Upon My Going into a Coffee-House Yesterday, and Lending an Ear to the Next Table. A Corpus-Based Exploration of Coffee House Dialogues and Their Discursive Practices in Late 17th and Early 18th Century England (1662–1712)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research presents a corpus-based study which examines various speech-related written genres from the period 1662–1712. The collected texts, comprising transcribed coffeehouse dialogues, plays, poems, and trial proceedings, reflects the popularity of public coffeehouses in England, renowned as social spaces where people gathered news and debated ideas on politics, religion, science, literature, travel and other matters. Although coffeehouses have been studied from the historical, social theorist point of view (Habermas, 1989), this research adds linguistic insight into the experience of these public spaces. Hence, the aim of the study is to explore linguistic features relevant to the socio-historical and pragmatic aspects of the texts, focusing on speech acts, politeness strategies, conversation principles, hedging and assertive utterances. Data retrieved so far reveal a significant tension in the supposed discursive practices. The idea of the coffeehouse as a peaceful place of rational and reasoned argumentation contrasts sharply with linguistic evidence which shows coffeehouse conversations as not always so civil.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".