Very little linguistically oriented work has so far been done on debate
poetry. However, debates are an interesting source for studying conflict
interactions, a topic of increasing relevance. While literary
representations of conflict will not show us how disputes were carried
out in reality, they can shed light on which features were salient
enough to be used as stylised markers of interactivity in literary
texts. As first and second person pronouns are well-known markers of
interactivity and involvement, this paper examines the first person
utterances in a small corpus of debate poetry, available from the EEBO
database. The analysis has two parts: a quantitative analysis, where the
represented dialogue and the narrator’s frame story are analysed as
separate layers (Clark 1996), and a qualitative analysis focusing on the
dialogue sections only. The quantitative analysis involves locating all
instances of the first person singular pronoun in subject form,
combined with the associated verb phrase. The verbs are then classified
according to semantic domains (Biber et al. 1999) and the layer of text
they occur in. This quantitative part is designed to allow comparisons
between the layers, but also between debate poetry and the genre of
controversies. The qualitative section, on the other hand, investigates
certain moves commonly found in the dialogues, along with the verb types
most frequently associated with each move.