Language is largely comprised of face-to-face spoken interaction; however, the method, description and theory of traditional historical accounts of English have been largely based on scholarly and literary writings. Using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, in this book Culpeper and Kytö offer a unique account of the linguistic features in several speech-related written genres, comprising trial proceedings, witness depositions, plays, fiction and didactic works. The volume is the first to provide innovative analyses of several neglected written genres, demonstrating how they might be researched, and highlighting the theories which are needed to underpin this research. Through this, the authors are able to create a fascinating insight into what spoken interaction in Early Modern English might have been like, providing an alternative perspective to that often presented in traditional historical accounts of English.

'This new book by Culpeper and Kytö is an important and outstanding contribution to historical linguistics. It provides rich insights into the spoken language of the past, and these insights are based on solid empirical evidence. The authors demonstrate what can be achieved through the analysis of a carefully designed corpus even if it is relatively small … The book will inspire a lot of work in this area, both because of its exciting insights and because of the novel research tools that it introduces and exemplifies.' English Language and Linguistics

Jonathan Culpeper is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. His previous publications include History of English, 2nd edition (2005) and Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts (2001). He was also co-editor for Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002) and Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (1998). Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. She was the co-editor for Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and Change (2006) and A Reader in Early Modern English (1998) and is co-editor of the ICAME Journal and Studia Neophilologica. She has also participated in the compilation of historical corpora including the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.