Jonathan Culpeper is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. His previous publications include History of English, 2nd edition (2005) and Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts (2001). He was also co-editor for Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002) and Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (1998). Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. She was the co-editor for Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and Change (2006) and A Reader in Early Modern English (1998) and is co-editor of the ICAME Journal and Studia Neophilologica. She has also participated in the compilation of historical corpora including the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

• Acknowledgements; List of figures; List of tables; 1. Introduction; 2. Dialogic genres and their contexts; 3. The multiple contexts and multiple discourses of dialogic genres; 4. The structures of spoken face-to-face interaction and writing; 5. Lexical bundles; 6. Lexical repetitions; 7. Cohesion: the case of AND; 8. Grammatical variation; 9. An introduction to pragmatic noise; 10. Pragmatic noise: a survey of functions and contexts in Early Modern English comedy plays; 11. Pragmatic noise: variation and change in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760; 12. Pragmatic noise: meanings and their development; 13. Social variation in interaction: representing identities; 14. The distribution of talk: social roles in trial proceedings and play-texts; 15. Pragmatic markers; 16. Summary and concluding remarks; Appendix I; Appendix II; Indexes.

'This new book by Culpeper and Kytö is an important and outstanding contribution to historical linguistics. It provides rich insights into the spoken language of the past, and these insights are based on solid empirical evidence. The authors demonstrate what can be achieved through the analysis of a carefully designed corpus even if it is relatively small … The book will inspire a lot of work in this area, both because of its exciting insights and because of the novel research tools that it introduces and exemplifies.' English Language and Linguistics