1.1 Research Objectives
English was in a transitional state during the early modern period, 1500–1750. In particular, the surviving textual evidence suggests that while written English prose from the period contains some linguistic features characteristic of modern day spoken communication, such as the use of clause-level AND as a marker of structure and cohesion , it is also characterized by complexity, with sixteenth century documents especially showing an increased tendency to favour subordination . The written prose in this transcript of a holograph letter from Elizabeth Talbot, née Hardwick (commonly known as Bess of Hardwick and henceforth referred to as Bess) demonstrates what is described above.
1 my good Lord I fynde my selfe so meche bouend to
2 your L[ordship] for all your honorabell fauores as I can
3 not but acknolege that I take a sengeuler comforte
4 theryn, and holde my selfe ryght hapey for
5 the great benyfytte of so fast a frend/ thynkeng[e]
6 yt my parte to desyre knolege yn what statt
7 of helthe your L[ordship] ys/ for whych respecte I thog
8 chefely thought good to sende and here by also
9 to aduertys that my Lo[rd] of Leycester be fore
10 my comynge to courte aponted one vary good
11 chamber w[i]t[h] some of other Letyll rome to be made
12 redy for me beynge parte of hys owne logynge
13 wereof I reste vary glade for that I hade rather
14 haue albeyett neuer so letyll a corner w[i]t[h] yn the
15 courte then greater easement forder of. har
16 magystye vouchsafed moust gracyous speche
17 and acseptance of my deuty, and as I haue alwaye
18 so I shall thyngke my selfe moust humbley bonde
19 trewly to honore sarue and prey for har magystye
20 wyhyle I leue. good my lo[rd] for that I hope shortely
21 to se you at courte I wyll now ceasse assurynge
22 I wysshe your L[ordship] and al your as to myselfe
23 al hapey welfare w[i]t[h] mouste harty comendacy[on]s
24 to your L[ordship] my good lady your wyffe and good
25 lady oxfort w[i]t[h] har letyll swette lady I end
26 recmond the xxiiij of october
your good L[ordships] moust assured E Shrouesbury
The written prose in this letter transcript is, like much early modern English written prose , somewhat difficult for a present day silent reader to process. The present day silent reader will automatically look for clear visual markers of where sentences begin and end in a written piece of text. They will then use these markers to aid their comprehension of the text. However, there is no clear, regularized, visual signposting of sentence boundaries in the above letter transcript. It is therefore not entirely clear to the present day silent reader where the sentences in the transcript begin and end. For example, is ‘thynkeng[e] yt my parte’ on line 5 the start of a single sentence? If so, does this sentence end with the full stop following the word ‘of’ on line 15? Furthermore, if this is a single sentence, why is its beginning not marked with a capital letter, and why does it contain such a large number of subordinate clauses?
Scholars have occasionally described early modern English (henceforth EModE) written sentences in relatively pejorative terms. Houston describes the prose of the period as being made up of ‘incremental’ sentences that constitute ‘the very opposite of a classical period: there is no syntactic suspension and often the drift of thought meanders on with little regard for any logical relation to its point of departure’ (1988: 28). Görlach refers to ‘the clumsiness and imperfect structure’ (1991: 121) of the EModE sentence, while Robinson refers to the ‘real English monster sentence’ as ‘a sixteenth-century phenomenon, caused by the unsuccessful grafting of Latin syntax on to English’ (1998: 112). However, the way in which oral features co-exist with features more characteristic of the written mode in this prose has rarely been researched in a systematic way. Using a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick dating from 1553 to 1608 as a primary data source, and referring to other epistolary materials from the time , this book offers an investigation of how oral features function within early modern epistolary prose .
The first question that needs to be asked as part of this investigation is: what do we mean by the word ‘sentence’? This book argues that we have a historically conditioned understanding of what an English ‘sentence’ actually is. A good way of demonstrating this is by briefly comparing how English sentences are understood and defined in the present day with how they were understood and defined during the early modern period.
The OED defines a PDE sentence as: ‘A series of words in connected speech or writing , forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought; in popular use often, such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another’.1 If this definition is unpacked, it can be seen that a PDE sentence is commonly understood to be unit of meaning in either speech or writing . However, although the word can refer to units of meaning in both the spoken and written modes, the fact that the definition states that ‘in popular use often, such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another’ suggests that the sentence is a form which is more associated with the written than the spoken mode in PDE . In other words, the word ‘sentence’ is broadly understood to refer to a graphological unit that is signalled to the reader with visual marking devices such as punctuation marks and capital letters.
In a strictly grammatical context, most modern-day grammarians of English would agree that a PDE sentence can be defined as ‘the verbal expression of a proposition, question, command, or request, containing normally a subject and a predicate (though either of these may be omitted by ellipsis)’.2 Furthermore, in relation to present day written English, grammarians normally recognize three types of grammatical sentence: simple, compound and complex. A simple sentence is a sentence that contains a single clause. For example: John plays football for Liverpool. A compound sentence contains coordinated main clauses. For example: Debbie bought the wine and Ben cooked the meal. A complex sentence contains a main clause and at least one subordinate clause. For example: Your dinner is cold because you were late. The subordinate clause in that sentence is: because you were late.3
However, during the early modern period, the word ‘sentence’ was much more associated with its Latin relative ‘sententia’ , defined by the OED quite simply as ‘a thought or reflection’.4 Therefore, despite the fact that, as Lehto (2010) found, sixteenth century documents written in vernacular English increasingly favour subordination , a ‘sentence’ was primarily understood to be a unit of meaning or sense, rather than a graphological or syntactic unit. Indeed, Robinson makes a crucial point, which is that during the Early modern period, ‘sentence is indeed meaning and a sentence is a unit of meaning, but not necessarily a syntactic one’ (1998: 16).
So how do we get from EModE sentences and prose , to PDE sentences and prose ? How does PDE written prose , and the standard written English sentence as we know it today, arise? Culpeper and Kytö suggest that:
before the mid-late seventeenth century, written communication in English was likely to have been aided by ‘(a) grammatical features (notably, clause boundaries), (b) a variety of punctuation marks, and (c) lexical features (notably, conjunctions). In other words, features similar to today’s spoken communication are likely to have guided earlier written communication’ . (2010: 168)
However, Treip (1970: 49–50), Lennard (1995: 67), Robinson (1998: 33–34) and more recently Culpeper and Kytö (2010: 168) all suggest that at some point between 1650 and 1700, the sentence begins to be conceived as a unit that is primarily defined ‘visually and syntactically’ (Lennard 1995: 67), i.e. as a visual, graphological unit that exists on the page. Culpeper and Kytö empirically investigate how this change is manifested linguistically, focusing on the frequency and function of a specific lexical feature, clause-level AND, which was often used as an explicit marker of structure and cohesion in early Englis...