Building on the description of the perfect in Unit 9, this unit introduces students to the pluperfect tense. It is formed from the auxiliary verb haber (now in the imperfect) and the past participle. Usage is similar to English, describing the relationship between earlier events and subsequent ones. It is frequently used for describing things that had happened and the circumstances in which they happened, as, for example, in someone’s life story. Students now have the full range of past tenses at their command, and the unit explores and revises the ways in which the past tenses relate to one another and are used in different combinations. Additional expressions of time support this work. The adjustments that need to be made in moving from direct to reported speech, often associated with the use of the pluperfect, are explained and practised through a number of exercises.

Building on the description of the perfect in Unit 9, this unit introduces students to the pluperfect tense. It is formed from the auxiliary verb haber (now in the imperfect) and the past participle. Usage is similar to English, describing the relationship between earlier events and subsequent ones. It is frequently used for describing things that had happened and the circumstances in which they happened, as, for example, in someone’s life story. Students now have the full range of past tenses at their command, and the unit explores and revises the ways in which the past tenses relate to one another and are used in different combinations. Additional expressions of time support this work. The adjustments that need to be made in moving from direct to reported speech, often associated with the use of the pluperfect, are explained and practised through a number of exercises.

Chapter 25 offers a survey of Jejueo (Cheju-ŏ), with a focus on two major issues. The first is the status of Jejueo and whether it deserves to be classified as a dialect of Korean, consistent with long-standing practice. Based on a test of its intelligibility to monolingual speakers of Korean, the chapter concludes that Jejueo is in fact a distinct language and deserves to be recognized as such. This finding leads to the question of how Jejueo differs in its phonology and morphosyntax from Korean. Drawing on the extensive treatment of this subject in the authors’ book, Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), the chapter examines the salient features of its phonological patterns, its inventory of nominal particles, and its system of verbal inflection.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Chapter 7 offers an analysis of the organisation of reported speech in rhetorical structures characteristic to political oratory. Lists and contrast relations are found in the 1978–1988 and 2003–2013 data sets to deliver reported speech, while combined structures (list, contrast, and puzzle–solution) are only performed in the 2003–2013 sample in this context. The use of these rhetorical structures constitutes a speaker’s resource to accomplish a denser packaging of incisive messages presented as reported speech, and the findings show that this rhetorical effect has even been increased through a tighter chunking of 2003–2013 reported speech in list constructions, and the overall use of combined structures. Crucially, these rhetorical devices are functional in forming hostile actions in an engaging way, which the speakers from 2003–2013 deploy to rally their audiences behind them, leading to an audible (and visible) opposition and polarisation in the House which communicates in a more accessible, i.e., popularised, style to mediated audiences.

Chapter 9 offers a summary of findings and general conclusions with regard to (1) evidentiality in English, (2) constructions, interactions, and change, (3) the House of Commons as a community of practice in change (and Prime Minister’s Questions as an activity in change), and (4) the potential for a new research strand, Diachronic Interactional (Socio-)Linguistics.

Chapter 2 offers an extensive literature review of reported speech and evidentiality, and introduces the relevant terms and concepts of the study. It describes reported speech as the object of study and positions the study in the field of evidentiality. In keeping with the diachronic, usage-based nature of the monograph, the chapter makes a case for viewing reported speech as a construction and briefly discusses its potential for entering processes of grammaticalisation. Revisiting the debate whether quotations represent constructed or reconstructed utterances, the chapter examines the notions of 'literalised' direct speech (Rumsey 1992) and 'constructed dialogue' (Tannen 2007) as relevant descriptive labels for reported speech in political speech. Due to the analytic interest of the study, a focus is placed on accounts made for English.

Chapter 8 is concerned with the question of how a sharp increase in the use of reported speech, and the heightened prominence of the interaction between the LO and the PM in the 2003–2013 sample are related to the constitution of recurrent, patterned courses of action. The small sample of reported speech from 1978–1988 did not yield such courses of action where reported speech with SAY is relevant. This contrasts with the 2003–2013 sample, where two recurrent adversarial courses of action with a patterned use of reported speech were identified: enticing sequences and trading-quotes sequences. Here enticing sequences seem to be a more recent development. By contrast, there is early evidence for a precursor of trading-quotes sequences in the 1978–1988 sample

The final case study examines critically an established topic in the grammatical canon: direct and reported speech. The extensive use of rules of ‘backshift’ (e.g. ‘change the past tense to the present’) to support this is rejected as a pedagogic fiction, not only because it is well-known that these ‘rules’ do not always apply. An explanation is offered for cases where tense does appear to ‘change’: to ‘distance’ the speaker from a commitment to the original speaker’s proposition (which explains why the past rarely ‘changes’ to the past perfect – the distance is already there). Beyond this there are grounds for rejecting completely the linking of direct and reported speech. Usually when something is reported it is not the actual text that is reported (with the ordained changes) but the meaning; if the actual words are important and remembered then direct speech will be used. It is therefore wrong to present the two as alternatives, and to expect learners to transform one into the other. Once this is accepted, other areas to do with reporting can be promoted, such as the structures used with reporting verbs (e.g. ‘I explained to him…’).

Chapter 7 looks at how non-royal subjects quoted and reported the texts of their monarch, focussing on evidence from epistolary materials. Letter-writers show a preference for indirect reports, with direct quotation the preserve of those with first-hand access to the monarch. The findings suggest that royal speech was reported primarily for its propositional meaning, rather than its lexico-grammatical form. Royal writing, on the other hand, appears more likely to have been copied out in full, providing a more faithful reproduction of the original text. These practices are considered in relation to the evolving reporting system in early modern English, and their implications for our understanding of how language was conceptualised in the period.

The final analytic chapter looks at royal reported discourse in historical chronicles: printed texts intended for a large, public audience. Focussing on three chronicles' accounts of the reign of Henry VII, the study finds that rhetorical principles inform the depiction of royal voices in the texts. In general, there is no clear distinction made between royal and non-royal reports, with discourse representation more obviously driven by narrative concerns e.g. narrative peaking. However, two lengthy orations of Richard III and Henry VII, found in Grafton's chronicle, are considered in detail. The formulaic characteristics of Tudor royal texts are most evident in Richard III's oratory, whereas Henry VII has a less institutionalised rhetoric. The findings point to the accepted creativity of discourse representation in historiography in the period, and the salience of key features of the royal voice when undertaking this creative work.

This chapter examines the socialization of affective stances towards church practicesduring classroom interactions at a Russian heritage language Orthodox Christian school in Southern California. Based on analyses of audiovisual recordings and ethnographic observations of classroom interactions over a year and a half, the importance of showing proper feelings, attitudes, and emotions towards practices of Orthodoxy was found to be a central theme in the teachers’ discourse. The analysis pays attention to teachers’ use of words, prosody, and embodiment in cultivating students’ appropriate affective stances towards priests’ and servants’ dress and the use of incense. Although children usually express agreement and alignment with the expected positive stances, at times they challenge the proposed stances in various ways. The chapter contributes to our understanding of the significance and mechanics of the often implicit socialization process that takes place in mundane classroom interactions, involving co-construction and negotiation of stances along with positioning of parties vis-à-vis each other in discourse.