Whose testimony is it? Institutional influence in the 1641 depositions

The 1641 depositions are oral witness testimonies which function as a record of the seventeenth-century Irish rebellion, describing the experiences and losses of (mainly) protestant settlers (Trinity College Dublin Library, 2010). Transcriptions of the original depositions are digitalised and available online (https://1641.tcd.ie) to encourage engagement with Irish history and challenge myths and propaganda surrounding the rebellion. Linguists and historians use the depositions to question the credibility of these accounts, such as the Language and Linguistic Evidence project (2010) lead by Dr Fennell-Clark. The project asked, '[C]an we detect the influence of the clerks and the commissioners in the 'manipulation' of the evidence?' (Fennell-Clark, 2011, p. 27). 

 

This paper explores the question of institutional influence as proposed above by Fennell-Clark (2011) by conducting an authorship attribution analysis using corpus linguistic methods. Building on the notion of idiolect (Coulthard, 2004), this study applies Kredens' concept of idiolectal style (2010). Idiolectal style is concerned with the unique ways an individual uses language that distinguishes them but also recognises the influences of context and genre. This analysis investigated similarities that reoccur through multiple depositions that may suggest the presence of an overarching institutional idiolectal style. To achieve this, a two-part analysis was conducted using WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2020). Firstly, the explicit indication of commissioner presence was analysed by creating a corpus of forty depositions taken by two co-commissioners. The high-frequency rates for certain lexis such as Latin, binomials, and modifiers reflected the depositions' formulaic element and indicated the legal genre (Durant & Leung, 2016, p. 35). Secondly, implicit markers of commissioner presence were analysed by creating a sub-corpus with utterances initiated with the verb 'saith'. Prior literature has suggested that 'saith' is used to indicate reported speech (Language and Linguistic Evidence in the Depositions, 2010; Collins, 2001, p. 5). Therefore, this paper postulates that utterances following 'saith' best represent speech attributed to the deponent. The sub-corpus analysis found similar linguistic constructions in concordances, including identical strings reoccurring throughout multiple depositions. These results suggest that the commissioners influenced the testimonies and indicates the presence of an anonymising institutional narrative. 

The findings of this study have implications for the credibility of the depositions. Taken together, the analysis of explicit and implicit institutional influence has shown an overwhelming tendency of high-frequency structures throughout the corpus. This paper argues that these patterns can be attributed to the commissioner's idiolectal style as a coauthor of the texts. Therefore, when engaging with these historical documents, this paper asserts that we must consider the broader historical context and the authors' institutional intentions as 'Hidden puppeteers' in the narrative (Goodich, 2006 cited in Johnston, 2010, p. 163).