Investigating a Corpus of Historical Oral Testimonies

Chris Fitzgerald is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Interactional Variation Online project at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.

• AcknowledgementsChapter One: Oral History and Corpus Linguistics1.1 Introduction1.2 Selecting an archive1.3 Corpus linguistics, historical texts and oral history1.4 The oral history interview1.5 Studies of orality in historical texts1.6 Structure of the bookChapter Two: The Bureau of Military History: themes and characteristics2.1 The creation of the Bureau of Military History2.2 The question of reliability2.3 Memory2.4 The language of the Bureau of Military History archive2.5 Autobiography and military discourse2.6 Speaking of spokenness2.7 TranscriptionChapter Three: Constructing the corpus of Irish historical narratives3.1 Introduction3.2 Representativeness and corpus size3.3 Text selection3.4 Data processing3.5 ConclusionChapter Four: General characteristics of the corpus of Irish historical narratives4.1 Introduction4.2 Investigating spokenness4.3 Characteristics of COIHN: single-word items4.4 Characteristics of COIHN: multi-word units4.5 ConclusionChapter Five: Commitment to truth: mental process verbs5.1 Introduction5.2 Truth5.3 Hedging and commitment to truth5.4 Epistemic modality and evidentiality5.5 Mental process verbs and commitment to truth5.6 ConclusionChapter Six: Commitment to truth: expectation markers6.1 Introduction6.2 Adverbs of certainty and actuality6.3 ConclusionChapter Seven: Bringing together corpus linguistics and oral history7.1 Introduction7.2 Corpus linguistics and oral history archives7.3 Considering context7.4 Final reflectionAppendicesIndex