Historical Corpus Stylistics

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Patrick Studer is one of the world's leading experts in early English newspapers. He has an intimate and detailed knowledge of both their content matters and their stylistic peculiarities. In this book he provides a rich and detailed introduction to these newspapers within their historical and socio-cultural context and he develops a set of sophisticated corpus-stylistic tools necessary for their analysis. There is a lot to learn not only about newspapers in eighteenth-century England but also about the English language at the turning point from Early Modern English to Present-day English. This is an outstanding book: theoretically and methodologically innovative yet well-anchored in the literature; wide-ranging yet systematic and detailed. It makes a real contribution to diverse fields. It sheds light on how corpus-based approaches can be deployed in the study of style, how styles interact with their social and pragmatic contexts and how change in style comes about ... All this is written up in polished prose. Briefly reviewed in the Year's work in English Studies journal, vol 89, No. 1