The Language of Queen Elizabeth I

A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Royal Style and Identity

Mel Evans author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Published:11th Oct '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Language of Queen Elizabeth I cover

The Language of Queen Elizabeth I presents one of the first diachronic accounts of the language – the idiolect – of the Tudor monarch who ruled England and Ireland from 1558-1603.

  • Suggests that Elizabeth I was a leader of language innovation and change, using it to build her complex social identity as a female monarch in a masculine position of power
  • Examines a number of the monarch’s letters, speeches, and translations
  • Establishes Elizabeth I’s participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes and explores her spelling practice
  • Develops theoretical and methodological frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics through the analysis of the individual speaker
  • Argues for the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change
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“I recommend this work to scholars specialising in Elizabeth I, regardless of their discipline; historical and present-day sociolinguists working particularly with idiolect research; and those interested in historical spelling variation and historical authorship attribution.”  (Cercles, 1 February 2015)

 

ISBN: 9781118672877

Dimensions: 229mm x 150mm x 10mm

Weight: 345g

266 pages