Referential NPs as subtle expressions of attitude in infanticide trials, 1674–1775
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Turo Vartiainen
Abstract
This article discusses how victims of infanticide were portrayed in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey in 1674–1775. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of lexical NPs as subtle foregrounding devices in the trial accounts. It is argued that the use of a prosodically prominent lexical NP in a place where a topical and a highly accessible referent could naturally be expressed by an unstressed pronoun may not be emotionally or attitudinally neutral; rather, I will argue that by repeatedly using lexical NPs, the trial participants were able to express sympathy and solidarity to the victims in a very subtle way by making the referent more discourse-prominent and emphasising the victims’ young age by using head nouns like child and infant. The data will mainly be discussed from a diachronic perspective, and the results show that as most women convicted of infanticide in the eighteenth century were acquitted, the frequency of lexical NPs used in reference to the deceased children increased. The overuse of lexical NPs is particularly prominent in the trials where the woman was found guilty of the crime, suggesting a possible connection between the degree of violence used in the murder and the kinds of NPs the trial participants used to refer to the deceased children as subtle indications of sympathy.
Funding statement: University of Helsinki.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Linguistic representations of the social margins in Early and Late Modern English
- “He said he was going on the scamp”: Thieves’ cant, enregisterment and the representation of the social margins in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers
- Referential NPs as subtle expressions of attitude in infanticide trials, 1674–1775
- The public representation of homosexual men in seventeenth-century England – a corpus based view
- Representations of prostitutes and prostitution as a metaphor in nineteenth-century English newspapers
- The language of “Ribbonmen”: A CDA approach to identity construction in nineteenth-century Irish English threatening notices
- People as property: Representations of slaves in early American newspaper advertisements
- Book Reviews
- Russi, Cinzia: Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics
- Early Germanic Languages in Contact (NOWELE Supplement Series 27):
- Bunčić Daniel:Biscriptality. A sociolinguistic typology
- Walsh, Olivia: Linguistic Purism. Language Attitudes in France and Quebec
- Letras del desierto. Edición de un corpus epistolar para su estudio lingüístico. Región de Tarapacá, Chile:
- Historische Mündlichkeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte der gesprochenen Sprache (Kieler Forschungen zur Sprachwissenschaft 7):
