Beyond speech representation Describing and evaluating speech in Early Modern English prose fiction

This article is concerned with "speech descriptors", markers that describe or evaluate the nature of represented speech, such as very modestly in "The Gentlewoman very modestly bade him welcome" (CED, D2FKIT). The form, frequency and function of such features are charted in Early Modern English prose fiction, drawn from A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, and the results are compared to those of Grund (2017a), which considers speech descriptors in contemporaneous witness depositions. The comparison reveals generic differences and points to the importance of studying speech descriptors for our understanding of the dynamics of speech representation in the history of English.