Volume 3, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Constructing the social margins in Early and Late Modern English, Edited by Minna Nevala, Marianna Hintikka and Turo Vartiainen

This paper investigates how cant is used to represent the social margins in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. Cant refers to the special vocabulary that is associated with and used by people living on the margins such as thieves and prostitutes. Little work has been conducted on the use of this language in courtroom texts. Using a historical pragmatic framework, evidence of the actual occurrence of cant as well as metalinguistic evidence was generated through lexical keyword searches in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online . Then the use of marginal vocabulary was examined more closely in extracts from the Sessions Papers using historical discourse analysis. This paper argues that cant is enregistered and that the courtroom recorder and the editor of the Session Papers reproduced the cant language to highlight and draw attention to the maliciousness and culpability of those who were accused in court. Linguistic techniques such as glossing and metalinguistic commentary were inserted to foreground the cant terms in the text. In addition, this historical discourse analysis sheds light on how the witnesses in the courtroom make strategic use of cant terms to portray the defendant in a negative light.

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.

In this article we explore public discourse around one marginalized group in early-modern English society, men who engaged in sexual relations with other males. To do this we use a large corpus of seventeenth century texts, the Early English Books Online corpus. Our exploration leads us to consider a number of methodological issues, notably low frequency data and the classical framing of some words. We consider the historical context which brings this about, the impact of such data on our study and the importance of close reading in understanding words in discourse. In addition, we show that, even where frequency does not seem to be an issue, close reading, guided by corpus analysis, is vital in allowing the analyst to move past a superficial analysis of the data towards an understanding of the conventions attached to the use of words which appear to reference men who have sex with men in this period. Through such analyses, this paper sheds light on the typically negative meanings associated with this group in early modern England, and provides both challenge and refinement to existing lexicography, both modern and early modern, relating to the group in this period.

In this article, we study the way in which prostitutes, on the one hand, and prostitution, on the other, were evaluated and represented in nineteenth-century English news articles. The main aims of the study are to chart referential terms used of prostitutes as socially marginal agents and objects, as well as to map concepts related to the metaphorical field of prostitution. Our data come from the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Database ( British Library newspapers parts 1 and 2: 1800–1900 . http://www.gale.com/c/british-library-newspapers-part-i) and The Times Digital Archive ( 1785–2011 . http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-digital-archive), consisting of altogether 300 news articles relating to prostitution. Our results suggest that there is variation between vilification and pity in the language relating to prostitutes in the Victorian press, both from the socio-pragmatic and the cognitive perspectives. While the overall attitudes are mostly negative, there is a tendency to highlight the humanity of the prostitute by referring to her, for example, as a pitiful object of a crime. All the metaphors found in the material also draw from the negativity seen as inherent in prostitution and prostitutes. This is accentuated by the frequent personification of states or political institutions as prostitutes, whose lamentable behaviour or appearance is referred to in the metaphor.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rural midlands of Ireland suffered from agrarian violence and intimidation through threatening notices. In the minds of the authorities, these outrages were committed by members of a secret society, called the “Ribbon Society”, which was deemed to be the embodiment of a nation-wide conspiracy of Irish Catholics to exterminate all Protestants in the country (Beames 1982). However, present-day historians are divided in their opinion on the existence of such a society, as for example, Garvin (1982: 154), who claims that “local agrarian groups simply accepted the label wished upon them by magistrates, police and other outsiders”. Thus, there is no consensus about the identity and existence of the “Ribbon Society” from an external point of view. This paper analyses how the identity of this socially marginalised group is constructed from an internal point of view through means of a CDA analysis of a collection of threatening notices written by those accused of membership of the Ribbon Society. I argue that the notices constitute a form of public discourse that is controlled by the labouring classes, and that through means of positive self and negative other representation the senders justify and legitimise their own actions and beliefs, while criminalising those of their intended targets, thus constructing an identity as defender of the labouring classes, and using the notices as a form of social protest.

Using van Leeuwen’s (1996) categories of social actor representations, this paper investigates the ways in which slaves were represented in four types of slavery-related advertisements (for sale, want to buy, runaways and captured runaways). The materials consist of 860 notices in total, and they are collected from eighteenth and nineteenth -century newspapers in Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and South Carolina. Of particular interest are the two aspects simultaneously present in slavery: how the advertisements can represent their subjects, on the one hand, as human individuals and, on the other hand, as someone’s property. The study examines, for example, the use of nomination and various kinds of categorization strategies used to represent the slaves, as well as the ways in which they are explicitly referred to as “property”. Examination of the advertisements shows that the representational strategies differ somewhat depending on the type of advertisement as well as the geographical area. Furthermore, the various representational possibilities also indicate that the advertisers could, by their word choices, choose either to highlight the slaves’ status as property or to leave it more implicit in the texts.