Special issue on speech representation in Late Modern English text types: introduction.

As the Late Modern English period also encompasses the Romantic literary movement (c. 1798-1837), which promoted the focus on the "real language of men", as noted by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ([32]), this development may therefore also provide more insight into the spoken language of the middling sort and the labouring poor. The current special issue "Speech representation in Late Modern English text types" tackles this challenge for selected text types in the Late Modern English period, which is here considered to cover the period I c i . 1700-1900. Finally, Peter Grund's article, 'Disgusting, obscene, and aggravating language: Speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in the I Old Bailey Corpus i ', investigates the representation of spoken language through speech descriptors that bring together speech representation and evaluation. South-western speech is also the focus of Anne-Christine Gardner's article, which is entitled 'Speech reflections in Late Modern English pauper letters from Dorset'. [Extracted from the article]