Chapter 10. Question strategies in the Old Bailey Corpus

Even though intensifiers have received a good deal of attention over the past few decades, downtoners, comprising diminishers and minimizers, have remained by and large a neglected category (but cf. Brinton, this issue). Among downtoners, the adverb little or a little stands out as the most frequent item. It is multifunctional and serves as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier and also in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative. Therefore, the present paper is devoted to the structural and functional profile of ( a) little in Late Modern English speech-related data. The data source is the socio-pragmatically annotated Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, version 2.0), which allows, among other things, the investigation of the usage of the item among different speaker groups. Our research charts the semantic and formal uses of adverbial little. Downtoner uses outnumber non-degree uses in the data, and diminishing uses are more common than minimizing uses. The formal realization is predominantly a little, with very rare determinerless or modified instances, such as very little. Little modifies a wide range of “targets,” but most frequently adjectives and prepositional phrases, focusing on human states and circumstantial detail. With regard to variation and change, adverbial little declines in use over the 200 years and is used more commonly by speakers from the lower social ranks and by the lay, non-professional participants in the courtroom.

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Digitising History From Below: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1834

History Compass ◽

10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00309.x ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 193-202 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Tim Hitchcock ◽

Robert Shoemaker

Keyword(s):

Old Bailey

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Gamble's Case

Journal of Mental Science ◽

10.1192/bjp.42.177.358 ◽

1896 ◽

Vol 42 (177) ◽

pp. 358-359

Keyword(s):

Old Bailey ◽

The Subject ◽

The Law ◽

Direct Recognition

It would have been interesting if Richard Gamble, the boy who committed the murderous outrage in Islington last autumn, and who was found unfit to plead at the Old Bailey January Sessions, had been able to take his trial. From all accounts he belonged to the class of instinctive juvenile criminals whom the law is gradually coming to recognise as proper objects not for punishment, but for treatment in asylums, and any fresh precedent which might have strengthened this growing judicial tendency would have been welcome. Its supremacy is already, however, in all probability assured. The truth is that lawyers began to be more reasonable on the subject when alienists began to reject as untenable the positive assertion of some French and American writers that there was in such cases an entire absence of any mental lesion. The result of the Plaistow case is a direct recognition of the existence of the only kind of moral insanity in which medical experts themselves now believe. Apropos of the Plaistow case, however, we view with considerable apprehension the ruling of Mr. Justice Kennedy that as Coombes was not convicted, the conviction of the man Fox as an accessory was not possible. Of course we offer no opinion as to Fox's guilt or innocence. But the learned judge's decision on this point appears to ignore the fact that lunatics are found guilty under the new Act, and that all that their insanity does for them is to excuse them from penal consequences. It will be a very unfortunate condition of things indeed if accessories to crimes committed by lunatics are to escape scot free. Mr. Justice Kennedy appears to have also overlooked the fact that the trial and conviction of the principal offender is not necessary under the law as it has existed since 1861. His assumption that the conviction of the lunatic is necessary therefore rests on no better foundation than his assumption that a verdict of “guilty, but insane,” is tantamount to a verdict of acquittal. It is to be hoped that there may be an early judicial revision of the Plaistow ruling.

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One Hundred Years of Rectitude: Medical Witnesses at the Old Bailey, 1717–1817

Law and History Review ◽

10.2307/744241 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 445-494 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Stephan Landsman

Keyword(s):

Empirical Evidence ◽

Technical Information ◽

Expert Witnesses ◽

Old Bailey ◽

Judicial Proceedings ◽

Anglo American

Partisan expert witnesses, selected, prepared, and presented by the parties, are one of the central features of Anglo-American judicial proceedings. They provide fact finders with essential technical information and are authorized to propound a range of opinions and conclusions that other witnesses are not. Their views are often the deciding factor in hard-fought cases. Yet their association with one party and their apparent partiality have long troubled legal commentators. These concerns have grown in recent years along with the perception, not based on a great deal of empirical evidence, that more and more experts are being used to prove more and more different things in modern American trials.

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