“Heav’n bess you, my Dear”

Abstract

The English and Swedish Drama Dialogue (ESDD) corpus is a sociopragmatically tagged corpus of English and Swedish drama texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using this corpus, I investigated the use of the address terms Fool, Dear, Sir and Brother. The study focused on the contexts where these terms were found and traced diachronic usage patterns. The main questions asked in the investigation concerned, first, the speaker’s attitude towards the addressees when using the address phrases and whether attitudes connected with particular phrases changed over time; second, whether the phrases could be said to signal intimacy or distance between the interlocutors.