Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 20 - The Language of Courtroom Documents

  • from Part III - Genre and Medium in the Record
  • Edited by Merja Kytö, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, Erik Smitterberg, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    18 October 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025, pp 482-505

  • Summary

    This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.