historical pragmatic perspective. As a consequence, my research is interdisciplinary in nature in that it pivots on several linguistic fields, i.e. historical linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics, sociolinguistics, as well as corpus linguistics. In my thesis, compiling an annotated corpus is both an end product in itself as well as data. In the Introduction, I present my research questions and the overall scope of the thesis. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of vocative by reviewing major works on address terms and politeness theory. Chapter 3 explains the annotation systems adopted in the corpus. Chapter 4 gives a general view of the distribution pattern and lexical components of vocatives in the corpus. Chapters 5-7 focus on the quantitative analysis of vocatives, in particular, the relation between the vocative form and the various attributes of the interlocutors. Chapter 8 discusses pragmatic functions of the vocatives by analysing examples in the corpus. Chapter 9 provides a case study in which shifts of vocatives are discussed from a stylistic and pragmatic perspective, using the notion of social network and the framework drawn from the analyses in the preceding chapters.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629123 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Shiina, Michi |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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