Investigating a Corpus of Historical Oral Testimonies guides the reader through the process of sourcing a relevant oral history archive for linguistic analysis, constructing a representative corpus out of this archive and analysing this using corpus tools. Focusing on the oral history archive at the Irish Bureau of Military History, this book shows how corpus linguistics can illuminate themes worthy of investigation that may otherwise remain hidden. This is exemplified through the investigation of how certainty is constructed in this archive through a number of expressions and which serves as a template for both how oral history can aid linguistic understanding and how corpus linguistics can contribute to oral history investigation. Highlighting why oral history archives are worthy of linguistic analysis and showing what readers can gain from blending linguistic tools and competencies with oral history data, this book is essential reading for all researchers and students working in the areas of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and oral history.

Corpus Linguistics for Oral History takes a step-by-step approach to presenting how corpus linguistics tools and techniques can be applied to oral history archives. Bridging the gap between the two areas, this book: establishes a framework to pursue this type of research and guides the reader through tasks that will ensure practical application shows how oral narratives can facilitate historical linguistics, including historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics illustrates how the techniques of corpus linguistics can help social historians to analyse oral narratives in new and fruitful ways takes readers through each step of the process, from initial close readings of data to constructing a corpus that adheres to parameters of representativeness, through to the application of various corpus linguistics techniques includes an appendix of resources and examples of extracts from a global range of historical texts throughout, introducing the reader to a range of freely accessible, digitized archives This book is key reading for students and researchers working in History and Corpus Linguistics. History students will find a new perspective on approaching primary historical sources, while linguistics students will find insights into an avenue of data worthy of multiple levels of linguistic analysis.

The recent wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. This articles in this volume, originally pubished in 1990, and which originally appeared in History and Anthropology, Volume 2, Part 2, discuss what contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory, and what the relationships are between history and memory.

The greatest problem in historical scholarship, theoretically and practically, is the relation between historians and their subject matter. The past is gone and historians can only study its remnants. On what basis do scholars select certain facts from the mass of data left from the past? How do they explain the interrelationship of the facts they select? What criteria do they use to evaluate their subject? The 35 volumes in this set, originally published between 1926 and 1990 discuss and answer these essential questions faced by historians. The development of historical understanding during the 18th and 19th centuries was one of the most striking features of Western culture. Both historiography and historical thinking advanced as never before. The historial movment of the 19th century was perhaps second only to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in transforming Western thought. One consequence was extensive organisation and professionalization of research, which the volumes in this set reflect.

This volume explores issues of memory, remembering and language in late colonial India. It is the first systematic historical sociolinguistic study of English private and public citizens who lived in and/or worked for India and the Indian cause from the 1920s to the 1940s. While some of the English have lived as common citizens and were committed to India, their voices and contributions have remained on the margins of Indian collective memory. This book offers microhistorical readings of extended language forms generally underexplored in sociolinguistics (such as letters, telegrams, missives, and oral histories) to reorient facets of individual memories, lives, and endeavours against larger officialised understandings of the past. Using previously unpublished corpus of archival material and interviews with English private citizens from that period, this volume on historical sociolinguistics will be of interest to scholars and researchers of language and linguistics, South Asian studies, post-colonial literary studies, culture studies, and modern history.

David Howes’s sweeping history of the senses in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology and in the field of law lays the foundations for a sensational jurisprudence, or a way to do justice to and by the senses of other people. In part 1, Howes demonstrates how sensory ethnography has yielded alternative insights into how the senses function and argues convincingly that each culture should be approached on its own sensory terms. Part 2 documents how the senses have been disciplined psychologically within the Western tradition, starting with Aristotle and moving through the rise of Lockean empiricism and cognitive neuroscience. Here, Howes presents an anthropologically informed critique of experimental and cognitive psychology, sensory science, and phenomenology. In part 3, he introduces the paradigm of the “historical anthropology of the senses and sensation” and applies it to the analysis of trade relations between Europe and China in the early modern period, to the treaty-making process in North America during the colonial period, and to all the unresolved disputes over land rights and Indigenous sovereignty that continue to this day, arguing that these differences are rooted in a cultural clash of sensoria. Designed for the classroom, Sensorial Investigations displays an expansive critical engagement with generations of scholarship. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the history and anthropology of the senses, the psychology of sensation, and socio-legal studies.

A pioneering collection of new research that explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of the English language. The volume, with contributions by world-renowned scholars as well as some emerging scholars in the field, covers a wide variety of approaches to grammatical categories and categorial change, constructions and constructional change, and comparative and typological research. Each of the fourteen chapters, based on the analysis of authentic data, highlights the wealth and breadth of the study of English syntax (including morphosyntax), both theoretically and empirically, from Old English through to the present day. The result is a body of research which will add substantially to the current study of the syntax of the English language, by stimulating further research in the field.