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.

Acknowledgements

Chapter One: Oral History and Corpus Linguistics

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Selecting an archive

1.3 Corpus linguistics, historical texts and oral history

1.4 The oral history interview

1.5 Studies of orality in historical texts

1.6 Structure of the book

Chapter Two: The Bureau of Military History: themes and characteristics

2.1 The creation of the Bureau of Military History
2.2 The question of reliability
2.3 Memory
2.4 The language of the Bureau of Military History archive
2.5 Autobiography and military discourse
2.6 Speaking of spokenness
2.7 Transcription

Chapter Three: Constructing the corpus of Irish historical narratives

3.1 Introduction
3.2 Representativeness and corpus size
3.3 Text selection
3.4 Data processing
3.5 Conclusion

Chapter Four: General characteristics of the corpus of Irish historical narratives

4.1 Introduction
4.2 Investigating spokenness
4.3 Characteristics of COIHN: single-word items
4.4 Characteristics of COIHN: multi-word units
4.5 Conclusion

Chapter Five: Commitment to truth: mental process verbs

5.1 Introduction
5.2 Truth
5.3 Hedging and commitment to truth
5.4 Epistemic modality and evidentiality
5.5 Mental process verbs and commitment to truth
5.6 Conclusion

Chapter Six: Commitment to truth: expectation markers

6.1 Introduction
6.2 Adverbs of certainty and actuality
6.3 Conclusion

Chapter Seven: Bringing together corpus linguistics and oral history

7.1 Introduction
7.2 Corpus linguistics and oral history archives
7.3 Considering context
7.4 Final reflection

Appendices

Index