Historical Pragmatics 9783110214284, 9783110214277

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Historical Pragmatics HoPs 8

Handbooks of Pragmatics

Editors

Wolfram Bublitz Andreas H. Jucker Klaus P. Schneider Volume 8

De Gruyter Mouton

Historical Pragmatics

Edited by

Andreas H. Jucker Irma Taavitsainen

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-021427-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-021428-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Historical pragmatics / edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen. p. cm. ⫺ (Handbook of pragmatics; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-021427-7 (alk. paper) 1. English language ⫺ Grammar, Historical. 2. Pragmatics. 3. Discourse analysis. I. Jucker, Andreas H. II. Taavitsainen, Irma. PE1101.H487 2010 306.44⫺dc22 2010024502

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Cover image: Tor Lindqvist/iStockphoto Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to the handbook series Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider The series Handbooks of Pragmatics, which comprises nine self-contained volumes, provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is meant to reflect the substantial and wide-ranging significance of pragmatics as a genuinely multi- and transdisciplinary field for nearly all areas of language description, and also to account for its remarkable and continuously rising popularity in linguistics and adjoining disciplines. All nine handbooks share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. Its purview includes patterns of linguistic actions, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, as well as organisational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (that of the speaker, the recipient, the analyst, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Unlike syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and other linguistic disciplines, pragmatics is defined by its point of view more than by its objects of investigation. The former precedes (actually creates) the latter. Researchers in pragmatics work in all areas of linguistics (and beyond), but from a distinctive perspective that makes their work pragmatic and leads to new findings and to reinterpretations of old findings. The focal point of pragmatics (from the Greek prãgma ‘act’) is linguistic action (and inter-action): it is the hub around which all accounts in these handbooks revolve. Despite its roots in philosophy, classical rhetorical tradition and stylistics, pragmatics is a relatively recent discipline within linguistics. C.S. Peirce and C. Morris introduced pragmatics into semiotics early in the twentieth century. But it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that linguists took note of the term and began referring to performance phenomena and, subsequently, to ideas developed and advanced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other ordinary language philosophers. Since the ensuing pragmatic turn, pragmatics has developed more rapidly and diversely than any other linguistic discipline. The series is characertised by two general objectives. Firstly, it sets out to reflect the field by presenting in-depth articles covering the central and multifarious theories and methodological approaches as well as core concepts and topics characteristic of pragmatics as the analysis of language use in social contexts. All articles are both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of their topic in the light of recent developments. Secondly, while we accept its extraordinary complexity and diversity (which we consider a decided asset), we suggest a definite structure, which gives coherence to the entire field of pragmatics and provides

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Preface to the handbook series

orientation to the user of these handbooks. The series specifically pursues the following aims: – it operates with a wide conception of pragmatics, dealing with approaches that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic; – it views pragmatics from both theoretical and applied perspectives; – it reflects the state of the art in a comprehensive and coherent way, providing a systematic overview of past, present and possible future developments; – it describes theoretical paradigms, methodological accounts and a large number and variety of topical areas comprehensively yet concisely; – it is organised in a principled fashion reflecting our understanding of the structure of the field, with entries appearing in conceptually related groups; – it serves as a comprehensive, reliable, authoritative guide to the central issues in pragmatics; – it is internationally oriented, meeting the needs of the international pragmatic community; – it is interdisciplinary, including pragmatically relevant entries from adjacent fields such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology, semantics, grammar and discourse analysis; – it provides reliable orientational overviews useful both to students and more advanced scholars and teachers. The nine volumes are arranged according to the following principles. The first three volumes are dedicated to the foundations of pragmatics with a focus on micro and macro units: Foundations must be at the beginning (volume 1), followed by the core concepts in pragmatics, speech actions (micro level in volume 2) and discourse (macro level in volume 3). The following three volumes provide cognitive (volume 4), societal (volume 5) and interactional (volume 6) perspectives. The remaining three volumes discuss variability from a cultural and contrastive (volume 7), a diachronic (volume 8) and a medial perspective (volume 9): 1. Foundations of pragmatics Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick 2. Pragmatics of speech actions Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner 3. Pragmatics of discourse Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron 4. Cognitive pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid and Dirk Geeraerts 5. Pragmatics of society Gisle Andersen and Karin Aijmer

Preface to the handbook series

6. Interpersonal pragmatics Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham 7. Pragmatics across languages and cultures Anna Trosborg 8. Historical pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen 9. Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen

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Preface

Fifteen years ago the book Historical Pragmatics was published with a title that turned out to be programmatic and constitutive for a new field of studies. Ten years ago, in the year 2000, the first issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics appeared giving testimony to the establishment and consolidation of this new, exciting and versatile field within the larger field of pragmatics. So it seems timely that now this Handbook of Historical Pragmatics takes stock of how far we have come in the meantime, what we have learnt in our quest to understand how earlier generations used language to communicate and where the field is heading today, ten years into the new millennium. In a relatively short period of time historical pragmatics has moved well beyond its initial scope into a dynamic field of research and branched out to interdisciplinary areas. This volume bears ample witness to the breadth and vitality of the scholarly activities within this field. We would like to express our gratitude to the authors for their rich contributions, which survey individual branches of historical pragmatics and give outlines of the relevant research issues, recent developments and future perspectives. We thank them for their exemplary cooperation and efficiency, and willingness to engage in a dialogue on their chapters. We also owe a debt of gratitude to our anonymous reviewers who have helped us to assess the contributions and whose pertinent comments increased the consistency, readability and accuracy of the entire volume. A special word of thanks is due to Danielle Hickey, our desk editor, for her untiring diligence when preparing the manuscript for publication and for her eagle eye in spotting inaccuracies and inconsistencies. We would also like to thank Anke Beck and Barbara Karlson of De Gruyter Mouton for their support and guidance throughout the work on this volume. Zurich and Helsinki, August 2010

Table of contents Preface to the handbook series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.

Introduction

1.

Trends and developments in historical pragmatics Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

v ix

3

II.

Data and methodology

2.

Data in historical pragmatics Merja Kytö . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

Historical sociopragmatics Jonathan Culpeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

3.

III. Diachrony 4.

Grammaticalization Elizabeth C. Traugott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

5.

Subjectification and intersubjectification María José López-Couso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

6.

Pragmaticalisation and Discursisation Claudia Claridge and Leslie Arnovick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

7.

Metaphor and Metonymy Brigitte Nerlich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

IV.

Pragmaphilology

8.

Chaucer Mari Pakkala-Weckström . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

9.

Shakespeare Ulrich Busse and Beatrix Busse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

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Table of contents

V.

Micropragmatics

10.

Discourse markers Laurel Brinton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

285

Interjections and expletives Elke Gehweiler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

315

Address terms Gabriella Mazzon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

351

11. 12.

VI.

Interactional pragmatics

13.

Speech acts Dawn Archer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

379

Politeness Minna Nevala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

419

Controversies Gerd Fritz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

451

Rituals Marcel Bax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

483

14. 15. 16.

VII. Discourse domains 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Religious discourse Thomas Kohnen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

523

Scientific discourse Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

549

News discourse Claudia Claridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

587

Courtroom discourse Kathleen Doty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

621

Correspondence Minna Palander-Collin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

651

Literary discourse Susan Fitzmaurice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

679

Table of contents

xiii

About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705 Index of subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713 Index of names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727 Index of languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742

I.

Introduction

1.

Trends and developments in historical pragmatics Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

1.

The aim of the handbook

The aim of the Handbook of Historical Pragmatics is to provide an up-to-date, comprehensive account of research in the field, but an additional and most ambitious goal is to go beyond that by defining the approach in more detail than has been done before, showing the relationships between pragmatic studies and other related enquiries. This contextualising work is initiated in this introduction by way of a summary; individual chapters probe more deeply into their special areas of interest. We hope that both current and future scholars of various aspects of historical pragmatics will benefit from discussion of the place of individual topics in the broader context of the field. The volume will also provide an exploration of the place of historical pragmatics both within the field of pragmatics and within the field of historical linguistics, and it will provide a roadmap for interdisciplinary cooperation between historical pragmatics and neighbouring fields. In this introduction, we would like to draw attention to some recent paradigm shifts in linguistics that have been crucial for the development of historical pragmatics (section 2). We provide an initial outline of historical pragmatics by discussing various definitions of the field in an attempt to define the scope of the approach and highlight some of its pertinent features (section 3). We briefly discuss some data problems (section 4) and elaborate on the defining features of the field, viz. the study of language use in earlier periods, the diachronic development of language use and the communicative causes of language change (section 5). Section 6 is devoted to a range of fundamental problems in historical pragmatics, such as the meaning problem, i.e. the problem of establishing not only the sentence meaning in historical data but appropriate speaker meanings. Finally, we will briefly contextualise the 21 contributions that appear in this volume (section 7).

2.

Paradigm shifts in linguistics

The ultimate decades of the twentieth century saw several important and fundamental paradigm shifts in linguistics. In the words of Traugott (2008: 207), “what was marginal in the 1970s has come to be of central interest, above all pragmatics”. As a result, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics are no longer privileged fields of linguistics; the study of language use is considered to be just as important, or perhaps even more important in the sense that a proper study of language struc-

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Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

tures must take into consideration how these structures are actually used and interpreted. Further shifts concern the move from homogeneity to heterogeneity. Variationist studies have become a major trend. Language is seen as diachronic, social and dynamic and not as just a synchronic and static system. “It is now almost a truism that virtually no speaker has just one homogeneous system; there are different knowledge structures in different domains (work, family, religion), and no domain proves a complete range of communicative power” (Traugott 2008: 208). Traugott lists several further shifts, such as the shift from introspective data to empirical data of all kinds; the shift from decontextualised to contextualised sentences; and the related shift from the study of the decontextualised language product (i.e. text) to interactional processes. All these aspects are prominent defining features in historical pragmatics: we rely on empirical data in context and focus on the joint negotiation of meaning. The inception of historical pragmatics in the 1990s owes a great deal to the above-mentioned paradigm shifts. In the course of 15 years, the position of historical pragmatics within pragmatics has changed from marginal to central, and the sheer number of publications in the field has grown so much that a dedicated handbook is in order. Jucker’s (1995) book on historical pragmatics was an early collection of relevant studies in the field. It introduced the distinction between pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics with form-to-function and function-to-form mapping, which is frequently quoted in the literature. In the wake of the 1995 volume, conferences on the topic, plus panels at larger conferences were organised. In the year 2000, the new Journal of Historical Pragmatics gave the field an acknowledged place within the research paradigm. Textbooks of pragmatics and of historical linguistics, handbooks and encyclopaedias have increasingly started to devote a separate chapter or even several chapters to historical pragmatics (see, for instance, Brinton 2001, 2006; Traugott 2004, 2006; Held 2006; Radtke 2006; Seoane 2006; Jucker 2006, 2008; Culpeper 2010; Taavitsainen forthcoming). And, in 2007, the volume edited by Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (2007) provided a more critical assessment of the key questions and the convergence of different traditions of reading and analysing discourse from the perspective of historical pragmatics. The growing maturity of the field can be verified in the versatility of the approaches and methods and in its broadening scope: history is not only something of the past, but includes the present and the future (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 29).

3.

Definitions and scope

The field of pragmatics in general has always been split into two more or less distinct approaches. On the one hand, there is a fairly narrow conception of pragmatics that deals with information structure, implicit meanings and cognitive aspects of utterance interpretation, and, on the other hand, there is a wider conception

Trends and developments in historical pragmatics

5

of pragmatics that also includes the social context of language use. The narrow view, also called the component view, is more typical for Anglo-American scholars, while the wider approach to language use, the perspective view, which also includes social aspects, is more typical for Continental European pragmaticists (see Huang 2007: 4–5; Jucker 2008: 894–895). The distinction is clearly reflected in the relevant textbooks and handbooks. The Handbook of Pragmatics edited by Horn and Ward (2004), for instance, explicitly excludes the broader sociologically-based European view of pragmatics and concentrates its coverage on the “more narrowly circumscribed, mainly Anglo-American conception of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics and its applications” (Horn and Ward 2004: xi). Huang (2007: 5), too, adopts the AngloAmerican perspective by focusing on “topics emerging from the traditional concerns of analytical philosophy”. Verschueren (1999: 7), on the other hand, defines pragmatics as “a general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behaviour”. The Handbook of Pragmatics edited by Verschueren et al. (2003) also casts a wider net and includes topics that approach the study of the use of language from a social or cultural perspective. It is this Continental European perspective of pragmatics that has been adopted both for the current handbook and for the entire series in which it appears (see Preface to Handbook Series). This distinction between the mainly Anglo-American and the mainly European conceptions of pragmatics has had an impact on historical pragmatics, even though the boundaries are less clear-cut for historical pragmatics than for pragmatics in general. As a representative of the Anglo-American tradition, Traugott, for instance, defines historical pragmatics as “usage-based approach to language change” (2004: 538). For her, pragmatics deals with “non-literal meaning that arises in language use” (2004: 539), though in her 2008 article she seems to move towards the broader concept (see above). Much of the work within this tradition has been devoted to the grammaticalisation of linguistic elements, to pathways of change and to the study of the function of different conversational maxims in language change (see e.g. Traugott and Dasher 2005; Brinton 2006). The wider European tradition, on the other hand, takes a sociologically-based approach and wants to understand the patterns of human interaction within their social conditions of earlier periods (see, for instance, Held 2006; Jucker 2006, 2008; Taavitsainen forthcoming), and there is a considerable overlap with sociolinguistics. It also wants to understand the developments of these patterns and the principles that govern them. In some cases, the focus is provided by the element under analysis as in the case of address terms, speech acts or dialogue analysis, but language is also seen as situated within discourse domains; therefore, language use in religious discourse, scientific discourse, media discourse, courtroom discourse and personal correspondence has been studied in detail in this volume.

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Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007: 13), representatives of the wider European tradition, make an attempt to reconcile the views and define historical pragmatics as follows: “Historical pragmatics focuses on language use in past contexts and examines how meaning is made. It is an empirical branch of linguistic study, with focus on authentic language use of the past”. Jucker (2008), also a representative of the European tradition, defines historical pragmatics as follows: In a broader sense adopting the more European conceptualization of pragmatics, historical pragmatics can be defined as a field of study that wants to understand the patterns of intentional human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments. (Jucker 2008: 895)

This definition includes the three areas of historical pragmatics mentioned above: the language use in earlier periods, the development of language use and the principles of such developments. It explicitly includes the societal conditions of human interaction. Language is studied within a larger communicative and social context. It is thus broader and more encompassing than e.g. Horn and Ward’s conceptualisation of historical pragmatics. Such definitions, while they may be important to delimit the contributions to a handbook such as the present one, do not constrain the work that is being done. Other publication outlets, such as the Journal of Historical Pragmatics, do not impose strict boundaries but invite contributions from neighbouring areas, such as sociohistorical linguistics or historical semantics as well. The borders are fuzzy and the neighbouring areas are overlapping, providing incentives for new lines of study, e.g. with new resources such as the Historical Thesaurus (see below). In addition to the term “historical pragmatics”, the term “historical discourse analysis” is sometimes used. Brinton (2001) points out that it is not easy to distinguish the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis, but in her outline of historical discourse analysis she puts the emphasis “on the more formal aspects of text structure, such as discourse markers or grounding, rather than on the more notional elements of text semantics, such as presupposition or conversational maxims or on aspects of language use” (Brinton 2001: 139). In a recent encyclopaedia article, Culpeper (2010: 189) discusses the relation between the two terms “historical pragmatics” and “historical discourse analysis” and points out that the terminology is not constant yet, but that in the narrow Anglo-American conception of historical pragmatics, the term “historical discourse analysis” is sometimes invoked for what in the wider European conception is covered by the field of “historical pragmatics” itself. “Historical dialogue analysis” is another frequently used label (e.g. Fritz 1994, 1995, 1997; Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999a). Fritz (1997: 47) argues that dialogue analysis is a central field within pragmatics and that, therefore, historical dialogue analysis should be at the centre of historical pragmatics. He envisages three

Trends and developments in historical pragmatics

7

basic concerns for historical dialogue analysis. First, historical dialogue analysis studies individual historical texts focusing on their pragmatic structures and the dialogues contained in them. Second, it compares earlier dialogue forms with later ones. As an example, he mentions a comparison of sixteenth-century forms of swearing in Switzerland with present-day practices (Lötscher 1981). And third, historical dialogue analysis studies the evolution of dialogue forms. Such an endeavour takes it for granted that different forms of dialogue exist and can be described. The analysis of the forms focuses on their organisation, their development and the degrees to which they are conventionalised and standardised.

4.

Data problems

Historical pragmatics has to rely on written data, while pragmatics in general largely takes it for granted that the object of investigation should be naturally occurring spoken data. The same discrepancy is embedded in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics: Historical pragmatics and, in a wider sense, historical sociolinguistics need access to spoken texts, preferably items of spontaneously spoken language of earlier periods; these are, however, no longer available. This plight has recently been referred to as the problem of “bad data”. (Fries 1998: 85)

The “bad data problem” was formulated by Labov (1994: 11) as an inherent quality of periods without authentic records of spoken language: “Historical linguistics can then be thought of as the art of making the best use of bad data”. His statement is echoed in several studies of the 1990s, and the data problems have been discussed widely and different solutions have been proposed (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 6–10; Culpeper and Kytö 2000; Jucker 2000a, 2008: 895–897; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 26–28; Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 18–21). Two approaches can be discerned: first, the search for material that is as authentic as possible; and second, the contention that even written language has a communicative purpose and therefore deserves to be studied from a pragmatic perspective. Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) have made these two approaches compatible with each other. In the following sections, we will briefly look at these two approaches and at Koch and Oesterreicher’s proposal that replaces the dichotomy of written and spoken language with a scale from the language of immediacy to the language of distance that interacts with the dichotomy of the phonic and the graphic code. In the final part of this section, we will briefly discuss more recent developments in the requirements for authenticity and how these are related to recent technological developments in the availability of relevant data.

8 4.1.

Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

The search for authentic language

For researchers who see written language as an imperfect rendering of actual, spontaneous spoken language use, it is important to search for instances of written language that are as close as possible to the “real thing”. Historical (written) texts often contain accounts of spoken language, and Rissanen (1986: 98), for instance, argued that features that are consistently more frequent in written representations of spoken language than in other types of written language may safely be assumed to be even more frequent in the spoken language of that period. Particularly promising genres in this respect are court records, which provide accounts of the spoken proceedings in court (see Doty, this volume). Drama texts and other fictional texts have also been used as a substitute for the spoken language of the past. Fictional texts obviously deviate to some extent from the actual spontaneous language usage, but the use of such material has regularly been justified on the grounds that it is the only possible source for the spoken language of the past (Salmon 1965: 105), and that “there is nothing else” (Brown and Gilman 1989: 170). More positive views are that drama comedies provide materials for studying features that primarily belong to spoken language, such as interjections, and that, of the genres included in the Helsinki Corpus, drama comedies provide “the nearest approximation to everyday spoken language in historical texts” (Taavitsainen 1995: 460). Mazzon, in a paper on address terms in the plays by Shakespeare, argued explicitly that “theatrical works mimic spoken interaction relatively more faithfully than other types of literary works” (Mazzon 2003: 223; see also Fitzmaurice, this volume). The Corpus of English Dialogues compiled by Culpeper and Kytö is based on the assumption that data for historical pragmatic investigation should be based on speech-related material (see Culpeper and Kytö 1999, 2000, 2006, 2010). The corpus contains material from four kinds of text that are all – in one way or another – closely related to spoken language: comedy drama, prose fiction, trial proceedings and witness depositions. The material covers the period from 1600 to 1720. The corpus is intended to allow a comparison between what might be called “recorded speech” in trial proceedings and witness depositions, and constructed, imaginary speech in comedy drama and prose fiction. In the introductory chapter to a recent book based on the corpus, they discuss the data problem of speech-related texts (Culpeper and Kytö 2010). Authentic communicative and dialogic language use has also been preserved in the form of personal letters, and indeed this form of interaction in historical periods has received a large amount of scholarly attention (see Palander-Collin, this volume). There are, however, problems connected with the data, as many of the letters are edited for various purposes, with modern conventions and normalisations to varying degrees imposed upon the original texts (see below).

Trends and developments in historical pragmatics

4.2.

9

The communicative nature of written language

In addition to the approaches that focus on types of data that are hypothesised to be close to spoken language or data that is by its very nature dialogic and communicative, such as letters, many researchers in historical pragmatics have devoted their attention to the communicative impact of written language per se. News discourse, for instance, has been extensively analysed from pragmatic perspectives without hypothesising any close connection to spoken language. Early Modern English pamphlets, for example, have been analysed as a form of early mass media (see Claridge, this volume). Pamphlets were printed, but they were often used in controversies and thus had a dialogic nature. They often had titles that alluded to their dialogic nature by including phrases such as “an answer to”, “a reply to” or “a replication to the rejoinder” (Fritz, this volume). Literary texts can also be studied as communicative acts as is highlighted by Sell (1991, 2000, 2001), who proposes a perspective on literature that focuses on the interaction of the real author with a real audience. Literary writing and reading are viewed as uses of language which amount to interpersonal activity, and which are thereby capable of bringing about a change in the status quo. This means that my references to communicative pragmatics will carry a strong echo of the Greek root pragma (= “deed”). (Sell 2000: 2)

Sell views the writer and the reader as being engaged in a triangular situation in which they are in communication about some third entity. His view puts literature within the remit of a general theory of communication and makes it possible to talk about the politeness of an author, e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer, towards his readers (Sell 1985; see also Fitzmaurice, this volume). 4.3.

A model for studying spoken and written texts

Koch and Oesterreicher (1985; see also Koch 1999) proposed a new way of looking at different types of language. They reconstruct the dichotomy of spoken versus written into a dichotomy based on medial realisation and a scale of communicative distance. A communicative act is realised either in the phonic medium or in the graphic medium. The scale of communicative distance describes whether the participants share a common physical context, whether the interaction takes place in a private or a public context, whether the participants are familiar with each other or not, and so on. Texts in the phonic medium typically display many features of communicative immediacy. A chat during a coffee break, for instance, takes place in a face-to-face situation, the communicators know each other, the context is more private than public, topics are allowed to develop freely and the partners talk spontaneously and generally cooperate in their communication. But there are also less typical instances of phonically realised texts, such as a funeral oration, which takes place in a public context in which some of the participants may know each

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Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

other less well. The topic is prescribed, and the text is mostly monologic rather than dialogic. Graphically realised texts, on the other hand, more typically display features of communicative distance. For typical forms of graphically realised texts, such as legal contracts, scientific treatises or newspaper articles, participants do not share a common physical context. The writers often do not know the readers of their text. The text is monologic and possibly rather formal, and it does not allow for spontaneity of the participants. But other graphically realised texts, such as email messages, Internet chat or short text messages may display many more signs of communicative immediacy. In such a conception, the historical pragmaticist, while restricted to texts in the graphic medium, is not restricted to texts of communicative distance. He or she can use the whole spectrum of texts from communicative immediate to communicative distant ones. The model allows the analyst to be very precise about the features of communicative immediacy and the features of communicative distance, and the rather crude dichotomy between spoken and written language can be refined. Court records, for instance, consist of a complex mixture of language that can be placed at different positions on the scale of communicative distance, even though all of it appears in the graphic code (Koch 1999: 410–412). The frame of the text consists of the legal modalities recorded by the court clerk for a future reader. This part is characterised by communicative distance. Embedded within the legal modalities, the clerk reports the interaction between the interactants present in the court: the judge, the defendant, lawyers and witnesses. Such language will be less distant than the legal formalities, but the courtroom imposes a fair degree of formality on the interactants, for some of whom the whole situation may be very unfamiliar and perhaps even threatening. Thus, it cannot be expected that this type of language reflects the language of immediacy. Within the proceedings in the courtroom, what has been said outside the courtroom may often become important, and it may be important for the case to have very accurate renderings of such utterances, e.g. in cases of slander, etc. It seems reasonable to assume that court clerks will have been particularly meticulous in recording the precise details of such instances of language use, and these instances are also likely to be characterised by the language of immediacy. 4.4.

New requirements on authenticity and recent technological developments

Modern technology has brought us to a new phase where the old problems of authenticity versus making texts more readily available to modern scholars can be resolved without compromising scholarly requirements. For example, the editing of texts of past periods is entering a new phase with electronic editions. Texts can be presented in a multilayered frame with digital images of the original texts accompanied by diplomatic transcriptions and edited versions with annotations and ex-

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planatory notes, making medieval texts available to modern readers in a different way from earlier times (see Honkapohja, Kaislaniemi and Marttila 2009; Kytö, this volume). Scholarly libraries are changing their policies of access to their materials, e.g. Catalan scientific manuscripts in Austrian libraries are available to the public in high-quality images on the Internet. A large number of Early Modern English printed books have been digitised and can be accessed online (Early English Books Online, EEBO); eighteenth-century English books are also available (Eighteenth Century Collections Online, ECCO). These new resources are bound to enrich studies of these periods on several fronts, including book history, book illustration and reading history. Such studies can also enrich the scope of historical pragmatics and open up new possibilities for probing deeper into characteristics of the audiences and the reception of historical works. New electronic resources are likely to change the research paradigms in historical pragmatics in the future. In the neighbouring area of historical semantics, the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), the result of 45 years of work, was recently released in book form; in the future an electronic version, compatible with the Oxford English Dictionary Online, will be available. The thesaurus relies on Oxford English Dictionary materials and organises them in a chronological order according to semantic fields to show what was available to speakers of English at any one point in the dictionary’s long history, and how meaning potentials developed and changed. This resource will provide an asset for historical pragmatics studies that focus on language use in context. English historical corpora offer large electronic databases of material ready to be searched so that the studied items can be located for contextual analysis. We can expect a boost in empirical studies along these lines in the future.

5.

Language use, development and communicative causes

In the definition and delimitation of the field of historical pragmatics, we mentioned three particular concerns that define the scope of historical pragmatics: the study of intentional language use within a social and cultural context in earlier periods of time, the study of the development of language use and the study of the communicative causes of language change in general. These concerns figure prominently in the various attempts to structure the field (Jacobs and Jucker 1995; Brinton 2001; Jucker 2008; Culpeper 2010). In the following, we want to elaborate these three concerns and mention some of the recent research that has added to our understanding of them.

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5.1.

Language use in earlier periods

The pragmatic study of the use of language in earlier periods has been termed “pragmaphilology” by Jacobs and Jucker (1995: 11). According to them, pragmaphilology “describes the contextual aspects of historical texts, including the addressers and addressees, their social and personal relationship, the physical and social setting of text production and text reception, and the goal(s) of the text” (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 11). Brinton, who uses the term “historical discourse analysis proper” for this field, describes it as “an application of discourse analysis to language history. It is the study of discourse forms, function, or structures – that is, whatever is encompassed by discourse analysis […] – in earlier periods of a language” (Brinton 2001: 139). Such studies usually rely on a careful consideration of the social and cultural context in which language is used, and the further removed the period under scrutiny is from our own, the more difficult it is to develop an accurate picture. What looks familiar might have had different meanings, and the language cannot be understood without specialised training and instruction. With the increased linguistic distance, cultural distance also increases, e.g. the Anglo-Saxon world is very different from our own and motivations guiding communicators may differ in unpredictable ways. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that studies that concentrate on the language of specific periods in the history of English or of other languages are often based on fictional materials, such as poems, narratives or plays. These fictional texts often depict worlds that are independent of the world in which they were written in the sense that they depict historical scenes, scenes that take place in countries that were foreign to the author or even entirely fantastic fairy-tale worlds. A substantial amount of work in historical pragmatics has been devoted to the works of the Middle English author Geoffrey Chaucer and to the plays written by William Shakespeare. It is for this reason that separate chapters in this handbook are devoted to these two authors (see Pakkala-Weckström on Chaucer, and Beatrix Busse and Ulrich Busse on Shakespeare). A second area of historical pragmatic research that focuses on language use in specific historical periods is devoted to courtroom language. In particular, the language of the Early Modern English courtroom has been studied extensively. The interactions in Early Modern courtrooms differ considerably from present-day courtrooms in their basic assumptions. The modern principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty was not in force; in fact, proceedings were based on an assumption that the defendant was guilty unless proven innocent. This had farreaching consequences not just for the fate of the defendants but also for the linguistic strategies chosen by the interactants in the courtroom. As in the case of fiction, the researcher has to analyse the linguistic strategies in several layers of context. The utterances are not just contextualised within, for instance, an Early Modern English courtroom, but they also have to be seen in the context of how

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court records were taken down in shorthand, written out in longhand or printed, of who the intended readers were and so on (see Doty, this volume, for an overview of research in this area). 5.2.

Diachronic development of language use

The next approach goes one step further as it combines synchronic descriptions of language use into a diachronic view, ultimately studying language as a process of continuous development. This is, then, not only historical pragmatics but, to use Jacobs and Jucker’s term, “diachronic pragmatics” in a more narrow sense (1995: 13). Brinton describes this approach as “less well developed than the other” and calls it “diachronic(ally oriented) discourse analysis” (2001: 140). “It involves a study of the changes in discourse marking, function, and structures over time. That is, discourse structure is treated on a par with phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structure as something which changes and develops over time” (Brinton 2001: 140). Brinton’s description may have been true at the turn of the century, but the last few years have seen a proliferation of work in this area. Jacobs and Jucker (1995) proposed a further distinction of this type of study into diachronic form-to-function mapping and diachronic function-to-form mapping. Diachronic form-to-function mapping takes a particular linguistic form, such as a specific discourse marker or an address term, as a starting point and traces its diachronic development. Brinton (1996, 1998, 2006), for instance, investigates the history of a broad range of discourse markers, or pragmatic markers as she calls them, such as gan, anon, hwæt or only. In a more recent study, she analyses the origin and development of comment clauses, such as I daresy, (as) I say, I mean, or as/so you see in the history of English and argues that they do not derive from earlier matrix clauses but have a variety of origins, such as imperatives, adverbial adjuncts or relative clauses (Brinton 2008). In all these cases, the linguistic form (with spelling variations) is the starting point. The focus is on the early functions of these forms and how, in the course of time, these functions changed. Similar studies have been carried out on address terms. Brown and Gilman (1960) provide a model of diachronic analysis that is claimed to be applicable to all European languages that make a distinction between two pronouns of address for single individuals. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1995) trace the development of address terms in a corpus of Early English correspondence. The volume edited by Taavitsainen and Jucker (2003) contains several contributions dealing with the Middle English and Early Modern English address term systems, but it also includes e.g. chapters discussing respect in the history of German pronouns of address, and Czech address forms until 1700. In diachronic function-to-form mapping, on the other hand, speech functions are taken as the starting point for the investigation and their different realisations across time are analysed. Speech acts with their functional definitions are an ob-

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vious case in point. Arnovick (1999), for instance, traces several speech acts in the history of English. The agonistic insult in English is one of her case studies, which she traces from the flyting of the Anglo-Saxon warrior to the competitive sounding of African-American youths. These speech acts, or speech events, as she calls them, are only comparable to the extent that they share a similar function, which – in this particular case – could be described as verbal duelling. A history of compliments (see Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008) likewise relies on the comparability of the speech function of paying a compliment, and a history of apologies (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008a) requires a continuing history of a speech act that is sufficiently identifiable as apology over the course of time. However, in such histories we always have to expect both the form and the function to change to a certain extent even if – for analytical purposes – we take one or the other as a starting point (see also Culpeper 2010: 192). Arnovick’s (1999: 95–118) account of the development of the leave-taking expression goodbye from God be with you provides a particularly telling example. In Early Modern English, God be with you entailed an explicit blessing and an implicit parting. The phrase developed into good-bye and in the process lost the element of blessing in its meaning. 5.3.

Communicative causes of language change

The third approach was termed “discourse-oriented historical linguistics” by Brinton (2001: 140). In her words, “it is the study of ‘discourse-pragmatic factors’ in language change or of the discourse motivations behind diachronic changes, whether phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic” (Brinton 2001: 140). Traugott and Dasher (2005), for instance, developed a far-reaching model that tries to adduce pragmatic motivations for semantic change and combine them with neo-Gricean pragmatics and ideas from cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. Linguistic expressions change their meaning over time because speakers use them to communicate and negotiate meanings in their interactions with each other. Meanings are conventionalised within speech communities but they are also constantly negotiated and re-negotiated in each interaction. Ad-hoc meanings that are repeatedly invoked may then become conventionalised for the entire speech community, that is to say the speaker may invite the addressee to draw specific inferences, and such “invited inferences” may then become conventionalised into new meanings. The English discourse marker in fact, for instance, derives from the Early Modern English lexeme fact meaning ‘deed, action’. In certain contexts, the phrase invited the inference of the evidential meaning ‘in practice/reality/actuality’. In such contexts, the proposition introduced by in fact was often understood in opposition to some other proposition and therefore regularly invited the inference of adversativity. And, finally, in fact functions at the discourse level to express the speaker’s attitude towards the proposition (Traugott and Dasher 2005: 165–169).

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Thus the reasons for language change are located squarely in the communicative needs of the speakers and in their interaction with each other. The traditional distinction between language internal and language external causes of language change becomes ultimately blurred: language changes as a result of the changing communicative needs of speakers, but these communicative needs change as a result of the wider cultural and social developments of the language community. Thus both internal and external motivations count. Political events, social, spiritual and economic developments all have a bearing on the communicative needs of speakers, and as a result the language adapts to these changing needs. And, in an even more obvious way, technical innovations change the world and ways of communicating. The developing means of distance communication – from the early postal services to the telephone, telegraph, mobile phone and the Internet – have a direct bearing on communicative patterns.

6.

The problems of historical pragmatics

Historical pragmatics deals with both larger and more elusive categories than traditional branches of historical linguistics, and its status on the map of historical linguistics is not as long-standing or established as that of historical phonology, for example. The regularities of sound changes are fairly well understood. Historical morphology and syntax have been studied extensively, as has semantics, which has also received attention within e.g. lexical studies, but changes at the pragmatic level are in many ways more difficult to trace. The reasons are manifold. In the following sections, we want to outline some of the main problems that are either unique to the investigation of pragmatic change or pose even greater challenges than at other levels of linguistic description. Modes of linguistic change and the problems of historical pragmatics are embedded in the problems of language change in general, and various models have been proposed. Corpus methods in historical linguistics, for instance, are based on the view of language as a constantly changing entity with variation (e.g. Milroy 1992: 1). The variationist paradigm of language change was first articulated in the seminal article by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), where they introduced the idea of “orderly heterogeneity” with the changing paradigms in the proportions of linguistic variants indicating ongoing changes. The model has received a great deal of attention and inspired studies of phonological, morphological and syntactic change. The variationist paradigm seems to be applicable beyond the well-established areas, e.g. Nerlich (this volume) discusses metaphorisation and metonymisation as strategies of meaning-making processes through multiple meanings to new meanings. The variationist view is applicable to the description of pragmatic utterances, as there are alternative ways of expressing the same meanings, and speech acts, for instance, can be performed in multiple ways (see Jucker and Taavitsainen

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forthc.). But, in general, our present methods are mostly either corpus aided or qualitative, and attempts at more quantitative approaches are few (e.g. Jucker et al. 2008; Valkonen 2008). It is difficult to find empirical evidence of change in proportions of occurrence of pragmatic phenomena, though in some cases it is possible to establish more general diachronic lines of development (see below). 6.1.

Pathways-of-change problem

Many studies in historical linguistics have tried to generalise trends across large numbers of individual changes that are observable in a diachronic analysis. Is it possible to find pathways of change that are common to all these changes or that are perhaps even universally valid? Such investigations presuppose that we can identify different instances and stages of language change. Speakers start using linguistic expressions with new meanings, they combine linguistic material in new ways to express new meanings and so on. Researchers of historical phonology have uncovered generally valid laws and generalisations, and many of them are reasonably well understood. In the area of syntax and semantics, the research into patterns of development has also been successful, but in the area of pragmatics the investigations into pathways of change are still very much at the beginning. Before we can hope to be in a position to tackle such problems, a range of more basic problems have to be confronted. We have to be able to establish the meaning potentials of pragmatic units, their categorisation and their context. These and related problems will be briefly outlined in the subsequent sections. 6.2.

Meaning problem (semasiology, form-to-function)

Older texts pose problems of interpretation. In order to arrive at reliable conclusions, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the conventionalised meaning potential of a linguistic expression and its actual usage in a particular context (see, for instance, Fritz 2005: 6). It is essential to understand the precise meaning of individual words that are used in the texts under scrutiny, and this requires detailed investigations into how a particular author and his or her contemporaries generally used a word or expression. How would a contemporary audience have understood and interpreted it? This is the semasiological approach in semantics, which investigates the meanings and meaning potentials of specific expressions. Within historical pragmatics, the meaning problem is most explicitly tackled in approaches that have been called “form-to-function” (see above), in which specific linguistic forms are taken as a starting point in order to investigate their pragmatic impact in specific situations. In historical pragmatics, we deal with the pragmatic effect of utterances and even of entire texts. How, for instance, can the illocutionary force or even the perlocutionary effect of a specific speech act be established? To what extent were spe-

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cific utterances considered to be ironic, polite or insulting? Our modern intuition may often be an unreliable guide in this respect. What comes across as polite may have been understood as ironic by a contemporary audience or vice versa. The interpretation of irony and politeness requires a large amount of contextual knowledge. If a speaker pays a compliment, the addressee needs to have some estimation of the speaker’s real opinion in order to be able to interpret the praise as a real compliment, an empty politeness phrase or an ironic slur. With the additional distance of the linguistic analyst, such interpretations become more difficult and more prone to error. Researchers dealing with the history of politeness or with expressive speech acts have to focus on this problem, and a variety of solutions have been proposed. In an investigation of insults, for instance, Jucker and Taavitsainen (Jucker 2000b; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2007) suggest a two-fold approach: on the one hand, a careful study of the reaction of the addressee can reveal instances that were considered to be insulting to him or her, and, on the other hand, a study of relevant speech-act verbs in their own context of use may reveal metadiscourse on the speech act under investigation. People who talk about insults may give indications as to how they interpret specific utterances. 6.3.

Identification problem (onomasiology, function-to-form)

The identification problem is the mirror image of the meaning problem. Researchers who want to investigate specific speech acts, for instance, need to be able to identify expressions of politeness and other speech functions in the texts that they are studying. Very often the identification of a specific speech function is not a trivial matter. In an investigation of insults, for instance, the researcher has to find identification procedures for this particular speech act (Jucker 2000b; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000). This corresponds to the onomasiological approach in semantics. The researcher starts with a speech function and searches for the different ways in which speakers of a language at a given time realised this function. Two types of evidence can be adduced in the identification process. First, explicit meta-comments contain discussions of particular speech acts or politeness and tell us a great deal about the cultural practices of the period in question. Through such textual clues, we may be able to locate the linguistic elements that are used for the realisation of particular speech acts. Speakers use labels to refer to specific speech acts, and a semantic analysis of these verbs can give us insights into the speech acts themselves. The usefulness of handbooks, guides to letter writing, language textbooks and various manuals needs to be mentioned in this connection as well. Second, in fictional dialogues, reported actual dialogues or letters written in response to other letters, we may get direct reactions to specific speech acts, i.e. an indication of the perlocutionary effects. An angry reaction of indignation to a

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preceding utterance may tell us that this utterance was perceived as an insult, for instance. The second parts are, however, fairly seldom available. For instance, in correspondence, letters may have passed through several hands and the survival of ephemeral materials is haphazard. This state of affairs enhances the value of fictional material, and drama is most helpful in this respect as the second turns are often provided. It is not always easy or even possible to distinguish between the meaning problem and the identification problem. Contextual information in the form of interlocutor reactions can be seen as the link between the linguistic form and what we know about its function. If we use this link to get from the function to the linguistic form, we are dealing with the identification problem. If we go the other way and use it to get from the linguistic form to its function, we are dealing with the meaning problem. The situation may be even more complex, especially if it is not entirely clear whether we are dealing with a functional or a formal entity. The speech act of thanking is a case in point. On the face of it, it seems that thanking is a clear case of a speech function, but it may in fact be difficult to define it without recourse to the occurrence of elements such as thanks (or alternative expressions with obliged or grateful). It is well known that some speech acts have a limited range or realisational pattern, such as, for instance, apologies, which in English tend to include such standard phrases as pardon, excuse or sorry (see Deutschmann 2003). And, therefore, it may not be entirely clear whether the speech acts of thanking or apologising can be defined independently of their realisational patterns. Furthermore, if an identification procedure has been found for a specific speech act at a given point in the history of English, it still remains an open question whether the same procedure can be used at other points in the history of English. Apologies in Presentday English are regularly realised by words such as pardon, excuse or sorry. But, in earlier stages of English, the range of realisational patterns was much less standardised, and different search patterns have to be established. 6.4.

Categorisation problem

In addition to the identification of specific meanings, the historical pragmaticist also has to classify and categorise the elements under investigation. To take a clear example, category boundaries have been drawn differently by different scholars for discourse markers and interjections (see the relevant chapters in this volume). Other areas are even more complicated. Studies on modal expressions in English provide evidence of such difficulties in various periods of language history. For instance, Mazzon (2009: 51), who investigates modals in Middle English, includes much more in the category of modal expressions than many other scholars. In Present-day English, ongoing changes with core modals and semi-modals undergoing extensive shifts have been studied, and the categorisation difficulties of English

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modality are obvious. The use of modal auxiliaries is diminishing, and there is a tendency towards monosemy, the prevalence of one meaning over others, with minor and marginal usages of core modals declining more than others. In contrast, there is a substantial rise in the frequency of the use of semi-modals, though the extent to which these two trends are connected is unclear; e.g. must is exceptional in many respects (Leech et al. 2009: 89–90, 116). Speech acts provide more evidence of the problem. Kohnen (2008) classifies a range of elements as directives in the history of English. He distinguishes four different constructions as directives. The first consists of a matrix clause with a directive speech-act verb and an embedded clause: Ic bidde eow þat … ‘I ask you to …’ (Kohnen 2008: 30). These he calls “directive performatives”. The second type consists of the phrase þu scealt or ge sculon ‘you shall’ followed by an infinitival verb phrase (2008: 33). This construction, however, is used both in directive and in descriptive contexts. The third construction consists of uton followed by an infinitive (2008: 35) and is usually translated as let’s. Finally, the fourth construction contains a combination of neodþearf or þearf ‘need’ plus a first- or a second-person pronoun (2008: 39). For such an analysis it is obviously necessary to determine the precise illocution of individual utterances containing these constructions. As a second analytical step, the utterance is then assigned to the speech-act category of directives. Thus it is not enough to analyse individual utterances; together they provide classes of elements, and several such classes may be combined in a hierarchical way to form larger speech-act inventories, such as one of Searle’s (1979: 14, 15) original speech-act types: directives, commissives, assertives and expressives (or some other classification). Grzega (2008) shows that such a categorisation may be very difficult. He looks at different forms of greetings in the history of English and finds considerable differences over the centuries. Greetings fluctuate between explicitly formulated wishes or questions and conversational markers. He categorises them on the basis of the motivation for their form. In Old English, attention getters and wishes for good health were frequently used as greetings. In Middle English, enquiries about the addressee’s health and wishes for prosperity or well-being took their place. Several issues are at stake here: we have to take cultural differences of directness and indirectness conventions into account and consider the changing conceptions of politeness in language histories. Sincerity, irony and sarcasm provide additional challenges that have to do with speaker attitudes. Further studies are needed to shed new light on the developments. 6.5.

Inventory problem

The inventory problem is the mirror image of the categorisation problem. While categorisation takes individual instances of a particular utterance type and tries to classify them on the basis of their similarities in form or function, an inventory

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starts with the superordinate category and tries to establish a full inventory of all such categories. The examples given in the previous passage about the categorisation problem can therefore also be viewed from this angle. The categorisation classifies different types of utterances as directives, for instance, and, in the next step of the analysis, an attempt is made to establish a comprehensive inventory of all the different types of directives at a given point in the history of a language, and ultimately to trace the changes in this inventory over time. For this, it is necessary to establish the sociohistorical context in which the changes take place in order to gain knowledge of larger pragmatic patterns of change. Such a research programme assesses how the proportions of items in a particular field change and lead to large-scale language change. A new inventory of modal expressions, for instance, seems to be in order as core modals undergo extensive changes and alternative expressions gain ground (Leech at al. 2009: 268–269). Greetings, mentioned in the previous section, provide a pertinent example at the utterance level. Inventories for different periods of English have been outlined by Grzega (2008), and there is a comparative study of greetings from the early days of philology in Old English, Old High German and Old Norse (Stroebe 1911). In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish between the categorisation problem and the inventory problem. If a researcher tries to give a comprehensive account of all elements of a particular category, this is both an instance of the categorisation problem (to what extent are the elements instances of this category?) and of the inventory problem (what is the inventory of all the elements that belong to this category?). 6.6.

Contextualisation problem

Context provides a multilayered analytical grid to historical pragmatics, and various models have been presented to describe the scale from macro- to micro-context and their analyses (see Culpeper, this volume). The context of culture provides one end of the scale. This has been taken into account e.g. by positing the various periods of language history as different cultural stages and by applying the methods of cross-cultural comparisons to these studies (see Culpeper and Archer 2008). The sociohistorical context of text production is also a macro-level issue. An intermediate level is provided by the genres of writing as they are important in guiding language activities, both the production of texts and their reception, and in this way investigations into genre distinctions also contextualise pragmatic elements. Speech acts, for example, are comprehensible only within their contexts, as meanings may easily be reversed and the only way to interpret them is through the context of utterance. When we analyse insults in a play, for instance, we place a speech act within its larger linguistic context. Micro-level analyses are at the other end of the scale, with the local level of text in focus. Pronoun references and meanings of deictic features in individual texts, for instance, would count in this category. More

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general questions essential to historical pragmatics are e.g. the following: What is the social context in which a particular element is being used? Who uses it in which genre/communicative context?

7.

The structure of the present volume

As pointed out above (section 3), the present volume adopts the broader sociologically-based Continental European approach to historical pragmatics, but it also includes important contributions within the narrower Anglo-American approach. The overall design conveys the notion of pragmatics as being a perspective rather than an additional component of language theory. The contents of the contributions range from micro- to macro-analyses of language use. English data prevails in many chapters; in fact, the entire volume is biased towards research on English historical pragmatics, although in some areas other languages take the leading role, e.g. in studies on controversies and on rituals. But, in general, there is far more relevant research on English than on any other language and we did not try to redress the balance by artificially foregrounding work on non-English languages. It is to be hoped that in due course work on other languages will expand and enrich the overall picture of historical pragmatics in significant ways. The volume is divided into six sections. The first section is devoted to data problems and methodology and consists of two chapters. The first chapter, by Merja Kytö, deals with data in historical pragmatics and also discusses some of the methodological issues in corpus linguistics – the use of corpora being a prevailing trend at least in English historical pragmatics. Jonathan Culpeper’s chapter deals with historical sociopragmatics. The point of departure is the fundamental issue of what we understand by pragmatics and whether a separate field of sociopragmatics is needed, but the chapter also answers some pertinent methodological questions and serves as a good introduction to the issues discussed in other sections of the volume. The second section is entitled “Diachrony” and contains papers that belong to the Anglo-American tradition of historical pragmatics. They are mostly concerned with the pragmatic causes of language change, and illuminate the problems and central issues from several angles. The first three deal with core processes of language change: grammaticalisation, subjectification and intersubjectification, and pragmaticalisation and discursisation. Some of these processes have strong semantic associations or at least shades of semantic colouring, but they have pragmatic motivations and can also be viewed from the angle of historical pragmatics, as is done in this volume. Elizabeth Closs Traugott’s chapter takes us more clearly to the area of historical semantics, viewed from the angle of pragmatic change. Traugott’s study demonstrates how interfaces often yield new insights. María José López-Couso reviews the literature on subjectification and intersubjectification,

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while Claudia Claridge and Leslie Arnovick provide an overview and four case studies on pragmaticalisation and – as a special case of pragmaticalisation – discursisation. Finally, Brigitte Nerlich’s contribution is devoted to metaphor and metonymy and their function in language change. The third section is devoted to two authors of fiction. Mari Pakkala-Weckström reviews the extensive historical pragmatic work on Geoffrey Chaucer, and Beatrix Busse and Ulrich Busse on William Shakespeare. There is more work from a historical pragmatic perspective on these two authors than on any other single author. Some occasional historical pragmatic work has been carried out on fiction in Medieval French (e.g. Lebsanft 1988, 1999) and in Middle High German (e.g. Weigand 1988). It is hoped that this section serves as inspiration for more, as there is great potential in these unexplored areas. These chapters will be particularly useful for researchers seeking an overview of historical pragmatic work that has been carried out on the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but they will be of interest to others as well because there are areas of overlap between these chapters and other sections (e.g. on discourse markers or on address terms). The fourth section is devoted to the pragmatic analyses of short expressions: discourse markers, interjections and expletives, and address terms. This subfield of historical pragmatics is well established with a large number of studies from the 1980s and 1990s, and other languages besides English are also represented. Laurel Brinton’s contribution deals with discourse markers, including those in French, and Elke Gehweiler’s with interjections and expletives, including in German and Swiss German among others. Gabriella Mazzon’s chapter is devoted to address terms and also cites relevant examples from a large range of languages. The section on interactional pragmatics deals with speech acts, politeness, controversies and rituals, and includes chapters by Dawn Archer, Minna Nevala, Gerd Fritz and Marcel Bax. They all deal with the dimension of self–other in various attestations. Researchers on speech acts have been active in recent years and methodologies are being developed to overcome the difficulties of locating relevant material. Politeness is another research-intensive area with more ambitious goals for politeness studies than earlier, as the long diachrony of language histories and the reverse side of impoliteness are also addressed. Controversies make a welcome exception to the domination of English studies, as work on the German language is leading in this field, with religious controversies of the Reformation period playing an important role. Studies on rituals have mainly been conducted within anthropology, but more recently also in historical pragmatics, with Dutch studies in a foregrounded position. The final section is devoted to discourse domains. The chapters deal with religious discourse (by Thomas Kohnen), scientific discourse (by Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen), news discourse (by Claudia Claridge), courtroom discourse (by Kathleen Doty), correspondence (by Minna Palander-Collin) and literary discourse (by Susan Fitzmaurice). Discourse domains characterise the source of the data ana-

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lysed in these chapters, and a certain amount of overlap is unavoidable with e.g. the pragmatic analysis of short expressions and interactional pragmatics. The overall angle is, however, different. The extent to which such elements have received attention in particular discourse domains varies, and the descriptions of the work done to date provide readers with state-of-the-art accounts of recent trends, ongoing work and indications of desiderata for future studies.

8.

Conclusions

This volume is an attempt to describe the position of historical pragmatics in the large field of pragmatics, and one of the goals is to relate historical pragmatics to the field of historical linguistics; this is in accordance with the notion that historical pragmatics is situated at the crossroads of the two disciplines – pragmatics and historical linguistics (as formulated in the blurb of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2000). The field was launched as a systematic area of research in 1995, though there had been some sporadic early studies already in the 1980s. During its lifetime, we have seen a move towards more ambitious research goals and more interdisciplinary work. The area has grown considerably with the widening of the field of pragmatics to an overarching perspective on any aspect of language use in communication at any level of structure (Verschueren 1987: 5). More recently, the definition has broadened to include general cognitive, social and cultural perspectives (Verschueren 1999: 7). At the same time in pragmatics as in other fields of linguistics, the view that the present cannot be understood without knowledge of the past has gained ground, and historical pragmatics has grown from a sidetrack to an area in its own right. It has also become more common to refer to past stages to give depth to present-day language developments (see Traugott above). Like pragmatics, historical pragmatics has become a perspective of language use rather than being at a crossroads, where it was located ten years ago (see e.g. the chapters on language domains). As the volume shows, exciting new areas of research can grow out of such a perspective. Cross-fertilisation of research approaches and methodologies are fruitful in inspiring new explorations that lead to innovative insights and open up new research paradigms. The contributions in this volume make use of several other fields of research that serve as launching pads for new thoughts: psychology, cognitive sciences, sociology, anthropology, cultural history and medical history or history of science are mentioned in various contributions. One of our bold statements was to aim at providing a roadmap for interdisciplinary cooperation. We hope that these surveys will fulfil their function and provide incentive for new extensions to – as yet – unknown areas. In addition, several new directions have been indicated as desiderata for future studies. The availability of new materials also opens up new avenues for studies. For example, new authentic data are more readily available in electronic resources

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that only a few years ago were buried in repositories of libraries in different continents; now the resources are available from scholars’ laptops on their own desks. New data lead to new methods, and these are being developed for historical pragmatics, e.g. in corpus linguistics and multimodal analysis. Corpus-linguistic analyses can be carried out more efficiently and reliably with new software, and pragmatic applications of corpus methods have recently become a focus of attention, e.g. in speech-act studies, so much so that the label “corpus pragmatics” has been carried over into more common use (see e.g. Jucker, Schreier and Hundt 2009). The future of the discipline looks bright. A great deal has already been completed and guidelines are set for future directions, but there is a great deal that we do not know yet, and there are unexplored areas and possibilities for new discoveries. We hope that the chapters in this volume will serve as inspiration for the future. Acknowledgements We are grateful to Wolfram Bublitz for bringing additional points on present trends in pragmatics to our attention, and to Turo Hiltunen and Daniela Landert for their pertinent comments on a draft version of this introduction. Electronic sources EEBO (Early English Books Online) http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Parts 1 and 2) http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/ecco. HTE (Historical Thesaurus of English) http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/sesll/EngLang/thesaur/. OED (Oxford English Dictionary) http://oed.com/.

References Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999 Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 68.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Borgmeier, Raimund, Herbert Grabes and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) 1998 Anglistentag 1997 Giessen: Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996 Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 1998 ‘The flowers are lovely; only, they have no scent’: The evolution of a pragmatic marker in English. In: Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 9–33.

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Brinton, Laurel J. 2001 Historical discourse analysis. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 138–160. Oxford: Blackwell. Brinton, Laurel J. 2006 Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), 307–334. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008 The Comment Clause in English. Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Developments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1960 The pronouns of power and solidarity. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 253–276. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1989 Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Language in Society 18.2: 159–212. Culpeper, Jonathan 2010 Historical pragmatics. In: Louise Cummings (ed.), The Pragmatics Encyclopedia, 188–192. London/New York: Routledge. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Dawn Archer 2008 Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640–1760. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 45–84. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 1999 Modifying pragmatic force: Hedges in a corpus of Early Modern English dialogues. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 293–312. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 2000 Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken discourse (re)cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 175–199. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 2006 ‘Good, good indeed, the best that ere I heard’: Exploring lexical repetitions in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen (eds.), Dialogic Language Use. Dimensions du dialogisme. Dialogischer Sprachgebrauch, 69–85. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 66.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 2010 Early Modern English Dialogues. Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutschmann, Mats 2003 Apologising in British English. (Skrifter från moderna språk 10.) Umeå: Institutionen för moderna språk, Umeå University. Ernst, Gerhard, Martin-Dietrich Gleßgen, Christian Schmitt and Wolfgang Schweickard (eds.) 2006 Romanische Sprachgeschichte. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen. Volume 2. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK 23.1.–3.) 20 Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Fitzmaurice, Susan M., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2007 Methods in Historical Pragmatics. (Topics in English Linguistics 52.) Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Jucker, Andreas H. 2006 Historical pragmatics. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren in collaboration with Eline Versluys (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics 2006, 1–14. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Historical pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 2.5: 894–906. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft 1999a Historical dialogue analysis: Roots and traditions in the study of the Romance languages, German and English. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 1–33. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.) 1999b Historical Dialogue Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen and Barb Breustedt 2008 Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 273–294. Jucker, Andreas H., Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.) 2009 Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29). Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008. (Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 68.) Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2008a Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 229–244. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008b Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen. Forthcoming Pragmatic variables. In: J. M. Hernández-Campoy (ed.) The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Koch, Peter 1999 Court records and cartoons: Reflections of spontaneous dialogue in Early Romance texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 399–429. Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43. Kohnen, Thomas 2008 Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 27–44. Labov, William 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. I: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Lebsanft, Franz 1988 Studien zu einer Linguistik des Grusses. Sprache und Funktion der altfranzösischen Grußformeln. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Lebsanft, Franz 1999 A Late Medieval French bargain dialogue (Pathelin II), Or: Further remarks on the history of dialogue forms. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 269–292. Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith 2009 Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lötscher, Andreas 1981 Zur Sprachgeschichte des Fluchens und Beschimpfens im Schweizerdeutschen. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 48: 145–160. Mazzon, Gabriella 2003 Pronouns and nominal address in Shakespearean English: A socio-affective marking system in transition. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 223–249. Mazzon, Gabriella 2009 Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 185.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Milroy, James 1992 Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. (Language in Society 19.) Oxford: Blackwell. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1995 Constraints on politeness: The pragmatics of address formulae in Early English correspondence. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 541–601. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Pearson Education. Radtke, Edgar 2006 Historische Pragmalinguistik: Aufgabenbereiche. In: Gerhard Ernst, MartinDietrich Gleßgen, Christian Schmitt and Wolfgang Schweickard (eds.), 2,292–2,302. Rissanen, Matti 1986 Variation and the study of English historical syntax. In: David Sankoff (ed.), Diversity and Diachrony, 97–109. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Salmon, Vivian 1965 Sentence structures in colloquial Shakespearian English. Transactions of the Philological Society 64: 105–140. Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, Roger D. 1985 Politeness in Chaucer: Suggestions towards a methodology for pragmatic stylistics. Studia Neophilologica 57: 175–185. Sell, Roger D. 1991 The politeness of literary texts. In: Roger D. Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics, 208–224. London/New York: Routledge.

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Sell, Roger D. 2000 Literature as Communication. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 78.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sell, Roger D. 2001 Historical but non-determinist pragmatics of literary communication. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2.1: 1–32. Seoane, Elena 2006 Information structure and word order change: The passive as an informationrearranging strategy in the history of English. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), 360–391. Stroebe, Klara 1911 Altgermanische Grussformen. Heidelberg: Winter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1995 Interjections in Early Modern English: From imitation of spoken to conventions of written language. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 439–465. Taavitsainen, Irma Forthcoming Historical pragmatics. In: Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics of English. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan M. Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) 2003 Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2007 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 107–138. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2008 ‘Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever’: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 195–228. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2004 Historical pragmatics. In: Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), 538–561. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2006 The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), 335–359. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2008 The state of English language studies: A linguistic perspective. In: Marianne Thormählen (ed.), English Now. Selected Papers from the 20th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007, 199–225. Lund: Lund Studies in English. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher 2005 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valkonen, Petteri 2008 Showing a little promise: Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of written prose. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 247–272.

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II. Data and methodology

2.

Data in historical pragmatics Merja Kytö

1.

Introduction

Recent advances in computerised methods of language processing and an increased interest in the use of electronic sources of data for linguistic research have had a fundamental impact on historical linguistics, where written texts dominate as sources of evidence, and introspection or consulting native-speaker competence is not an option. Electronic corpora have made a variety of sources more easily accessible to historical linguists and at the same time significantly cut down the effort needed to collect the data. They have also prompted scholars to aim at more extensive coverage and consider large amounts of text and various types of texts, which, in turn, has raised the standards of linguistic analyses and argumentation, especially as regards quantification and statistics. Access to electronic corpora and other electronic materials has energised the study of language history to the extent that almost all research on historical linguistics currently involves the use of computerised resources or tools in one form or another (McEnery and Wilson [1996] 2001: 123). This chapter will outline the various ways in which the corpus linguistic approach has shaped and is shaping developments in the field of historical pragmatics. Because lexical and morphosyntactic features are more easily retrieved automatically or semi-automatically in electronic texts, it is only relatively recently that those working on historical discourse and pragmatics have turned to corpora for data (Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999a: 18; Curzan 2008: 1,097; Rissanen 2008: 54). Initially, the corpus-linguistic approach seems to have diverted scholars from the analysis of e.g. dialogues and dialogic elements rather than promoted the field of historical pragmatics (Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999a: 19), but, since the mid-1990s (cf. Jucker 1995), computer tools have been combined with a systematic analysis of historical dialogue features and dialogues (Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999a: 17). Electronic resources have made it easier for historical pragmaticians to carry out pragmatic and discourse-based analyses by offering relatively speedy access to data on speaker-hearer and writer-reader interaction. In fact, access to electronic resources has been counted among the factors that contributed to the field emerging and gaining ground in the last decades of the twentieth century (Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999a: 13–20). Historical corpora, especially when stratified to cover specific historical periods, genres or other extra-linguistic features, provide a useful shortcut to a systematic and replicable set of data and to results that are potentially comparable with previous and subsequent research. They

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also enable access to revelatory frequency surveys and, when quantification is not the aim of the study, qualitative insights. As a methodology, modern corpus linguistics can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s, when projects such as the Survey of English Usage (Svartvik and Quirk 1980) and the Brown Corpus were launched (Francis and Kucˇera [1964] 1979) (for an outline of the developments, see McEnery and Wilson 2001: 1–27). The ensuing two decades saw a rapid increase in the number and variety of textual resources fed into the memory of the computer (Johansson 2008: 34–35). For instance, in English historical linguistics, the publication of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts in 1991, and the work carried out on its pilot versions in the 1980s, paved the way for a prolific production of computerised corpora containing historical English, which in turn increased general interest in the historical framework in language studies (Rissanen forthcoming). In a survey of the electronic resources available to historical pragmaticians, it is useful to look at the circumstances where the first influential digitised corpora came into being. In this context, the term “corpus” is taken to refer to “a collection of text or parts of texts upon which some general linguistic analysis can be conducted” (Meyer 2002: xi). The use of corpora in the study of language change is of course nothing new. In the nineteenth-century Indo-European tradition, early texts and manually handled text collections, or corpora, were the key to success in the study of language change and the reconstruction effort (Lüdeling and Kytö 2008a: vi; on pre-electronic corpora, see Meyer 2008). The different ways of saying one and the same thing, and the factors influencing the loss and emergence of forms, were among the issues of great interest to these linguists and philologists. This approach, with further emphasis put on the processes of change, started to gain in vigour again in the 1960s when the systematic and empirical study of language variation as a way of accounting for change started to gain ground (see e.g. Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968; Samuels 1972; Romaine 1982). The interplay of extralinguistic and linguistic factors in promoting or retarding language change became one of the essential objectives of study, and systematically compiled large-scale text collections reflecting these parameters were found to be very useful tools in this effort (for the interface of the variationist approach and historical corpus linguistics, see Rissanen 2008). That the language user and his/her speech habits are in focus is natural to this approach, especially as regards linguistic innovation. In this respect, as Milroy aptly put it in the early 1990s, “[i]t is speakers and not languages, that innovate” (Milroy 1992a: 169, italics original). As regards historical pragmatics, which “focuses on the linguistic inventory and its communicative use across different historical stages of the same language”, the notion of variation has proved important in both diachronic form-to-function mapping and function-toform mapping (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 13–25). Against the background of these methodological developments, it is understandable that modern historical corpora are generally expected to be systematic

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collections of data, to be of a certain finite size and to be representative of the language variety or varieties they contain. During compilation, attention has usually also been paid to extra-linguistic parameters such as periodisation, region, genre and writers’ sociohistorical background, which enables corpus users to provide quantitative and/or qualitative evidence of the nature of language variation or change. Of particular value for (socio)historical pragmaticians are electronic resources that include genres such as dialogue texts or private correspondence, which can be thought to contain evidence of conversational, oral features such as turn-taking phenomena or colloquial everyday language (for discussion of the data problem, see section 3.3 below). Thus text collections containing drama texts, trial proceedings, dialogic handbooks, stretches of quoted speech found in fiction, or correspondence are important sources for studies within the historical pragmatic framework. Given the prominent role that electronic resources have played in English historical linguistics, this field will provide most illustrations used in this chapter. However, recent advances in corpus linguistics have started to make an impact on the study of the history of other languages as well. Only a decade or so ago, it was still clear that English historical linguistics had been fuelled to a greater extent than e.g. German or Romance historical linguistics by the emergence of electronic resources (Jucker, Fritz, Lebsanft 1999a: 17; Jucker 2000: 18–19). However, in his recent survey of well-known and influential corpora, Xiao (2008: 407–408) also deals with the extensive multi-million-word corpora of historical Spanish and Portuguese, Corpus del Español and Corpus do Português, in addition to discussing twelve resources containing early English. In the same volume, Claridge (2008) also makes frequent reference to the Corpus del Español and other historical collections of non-English texts available or underway such as Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank, the Bonner Frühneuhochdeutsches Korpus, DeutschDiachronDigital, Frantext, Textes de Français Ancien, TITUS or Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien and Augustana. The prospects of the historical corpus-linguistic framework also facilitating the study of languages other than English thus look good. The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. In section 2, the resources available are introduced and assessed from the perspective of historical pragmatics. This survey focuses on the kinds of structured corpora and other text collections, electronic editions and atlases, dictionaries and other textual resources that are currently in use in the field. Methodological concerns will be discussed in section 3. These have to do with the nature of data used in historical pragmatic studies, and search tools and techniques. Section 4 concludes the chapter.

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Availability of resources

Various types of electronic resources are currently available to historical corpus linguists. In addition to stratified historical corpora that have been compiled for the purposes of linguistic study, usually according to a carefully designed sampling plan, language data can be retrieved from electronic editions, very large-scale text collections comprising many millions of words, electronic dictionaries and Internet resources. These can all provide important information for those working on historical pragmatics and are hence included in this survey (for a related discussion, see Kytö forthcoming). 2.1.

Multi-genre corpora

Most corpora intended for linguistic study have been designed to serve certain purposes. General multi-genre corpora tend to cover centuries of the history of a language and are suitable for studies of long-term change. Examples of general multigenre corpora are The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (or the Helsinki Corpus), which roughly covers a millennium, from c. 700 to 1710, and ARCHER (or A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), which extends from 1650 to 1990. Both these corpora contain a variety of genres. In addition to genres that are represented across the history of English (e.g. law, science, history writing, travelogues, fiction), the Helsinki Corpus also includes period-specific genres such as medieval romances and mystery plays. ARCHER covers a number of the genres included in the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki Corpus, e.g. travelogues/journals, fiction, drama and correspondence, represented by both the British and the American varieties. Multi-genre corpora may contain only limited quantities of texts representative of genres that are of direct interest to studies in historical pragmatics, but at the same time they are important diagnostic tools that help one to see the potential of a research topic. They also provide further material when used in combination with genre-specific specialised corpora compiled specifically for studies in historical pragmatics. Finding suitable texts usually becomes more difficult the further we go back in time. ARCHER and the Helsinki Corpus have been organised into periods of 50–100 years, so as to cover one or several generations of language users. One hundred years has been taken to cover roughly three generations of successive language users (for the references and discussion of periodisation issues, see Claridge 2008: 243–244). No single structured corpus offers access to materials from the Old English period up until the present day, but such a project is underway in the form of the Leuven English Old to New (LEON) corpus, which is intended to span the 900s to the twenty-first century (Petré 2009). In addition to including fresh material, this corpus is envisaged to mine existing corpora. But at present, those wishing to cover the full diachronic span of English will thus need to draw on different

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corpora, which means that researchers will need to pay attention to the impact of possible differences in their compilation strategies (for comparability problems, see section 3.3). 2.2.

Specialised corpora

Specialised corpora focus on a time period, a register or a genre, or another compilation parameter that narrows down the scope of the materials, thus allowing indepth analyses of the area covered by the corpus. Period-specific corpora tend to contain texts representative of several genres, like, for instance, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC), while genre-specific corpora focus on one genre, or a family of genres, and usually extend across several centuries, such as e.g. the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and its extensions. The present survey of these resources will start with corpora devoted to specific periods in the history of English. The next category to be discussed will be the genre-focused corpora, and, finally, attention will be paid to corpora devoted to regional varieties of early English. In English linguistics, the above-mentioned Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC) is an early example of a period-specific corpus (c. 600–1150), which comprises all extant Old English texts (the texts included in the corpus are represented by one manuscript except when dialect or date definitions warrant the inclusion of multiple copies). This 3.5-million-word corpus is a rare example of a practically exhaustive record of the textual basis preserved from a past period. It is seldom possible for a corpus to claim exhaustive coverage owing to the wealth and length of texts that have come down to us from medieval times onwards. An even larger period-specific corpus is the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMPV), which comprises 18 million words. Considering the large number of Middle English texts that have survived, this corpus is still openended in the way most corpora are. The value of this text collection could be enhanced by a more versatile and linguistics-friendly search engine than is currently available for end-users. It would also be useful to have access to full texts for word counts and other running-text features. In fact, the Old, Middle and Early Modern English periods are all served by period-specific multi-genre corpora developed on the basis of the materials included in the Helsinki Corpus. These are the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry (79,000 words), the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) (1.5 million words), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (second edition, PPCME2) (1.2 million words) and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1.8 million words). These corpora are among those annotated linguistically to enable searches for grammatical and other phenomena beyond mere lexical items. Further Middle English text collections are the Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable Middle English

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Texts (ICAMET), which comprises two parts, the Middle English Prose Corpus (c. 1100–1500) (5.6 million words) and the genre-specific Innsbruck Letter Corpus (1386–1688) (c. 240,000 words). The Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) (1350–1500) (c. 300,000 words at present; the aim is c. 1 million words) differs from the above collections in that it draws on manuscript material rather than text editions; the corpus texts have been provided with linguistic annotation. For a literary epoch, the Century of Prose Corpus (COPC) (1680–1780) (500,000 words) brings together texts by well-known or established literary authors and less known journalists and other categories of professional writers (Milic´ 1990). A corpus representative of a yet later period is the close to one-million-word Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (CONCE) (Kytö, Rydén and Smitterberg 2006), which echoes the genre selection found in the Helsinki Corpus by containing trial proceedings, drama, fiction, history writing, science and letters, in addition to parliamentary debates, which are not included in the Helsinki Corpus. As is the case with general corpora, parts of these period-specific specialised corpora lend themselves to studies in historical pragmatics more naturally than others as they include larger proportions of dialogic or otherwise orality-related genres. Among the genre-specific specialised corpora are the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and its extensions (1403–1800) (totalling 5.1 million words), the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED) (1.3 million words), the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640–1740) (1.2 million words), the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) (1661–1791) (1.6 million words), the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (1654–1655) (1 million words) and the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) (1375–1800) (3.8 million words). The Corpus of English Religious Prose (1150–1800) is underway. These resources will be introduced and commented on, at varying length, below. To start with the Early English Correspondence corpora, personal letters are regarded and have been shown as coming close to spoken language (Rydén 1979; Biber and Finegan 1989, 1992), and as spoken language is considered the source for most change, according to the compilers of these corpora, “a genre like personal letters may provide the best possible access to early phases of change in the history of a language” (Palander-Collin, Nevala and Nurmi 2009: 5). These corpora were originally compiled to “provide a research tool for the study of stratificational sociolinguistics during earlier stages of English, with the intent of both testing the applicability of present-day sociolinguistic methods in historical linguistics and providing a social context for linguistic change” (Palander-Collin, Nevala and Nurmi 2009: 14; see also Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 16–25). They have been applied to population-level studies of variation and change, and to the study of the language habits of individual letter writers (for references, see Palander-Collin, Nevala and Nurmi 2009: 2). An example of an early study based on the correspondence corpora within the historical pragmatic framework is Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1995), where the authors investi-

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gated the pragmatics of address formulae in Early Modern English correspondence; the topic was pursued further in Nevala (2004). Two of the correspondence corpora have been released so far, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) (1418–1680) (450,100 words) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) (1410–1681) (2.2 million words). The other correspondence corpora comprise the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) (1410–1680) (2.7 million words), partly overlapping with the parsed PCEEC, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE) (eighteenth century) (2.2 million words) and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement (CEECSU) (442,500 words). Further letter material is available in e.g. the 5.6-million-word Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable Middle English Texts (ICAMET) (whose 240,000-word Letter Corpus section contains letters up to 1688, see above) and the Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (some 300,000 words of local English letters on practical subjects from 1761 to 1790). A selection of nineteenth-century letters by men and women writers can be found in the above-mentioned CONCE (some 340,000 words). Another compilation philosophy was applied to the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED). This corpus was intended for studies within the historical pragmatic, variationist and speech presentation frameworks. As rapid turntaking phenomena and spontaneous unplanned discourse are characteristic of present-day speech, priority was given to genres conveying echoes of dialogic speech situations, whether authentic or constructed. Such features are lacking in correspondence, which does not allow immediate on-line face-to-face interaction between the participants as in conversational situations (cf. Milroy 1992b; Culpeper and Kytö 2010: 6). CED comprises trial proceedings, drama comedy, witness depositions, prose fiction, didactic works including language teaching and other handbooks, and a minor category of miscellaneous texts (see Culpeper and Kytö 2010: chapter 2; see also Kytö and Walker 2006). In terms of methodology, the rationale underlying this corpus design is that one can investigate hypotheses about the “spoken” interaction of the past in its social context through comparison of genres that can be thought to convey conversational or “oral” features when taken down in authentic speech situations or created by literary authors to represent fictive speech (Rissanen 1999: 188; Rissanen 2008: 60–61; for discussion, see Culpeper and Kytö 2010: 14–18); this rationale is not meant to exclude the possibility of studying these texts merely “as communicative manifestations in their own right” (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 9). Again, like many other corpora containing speech-related or speech-like texts, this corpus is intended to offer material suitable for dealing with the fundamental problem in historical linguistics that most language change is actuated in everyday spoken language while the language use of the past has been preserved to us in written records only. The corpus has generated a body of research extending from language variation to historical pragmatics and sociopragmatics. For instance, Walker (2007) investigates the use of you vs.

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thou in trials, depositions and drama comedy, paying attention to macro-level variation across time and genre, and to the gender and rank of speakers, and to microlevel variation within individual speech situations. Culpeper and Kytö (2010) study speech-like characteristics, multiple discourse levels and speech presentation in historical speech-related genres. Among the issues they address are the formulaic properties of past spoken interaction in the light of the distribution and development of lexical bundles (or n-grams, see section 3.4 below); lexical repetition; the use and development of and as a cohesive device; variation in and the development of grammar features such as the third-person neuter possessive its, the prop-word one and periphrastic do in negative declarative sentences; the functions and development of “pragmatic noise” items (e.g. oh, ah, ay, ha, ho, fie, foh, tush, pish); sociopragmatic phenomena such as the distribution of talk across the gender and rank of speakers; and pragmatic markers. The study of the sociopragmatic phenomena was enabled by the compilation of the Sociopragmatic Corpus (SPC), a subsection of CED comprising a number of trials and drama texts from 1640 to 1760, annotated for speaker and addressee properties such as gender, rank, age and social role for each utterance in the text (Archer and Culpeper 2003; Culpeper and Archer 2007). Other SPC-based studies are Archer (2005) on questions and answers in the Early Modern courtroom and Shiina (2005) on the variation in and the development of the use of vocatives in Early Modern drama texts. The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts is a collection of nonliterary tracts and pamphlets published between 1640 and 1740 within six domains of language use, i.e. religion, politics, economy, science, law and miscellaneous. The category of law texts is of special interest to historical pragmaticians as it contains specimens of trial proceedings on political themes. The 120 texts included in the corpus are all complete, which adds to the attraction of this corpus as a resource for studies within historical pragmatics. The texts derive from a time characterised by the rise of mass publication and the development of a public discourse in various fields of daily life. The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) (1661–1791) and the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (1654–1655) throw further light on discourse in the public domain in the Early Modern period. While the ZEN corpus comprises 349 complete newspaper issues, and records the early history of this emerging genre up to the advent of The Times, the scope of the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus is more specialised; it focuses on text re-use in seventeenth-century news reportage. A further specialised variety of early English is documented in the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) 1375–1800, which comprises three sub-corpora devoted to the Middle English, Early Modern English and Late Modern English periods and covers the entire history of vernacular medical writing in English from the earliest manuscript records to the rise of modern clinical medicine. The multi-faceted spectrum of sub-genres in the corpus allows pragmatically oriented studies of early texts and their intended uses and audiences (for

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example studies, see Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004 and forthcoming). Another interesting on-going project, the Corpus of English Religious Prose, aims at an extensive text collection documenting the history of English religious writing. In addition to ordinary genres such as treatises or sermons, recurring sub-functions of the texts are taken into consideration in the compilation process. Five textual subfunctions have been distinguished so far: exhortation (whose aim is to change the addressee’s behaviour), exposition (the explanation of the Christian belief), exegesis (the interpretation of the Bible), narration (instruction by means of exemplary stories) and argumentation (methodical presentation of arguments). The subsections of a text can display several of these sub-functions, and the corpus has been planned to contain extracts representative of these sub-functions (Kohnen 2007a). Specialised corpora documenting the early stages of regional varieties of English are increasingly attracting interest. Among these are The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS) (1450–1700) (c. 850,000 words), the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) (1500–1715) (c. 256,300 words), A Corpus of Irish English (14th–20th centuries) (450,000 words) and the Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section (CONTE) (1776–1850) (125,000 words). Of these, The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots was compiled as a supplement to The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, according to the same principles of sociohistorical variation that were followed in the compilation of the main corpus. The corpus provides “material for studying the last stages of the differentiation of the northern English dialect, the rise of a distinctive Scottish variety of English and the anglicization process of Scots” (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HCOS/ index.html). Among other genres, it contains extracts from trial proceedings, and private and official letters, which lend themselves to investigations within historical pragmatics. While most corpora are based on scholarly text editions, the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) (1500–1715) draws solely on manuscripts (for electronic text editions, see below). Texts have been transcribed diplomatically and tagged lexico-grammatically. The first transplanted variety of English is in focus in the Corpus of Irish English, which covers the essential documents containing English in Ireland from the fourteenth century up to the present day. The diversity of the genres represented in the history of Irish English is reflected in the close to 70 texts included in the corpus: poetry, glossaries, sketches and full-length plays. Speech-related drama, in particular, has been considered as playing a central role in the documentation of this variety and is consequently well represented in the corpus. The history of another transplanted variety, Canadian English, can be studied via the Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section (CONTE) (1776–1850). The periodisation, sampling sizes and genres are intended to allow comparisons with e.g. ARCHER. The three genres represented in this corpus are newspaper texts, diary entries and letters, intended to allow the study of early written Ontario English and hypotheses of its spoken forms.

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In sum, general multi-genre corpora and specialised corpora contain varying amounts of material suitable for historical pragmatics analyses. In view of the wide spectrum of genres and levels of formality represented, they can provide evidence of language use at varying distances from “spoken” interaction of the past as well as comparable evidence of written language. The extra-linguistic features encoded in corpus files or accompanying databases provide speedy access to basic sociohistorical and other information. The linguistic coding accompanying some of the corpora further enhances the usability of the materials. 2.3.

Electronic text editions and linguistic atlases

The Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) referred to in section 2.2 is an example of a resource type that has recently started to attract interest among historical linguists. At the same time as these resources are usually diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript sources, they also serve as corpus-like structured collections of texts. These resources aim at rendering the manuscript versions as reliably as possible within modern typography and printing conventions (for recent discussion, see e.g. Bailey 2004; Lass 2004; Grund 2006; Kytö, Walker and Grund 2007; Kytö, Grund and Walker 2007; Honkapohja, Kaislaniemi and Marttila 2009). Given the distance between speech and representations of it, research on topics of interest to historical pragmaticians would benefit if one could trust that the original record had not been tampered with when transferred from the source text to the modern electronic or hard copy form (for further discussion, see section 3.3). Such electronic sources can be searched for linguistic data. They can also be annotated with linguistic and extra-linguistic information and offered in various hypertext or multimodal versions with links to image material, manuscript history, etc. An electronic edition project that offers access to a corpus-like single-genre collection is the English Witness Depositions 1560–1760: An Electronic Text Edition (c. 300,000 words) (Kytö, Grund and Walker 2007; Kytö, Walker and Grund 2007). This collection covers a period of 200 years and comprises some 900 witness depositions from 30 collections from the London area as well as the north, south, east and west of England. Cases from both criminal and ecclesiastical courts are represented. Many of the over 600 male and close to 300 female deponents come from the lower strata of society; the former range from gentlemen to yeomen to representatives of various professions (e.g. surgeons, labourers, masons, bakers, servants) while the latter are referred to as servants, singlewomen, wives and widows in the records. Information on deponents’ gender, age and occupation is given in the metadata section listed for each deposition; this information also gives the date of the document, the region and the manuscript reference. In the interest of studies within historical pragmatics and for easier searchability, stretches of direct speech have been distinguished from the rest of the text with annotation; also, Latin stretches of text have been enclosed in codes. Another manuscript-based col-

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lection is the above-mentioned Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) (1100–1500) (see section 2.2). The project aims at compiling a corpus-based grammar of Middle English and, in the interest of enhanced searchability, texts will be annotated for linguistic and extra-linguistic features (e.g. period, region, genre). The text selection and annotation draw on the information included in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English 1350–1450 (LALME). Like electronic editions and corpus-like collections of manuscript transcriptions, digitised linguistic atlases offer access to texts that have been transcribed from manuscripts or from facsimiles of manuscripts. Among these are A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1.1 (1150–1325) (LAEME) (c. 650,000 words) and A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1 (1380–1500) (LAOS). These are “daughter” atlases of the above-mentioned LALME and comprise lexicogrammatically tagged texts in searchable form, in addition to other features that exploit the electronic interface (see http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/front_page/ about_laeme.html). Another on-going project is e-LALME, which aims at presenting a computerised and extensively revised edition of LALME. 2.4.

Large-scale text collections

Interest in automated data retrieval and other computational methods in areas other than linguistics or philology has led to the compilation of vast text collections originally intended for research in social, political, legal or cultural history, literary studies, genetics, computational biology and other such fields of research. An example of a large-scale specialised text collection containing historical English suitable for historical pragmatics studies is The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913, which comprises “[a] fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court” (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). The collection contains a searchable version of all 190,000 pages of the Proceedings and 4,000 pages of Ordinary’s Accounts; it also contains a particularly rewarding feature from the philological point of view, namely digital images of these pages. While the accompanying search engine can be used for many purposes, it is not particularly well suited for linguistic research. A project directed by Magnus Huber is underway at Giessen University on a version of the corpus annotated for the purposes of linguistic study (Huber 2007). The Old Bailey proceedings can be consulted for free on the Internet. This is not the case with commercially available large-scale text collections such as the Literature Online (Lion) collection, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and its sequel the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which require that libraries and other clients pay considerable sums in the form of licences. These collections offer facsimile images, searchable plain-text material and bibliographical

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and other information on the source texts. Lion was primarily designed for literary research and it provides “[a] fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 236 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources” from 700 to the twenty-first century (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/). Among the user-friendly features are access to a number of leading literary reference works, electronic dictionaries, 4,100 biographies of well-studied authors and links to 5,100 web sites. The texts have been organised into close to twenty period- and genre-specific sub-collections ranging from British and American fiction to drama and poetry. Even though the search facilities provided for the online versions of the texts do not allow efficient options for linguistic research, basic word searches are possible and can be used for qualitative and certain quantitative insights (the five literary period sections available on CD-ROM are searchable with concordance programs; see Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008: 234). An example is the study of compliments and gender in the history of English carried out by Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008a) based on what the authors refer to as the “ethnographic” method. Speech-act labels such as compliment, compliments, complement, complements (and their spelling variants) were collected “to discover what people in past periods labeled as ‘compliments’” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008: 207–208; the method had been tested previously by Taavitsainen 2006 on the history of the word merchant). Renaissance English data from Lion was also used for a pilot study of apologies by Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008a). EEBO contains over 22 million digital page images from “virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700 – from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War” (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home). The subject areas covered include English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics and science. While the digital images cannot be searched with concordance programs, efficient searches can be carried out on the bibliographical and other information. Within the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project, 11,500 texts have been encoded to allow searches. Some 25,000 books in the collection are being encoded to allow linking the searchable files with the corresponding digital images. The chronological sequel to EEBO is the ECCO collection, which, by covering the period of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, “brings this period to life with materials ranging from books and directories to Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements” and offers “[c]anonical titles of the period as well as contemporary works that analyze and debate those titles” (http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/ about.htm). More than 136,000 titles or 26 million digital facsimile pages of text are included in the collection. The subject areas covered include literature, lan-

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guage, law, history and geography, social sciences and fine arts, medicine, science and technology, and religion and philosophy. The searchable parts of these electronic resources can also be used to compile sub-corpora for quantitative and qualitative studies within the historical pragmatics framework. Similar use can also be made of the materials that are available at various web sites such as the Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/Main_Pag) or clearing-houses such as the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/) or the Uni Digital centre (http://digital.uni.no/). Largescale corpora compiled from the Gutenberg and OTA sources are already available or under compilation. An example of the former is the 15-million-word Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (1710–1920) (CLMET and the extended version CLMETEV), which contains a varied collection of personal letters, diaries, literary fiction, scientific writing and other works, with an emphasis on formal prose. 2.5.

Electronic dictionaries

Electronic dictionaries facilitate the study of word senses and usage by making it easy to look up entries. It is also possible to use many electronic dictionaries as corpora and target searches to concern the various fields distinguished for entries. Electronic dictionaries are thus useful tools for historical pragmaticians interested in studying e.g. grammaticalisation phenomena: in addition to data drawn from electronic corpora proper, meanings and uses of words or phrases can be investigated in the light of citations collected in electronic dictionaries. The history of the lexis (or substantial parts of it) of many languages has been recorded in electronic historical dictionaries, e.g. the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), the Middle English Dictionary (MED), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language ([1755] 1773) and the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) for English, Der digitale Grimm for German, and Svenska Akademiens ordbok for Swedish (for information on historical dictionaries available on the Internet, see http://www.thesauruslex.se/lexikon/typ/historisk.htm). Compared with corpora proper, the drawback in the use of electronic dictionaries is that, understandably enough, dictionaries are seldom able to offer contextual support to the extent that full-text or extract-based corpora are able to provide. The DOE, based on the above-mentioned Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC) already in distribution, is still in preparation, with parts of it already available on CD-ROM and on-line. The electronic MED is an incomparable tool and part of the Middle English Compendium (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/), which also comprises the above-mentioned Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMPV). The software accompanying the OED Online “allows you to find the word or phrase you need in the full text of the Dictionary, or in selected areas such as quotations or etymologies” (http://dictionary.oed.com/pdfs/oed-quickref.pdf). According to Hoffmann (2004: 18, 21), 33 to 35 million searchable words

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(with an approximate average length of 13 words per each of the 2.4 million quotations) are found in the OED. However, these materials are not representative in the same sense as is understood within the corpus-linguistic approach. For instance, literary language (often of well-known writers) tends to dominate over everyday language, quotations may have been truncated or edited by the compilers, quotations are distributed rather unevenly across the centuries and so forth (for discussion, see Hoffmann 2004 and Claridge 2008: 255–256). Examples of digitised early dictionaries include Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, which is available in several electronic versions (see McDermott 1996). Even earlier dictionaries are found in the Lexicons of Early Modern English database (formerly Early Modern English Dictionary Database), which is “a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexicallyvaluable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration period” (Lancashire 2006). This collection can serve historical pragmaticians in that it highlights the value of early dictionary compilers’ lexical insights to present-day scholars interested in seeing beyond the senses of a word based on present-day use of lexis, which may not be applicable to historical uses of the word in question. Close to 550,000 word entries drawn from 163 searchable lexicons are currently found in this database, which has been annotated to enable simple and advanced searches with the help of the accompanying and relatively advanced search engine. 2.6.

Where to look for electronic sources?

The rapid development in the field of corpus linguistics sometimes makes it difficult to keep up to date with what is available by way of resources and search tools. It is possible to find information in publications and web sites attended to by research teams, individual researchers or clearing-houses. Among recent publications discussing and/or listing historical corpora and other electronic resources are Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (2007a: 9–10); Claridge (2008); Xiao (2008: 401–408); Honkapohja, Kaislaniemi and Marttila (2009); Brinton (forthcoming); Kytö (forthcoming) and Rissanen (forthcoming). Useful web sites include the Corpus Resource Database (CoRD) (available for free at http://www.helsinki.fi/ varieng/CoRD/index.html), which is an online resource made available by the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. Through this resource, academic corpus compilers can distribute first-hand information about their corpora. Each entry contains a set of core information, including a brief description of the corpus, its contents, structure, principles of compilation and annotation, the names of the compilers, recommended reference line, copyright details, availability and a bibliography on research based on the materials. Other valuable web sites are http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/intranet/ug/

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useful-links/computing-resources/#corpora by David Denison, http://www.unidue.de/SHE/HE_Sources.htm by Raymond Hickey, http://clix.to/davidlee by David Lee and http://bowland-files.lancs.ac.uk/corplang/cbls/corpora.asp by Richard Xiao. Information on the ICAME CD-ROM containing electronic corpora can be found at http://icame.uib.no/newcd.htm web site, and on the OTA Catalogue at http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/index-id.html.

3.

Methodological considerations

What counts as data in historical pragmatics is a question which raises further issues of a linguistico-philological nature. As mentioned above (section 2.2), it is nowadays considered legitimate to treat written texts not just as “imperfect renderings of the real thing” but as “communicative manifestations in their own right and as such […] amenable to pragmatic analyses” (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 9; cf. Romaine 1982: 14–21; Collins 2001: 17), but the question of to what extent authentic or fictive speech-related texts might reflect past spoken interaction remains intriguing just the same. Also, transferring manuscript sources, early imprints and scholarly text editions into searchable electronic form can often be as difficult as walking a tightrope: it is not only editorial interpretations on the part of early scribes, printers and text editors but also those by modern corpus compilers that will need to be reconciled. For instance, an early manuscript may contain features such as characters or symbols that are not available in modern keyboards or in international standard character coding systems (for e.g. Unicode Standard, see http://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html). The problem of how to transfer such a source text into electronic form will thus need special consideration. This section will deal with these linguistico-philological concerns by drawing attention to the value of written representations of early spoken interaction as evidence for linguistic study: the validity and reliability of these records are discussed in section 3.1 and the linguistico-philological concerns in section 3.2. Section 3.3 turns to issues regarding research questions, and searchability and comparability of materials. The concluding section, 3.4, presents a brief survey of tools and techniques developed for searching for linguistic data in electronic texts. 3.1.

Validity and reliability issues

For any empirical research endeavours such as those carried out within the corpuslinguistic framework, it is of course important to ensure that the data fulfil the requirements of validity and reliability. As electronic recording techniques made it possible to store speech only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, we are unable to make direct observations of spoken language of most past periods (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 6–7, with reference to Bax 1983). We may of course find

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information about historical conversational behaviour by looking for statements or recommendations by contemporaneous authors in manuals or other works (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 9). That we no longer have direct access to past speech does not mean that we are not able to investigate historical pragmatic phenomena. Recently, mediums other than spoken language have started to be regarded as legitimate data sources for pragmatic studies, which allows room for explorations in both early authentic (e.g. trial proceedings, witness depositions) and fictive (e.g. drama, fiction) speech-related texts and also written sources containing everyday language (e.g. correspondence) (cf. Jacobs and Jucker 1995; Jucker 2000: 19–20; Culpeper and Kytö 2010). As regards authentic speech-related texts, we know on the basis of present-day language use that spoken language and writing differ in many ways and that even an accurate transcription of speech can only convey part of the information exchanged between interlocutors. How reliable, then, are speech-related texts as representations of past speech? An additional issue is that even the forms in which records containing purportedly speech-like data are available to scholars today may not necessarily render the original documents as reliably as one might wish. This, as well as the fact that they may not be available in such quantities that warrant reliable generalisations, is of particular concern to historical pragmaticians interested in corpus-linguistic methodology. The “faithfulness” of the written record as a representation of authentic spoken interaction is a complex issue (for discussion, see e.g. Short, Semino and Culpeper 1996; Short, Semino and Wynne 2002). Certain features inherent in speech are not easy to render in writing or are filtered out by the scribe as unnecessary or ill-suited for the written register (e.g. instances of hesitation, dysfluencies and bad language). “Faithful” or “verbatim” records have often been shown to convey only the gist of the message couched in lexical items and grammatical structures that can be expected to derive from the speech situation (for discussion, see Culpeper and Kytö 2000 and 2010). Accordingly, comparisons of multiple records of one and the same speech event by different scribes usually unearth both similarities and differences in the texts (see e.g. Kytö and Walker 2003: 227–228; Grund 2007). In fact, there is evidence both supporting and refuting the view that early speech-related records are reliable renderings of authentic spoken interaction. For instance, a trial record may contain an explicit statement to the effect that it was taken down by a stenographer (various systems of stenography were already available towards the end of the sixteenth century) or endorsed by an official party before publication although this very same feature could also be taken as a sales-encouraging measure on the part of the publisher. Records can also contain narrators’ comments where mention is made of the difficulty experienced in hearing what was said in the noisy courtroom (for further discussion, see Kytö and Walker 2003: 224–230). It thus seems wise not to make claims as to how accurate a record of a past speech event a text is, whether what we have at hand is an authentic text containing

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past speech-related language or whether it be fictive: real-time constraints make it difficult to take down speech accurately, and writers may not have been skilful in representing speech in their drama texts or fiction. Even so, the study of speech-related texts can give interesting insights into past spoken interaction. For instance, in his study of speech-reporting strategies in a large corpus of medieval Russian trial transcripts, Collins (2001: 285) asked the question whether we can “really reconstruct aspects of pragmatic competence and so reanimate, as it were, the silenced voices of premodern writers”. The aim of the study was “to recover the factor(s) that motivated the writers to choose one strategy over the others in a particular context” when it was obvious that the scribes’ choice of expression was determined by pragmatic rather than syntactic factors (2001: 285). Collins’ analyses showed that the strategies preferred by the writers were conventional but at the same time context-sensitive and purposive in view of the needs of the intended audience: “[t]he scribes chose them based on their experiential knowledge of the interpretive process – not because the strategies were mechanized clichés but because, by virtue of their formal properties, they produced effects that were appropriate to the communicative function(s) of the given portions of the transcripts” (Collins 2001: 286). Collins’ study thus serves as an exciting example of how written records containing speech-related language can be valuable objects of study in their own right. In fact, the relationship between spoken and written language is more complex than a mere dichotomy. The models presented by Koch (1999) and Koch and Oesterreicher (1985–1986, 1990) depict language use as a dichotomy between the phonic and graphic mediums and at the same time as a conceptual continuum with features typical of the phonic medium at the one end, and those typical of the graphic medium at the other (for discussion, see Jucker 2000: 19–24; Culpeper and Kytö 2010: 10–12). Among the characteristics of the language of “communicative immediacy” are features such as physical immediacy, privacy, familiarity (or intimacy) of partners, high emotionality, deictic immediacy, dialogue, communicative cooperation and spontaneity. The opposite features characterise “communicative distance”. Importantly, as summarised by Jucker (2000: 19–25), “the language of immediacy also occurs in the graphic code, and the language of distance also occurs in the phonic code” (2000: 20) and “[w]hile historical pragmatics is indeed restricted to data in the graphic code, it is not restricted to data of communicative distance” (2000: 24). This is why, as shown earlier in this section, texts allowing glimpses at constructed or purportedly authentic past spoken language provide data for historical pragmatic analyses. Specimens of these data may not be representative of the extreme end of the “communicative immediacy” axis but they can present evidence of different stages between the two extremes of the communicative continuum (Jucker 2000: 24). This line of thinking tallies well with the results that Biber presented in his 1988 study of linguistic variation across speech and writing in Present-day English: none of the dimensions of variation that

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Biber distinguished with the help of factor analysis was a straightforward spoken vs. written language continuum. For comparison, another way of approaching the spoken-written axis has been presented by Schneider (2002), who classifies genres according to their proximity to speech into “recorded” (trial records, interview transcripts), “recalled” (ex-slave narratives), “imagined” (letters, diaries), “observed” (commentaries) and “invented” (literary dialect) categories (Schneider 2002: 72–73). In sum, it is important that end-users of corpus texts consider the status of the texts as evidence of past spoken interaction instead of using electronic sources uncritically. As regards the speech situation and interlocutor characteristics, we tend to have only very little background or contextual information (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 7, with reference to Sitta 1980). Corpus compilers can usually provide no more than the basics of the information that may be out there. It is then up to the end-users to dig deeper where need be. It is also important to take into consideration the multiple discourse levels typical of speech-related texts: who is speaking to whom and who is addressing an audience of what kind are factors that affect the pragmatics of the utterances in a dialogue or stretches of speech put in the mouth of a speaker in narrative texts, whether past or present. 3.2.

Linguistico-philological concerns

It is also important for corpus compilers and end-users to consider the philological status of corpus texts. Early texts come down to us in many shapes, e.g. manuscripts, imprints, reprints, facsimiles and text editions, with sometimes quite remarkable differences between different versions. There can also be a considerable time lag between the speech event and the first record of it that has been preserved. For instance, it was only in 1730 that a number of the sixteenth-century cases appeared in the State Trials collection, displaying clear features of modernisation on the part of the editor. With some exceptions, no manuscript records of these trials survive, so their status as evidence of sixteenth-century language habits can be questioned. Similarly, modern reprints or text editions can look deceptively “authentic” but contain features that make them suspect material for historical linguists. Editors may have summarised parts of the manuscript sources or even translated Latin stretches into English with no mention made of these practices (for examples of comparisons between manuscript and printed versions, see Kytö and Walker 2003: 231–241). Manuscripts and early imprints have proved to be more reliable than other versions, but using these – especially manuscript material – tends to be too expensive a solution in the compilation of large-scale corpora. However, much can be done to raise the awareness of both text editors and endusers of the status of the texts they are working on. As pointed out by Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007: 21), “[f]or practical reasons it is impossible not to rely on edited texts in large-scale corpora, but what can and should be done is to take the

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local, idiosyncratic nature of source texts better into account. It is the editor’s task to make past texts available to scholars, and thus editors are important mediators of past texts and language structures”. When storing texts in electronic and searchable form, corpus compilers should ensure that end-users are served with information on editorial interventions (whether accounted for in the scholarly editions or not) and account for the use of typographical features such as italics, bold face, punctuation marks and capitalisation in source texts. The same holds for textlevel annotation. For instance, distinguishing direct speech by using quotation marks is a modern practice, leaving it up to editors or corpus compilers to choose whether to mark off instances of direct speech in their renderings of early texts (for discussion and examples, see Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 22; Moore forthcoming). For instance, texts in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED) were annotated for direct speech by the corpus compilers. Even though this annotation was subject to several cross-checking rounds, the result necessarily involved a degree of interpretation and back-projecting of modern conceptions, especially regarding borderline cases in e.g. witness depositions. Yet the gain for end-users is that, with minor caveats in view of a handful of problematic instances, searches can be targeted at the direct-speech stretches only. Similarly, fluid sentence boundaries are a common feature especially in medieval texts, and this can be a problem for corpus compilers and end-users: computerised techniques would benefit from precise punctuation, but editors or corpus compilers imposing modern punctuation on a text may end up rendering the text in ways that will mislead historical pragmaticians or syntacticians who base their readings on this punctuation (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 22). 3.3.

Research questions: Searchability and comparability of data sources

What kinds of research questions of interest to historical pragmatics can be addressed within the corpus-linguistic framework? As widely acknowledged since the landmark volume by Jucker (1995), the two main directions of research in historical pragmatics entail the mapping of form to function (the semasiological approach) and the mapping of function to form (the onomasiological approach). The computer can do a brilliant job in locating the forms in the text, but the identification of functions is still very much a labour-intensive task on the part of the linguist. Though encouraging advances have been made recently in the field of automatic semantic tagging and normalisation of spelling variation, a good deal still remains to be done before the computer can be of full-scale help in the study of e.g. the diachronic development of speech acts, conversational implicatures and other phenomena that do not appear in conventionalised lexical forms or grammatical structures (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 18). Moreover, one would not only like to retrieve more multi-faceted linguistic data but also arrive at a quantification of the possible patterns identified. Yet, considering the relatively limited amount of

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text available in electronic form, the data sets at hand may remain too small for statistically robust claims. There can thus be some tension between one’s research aims and the limitations set by the corpus. Research questions that can be profitably dealt with within historical corpus linguistics have to do with the frequency and distribution of particular linguistic features across periods, genres and language user groups. This is all evidence that can be used to support claims about linguistic stability or change and about the factors that have promoted or retarded developments. As mentioned above, relatively large quantities of data are often needed to arrive at statistically robust results for work carried out within the quantitative approach, but for work carried out within the qualitative framework, even smaller amounts of data can yield results. An example of an area where a considerable amount of research has been carried out by using corpus evidence is the study of discourse and/or pragmatic markers. These items have been studied from qualitative (see e.g. Brinton 1996, 2006) and quantitative/qualitative perspectives (see, most recently, Lutzky 2009 and references therein). These and many similar items or multi-word expressions can be retrieved in electronic texts on the basis of lexical forms, with due attention paid to spelling variation. However, not all topics lend themselves as easily to automatic data retrieval. The computer can seldom be used to identify the semantic or pragmatic functions that could then be associated with their respective forms or groups of forms. Techniques such as keyword analysis (see section 3.4 below) are being exploited to overcome this problem (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 17, with reference to McEnery 2006). Studying speech acts has for a long time presented a notorious case for the corpus-linguistic approach: computerised searches mostly target lexical items, but “speech act verbs are often an unreliable guide to the existence of the speech act that they label” (Jucker 2000: 30; for further problems, see e.g. Jucker 2000: 28–30; Kohnen 2007b: 139–141). The above-mentioned “ethnographic” method (see section 2.4) applied in Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008) to the study of compliments and in Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008a) on apologies is an important step towards a solution to the problem. Further, in his study of directive speech acts in sermons sampled from the Old English to Modern English periods, Kohnen (2007b) applied exploratory microanalysis to determine the number and manifestations of directives in the sub-corpora collected. This approach is particularly fruitful in that further and larger corpora can be explored by using automated search tools on the basis of the example types distinguished in the microanalysis. It proved possible to distinguish four categories of directives, i.e. performatives, imperatives, modal expressions and indirect manifestations. The material yielded evidence of “a graduated decrease from Old English till the seventeenth century and again an increase in the late twentieth century” (Kohnen 2007b: 158). The study also showed that to be able to replicate searches on larger corpora, it was essential to be explicit about the relationships between functions and forms, and

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about the role played by context in the analyses (cf. Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 27). An important aspect of data collection concerns the possible problems brought about by the combined use of various corpora for the purposes of one and the same study. These problems can be both practical and language-theoretical. How far are data sets drawn from different corpora comparable at all given the differences in corpus compilation principles and contents? To document long-term change, one often needs to exploit a range of corpora to cover the diachronic space. Yet these corpora can be of multi-genre or specialised types, or balanced or biased in terms of genre representation and length of texts. Using non-comparable corpora for data collection may reduce the validity of the study (see section 3.1). On the more practical side, searches for constructions in a linguistically annotated corpus compiled to cover one period of language history may not be possible to replicate for another period as no such corpus may be available. This problem of course holds for any corpus-linguistic research but it may be aggravated in studies carried out within the historical pragmatic framework, which is sensitive to fluctuations in both macroand micro-level contexts. It is also usually more difficult to acquire the necessary historical understanding of the texts, genre conventions and the cultural and sociohistorical foundation underlying the production of texts the more heterogeneous the materials included in the study are. Lack of such knowledge may then endanger the integrity of the research design and the searches carried out on the materials (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 28–29). 3.4.

Search tools and techniques

This section will provide a brief survey of a selection of search facilities available. A recent and useful introduction to the basic corpus-linguistic search and data sorting techniques for linguistic analysis can be found in Wynne (2008, for a representative list of current search programs, see page 736). Over the years, quite a number of search tools have been developed to enable automated data collection. These vary as regards their level of sophistication and applicability to linguistic searches. Package programs such as WordSmith Tools (http://www.lexically.net/ wordsmith/), MonoConc Pro (http://www.athel.com/mono.html) and Corpus Presenter (http://www.uni-due.de/CP/) tend to allow quite advanced searches, display the results in various ways and provide statistical information on the data. Among the programs that, additionally, provide advanced graphical applications are Xaira and SARA (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/tools/). Sometimes it is necessary to turn to a programmer for special search facilities as was the case with, for instance, the above-mentioned Sociopragmatic Corpus (SPC). Some historical corpora are accompanied by search engines of their own. Among these it is worth mentioning the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), which are intended for searches with the Corpus-

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Search 2 program (http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/index.html), or the Corpus of Irish English and the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) (part of the abovementioned Corpus of Early English Medical Writing), which can be conveniently searched with the accompanying Corpus Presenter application. Most of those making use of corpus-linguistic searches are likely to make use of word lists, which list word forms in a corpus in various ways, and so-called concordances, which list the words or expressions searched surrounded by a stretch of context. The concordance facility is among the most powerful techniques in the corpus-linguistic approach as it helps detect recurrent patterns of usage that would most likely go unnoticed if one were merely to read through the text or look up examples one by one in isolation. Patterns often become quite obvious on the basis of horizontal or vertical scanning of the concordance entries. Once a concordance has been created, the analyst will usually need to go through the examples to thin the list and set aside the irrelevant instances. These can be many in historical pragmatics studies as pragmatic uses can coexist with propositional uses, which will also appear in the concordance (unless the target corpus has been annotated beforehand to exclude the unwanted instances). After the relevant examples have been selected, they can be conveniently transported to various database programs and coded for further classifications and analyses. Some search tools allow one to expand the context for an entry on the screen for a better view of the text. Most programs also give the name of the file to accompany each example so as to make it possible to trace back an example to the source text. Classifying data for further analysis will be easier if file names contain information on the main extra-linguistic parameters observed in the compilation of the corpus. In the case of historical corpora these could comprise e.g. the period, genre and author; the key to coding principles is usually provided in the manual to a corpus. For most historical pragmatic analyses, such metadata is vital, as is a large enough context that accompanies the search word. In addition to metadata, examples can be sorted alphabetically according to the search word form and their left- or right-hand contexts (e.g. one to three places to the left or right), or wordclass or other annotation. Some of the more sophisticated search programs are able to extract information from the data in a way that would hardly be possible with manual methods. Three examples of these techniques are given in what follows. Some programs can be used to identify the significant collocates of the search term in the corpus, i.e. words that tend to frequently co-occur close to the search term, and to highlight these in the concordance on the screen. It would not be possible for an end-user to assess the statistical significance of these words without the help of the computing techniques provided by the search program (for details, see Wynne 2008: 725–726). Another useful technique is keyword analysis. In this context, keywords are “words which can be shown to occur in the text with a frequency greater than the expected frequency (using some relevant measure), to an extent which is stat-

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istically significant” (Wynne 2008: 730; for further discussion, see Wynne 2008: 730–734). To carry out keyword analyses, one generally needs access to a reference corpus that serves as a point of comparison for defining the characteristics of the lexis in one’s main corpus. Keyword analysis helps one investigate how texts function and has, accordingly, recently gained in popularity as a tool in pragmatic, discourse and stylistic analyses, in particular (see Scott 2008; Archer 2009). A third example concerns searching units larger than a word, with no prior knowledge of possible search words or expressions. In these searches, it is the computer that is used to locate the most frequent sequences of words in a corpus. These sequences are referred to as e.g. n-grams, lexical bundles or multi-word expressions and can comprise two-word, three-word, four-word or even larger units. These searches tend to produce useful information on the recurrent phraseology of a text (for details, see Wynne 2008: 734–735). From the point of view of historical language forms, the problem with the above-mentioned advanced search techniques is that they usually require a lemmatised corpus (a corpus in which related word forms have been annotated with their respective canonical form) or a corpus that contains texts with normalised spellings. The spelling variation characteristic of early texts makes it difficult if not impossible for the computer to keep together the various spelling variants of one and the same term for computational purposes. However, encouraging progress has been made recently in attempts to control spelling variation (Rayson et al. 2007; Baron and Rayson 2008; see also http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/VariantSpelling/ for variant spelling research). A recent piece of software, VARD 2 (or Variant Detector 2), is a powerful tool developed at Lancaster University, originally to deal with Early Modern English but currently applicable to other varieties of English and even other languages. This interactive program “uses techniques derived from modern spell checkers to find candidate modern form replacements for spelling variants found within historical texts” (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~barona/vard2/). One can process texts manually (by selecting a replacement form offered by the tool), automatically (by letting the tool use the best candidate replacement in sight) or semi-automatically (by training the tool to deal with a sample of one’s corpus to start with). The tool will significantly facilitate the pre-processing of many historical corpora and be of major help to anyone working on historical linguistics, historical pragmaticians included.

4.

Final remarks

In their visionary publication a decade ago, Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft (1999a: 19) stated that “[i]t is to be hoped that the increased sophistication of the computer tools and the growing experience of the historical linguists will further enhance English historical dialogue analysis”. This hope has certainly been realised, and re-

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cent advances in the field point to an ever-increasing interest in empirical studies within historical pragmatics and corpus-linguistic methodology. Even though we are unlikely to see a unified methodology emerge in the foreseeable future, there is much potential for methodological innovations and new discoveries based on hitherto unused data sources. As regards compiling new electronic materials for the purposes of historical pragmatic studies, the desiderata include the creation of more resources that contain everyday or colloquial or non-standard language, language of so far under-represented groups such as women, lower ranks and illiterate or uneducated speakers, dialectal usage and regional varieties, and early manuscript material. Both synchronic and diachronic studies of past language use can benefit from the time invested in making new source texts available in electronic form and enhancing computational technology. In turn, these developments are likely to increase our understanding of how to approach present-day pragmatic phenomena from fresh angles.

Corpora and other electronic resources ARCHER = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, version 3.x 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010 Compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University, University of Southern California, University of Freiburg, University of Heidelberg, University of Helsinki, Uppsala University, University of Michigan, University of Manchester, Lancaster University, University of Bamberg and University of Zurich. Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and its extensions 1998 Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin (Department of English, University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html. Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) (1418–1680) 1998 Compiled by Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Department of English, University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html. Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement (CEECSU) (1402–1663) Compiled by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg and Anni Sairio (Department of English, University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/ceecsu.html. Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) (1375–1800) Forthcoming Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Martti Mäkinen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö, with the assistance of Anu Lehto and Alpo Honkapohja (Department of English, University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEM/index.html.

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Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section (CONTE) (1776–1850); see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sdollinger/CONTE.htm. Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, A, (CED) 2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University); see www.engelska.uu.se/corpus.html. Corpus of English Religious Prose, A Forthcoming Compiled by Thomas Kohnen, Sandra Boggel and Tanja Rütten-Stanelle (University of Cologne). Corpus of Irish English, A (14th–20th centuries) 2003 Compiled by Raymond Hickey (University of Duisburg-Essen); see http://www.uni-due.de/CP/CIE.htm. Corpus of Late Modern English Prose, A, (1861–1919) 1994 Compiled by David Denison (University of Manchester); see http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/david-denison/lmode-prose/. Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (1710–1920) (CLMET) and the extended version (CLMETEV) 2006 Compiled by Hendrik De Smet (University of Leuven); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CLMETEV/index.html; see also https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMPV) 2006 See http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/. Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (CONCE) Forthcoming. Compiled by Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Juhani Rudanko (University of Tampere). Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC) Compiled by Anneli Meurman-Solin (University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/csc/index.html. CorpusSearch 2 see http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/index.html. Dictionary of Old English (DOE) see http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pub/pub.html; see, also, http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/. Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC) 2004 Compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey, Dorothy Haines, Joan Holland, David McDougall, Ian McDougall and Xin Xiang (University of Toronto); see http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pub/corpus.html; for earlier versions, see http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pub/pub.html; see, also, http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/. digitale Grimm: Deutsches Worterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, Der, 2004 Elektronische Ausgabe der Erstbearbeitung. Cassette comprising 2 CDROMs. Edited by Hans-Werner Bartz, Thomas Burch, Ruth Christmann, Kurt Gartner, Vera Hildebrandt, Thomas Schares and Klaudia Wegge. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins. Early English Books Online (EEBO) see http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) see http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ec co/ about.htm.

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English Witness Depositions 1560–1760: An Electronic Text Edition see http://www.engelska.uu.se/witness.pdf. Helsinki Corpus = The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts 1991 Compiled by Matti Rissanen (project leader), Merja Kytö (project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/index.html. Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, The, (HCOS) 1995 Compiled by Anneli Meurman-Solin (Department of English, University of Helsinki); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HCOS/index.html. Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable Middle English Texts (ICAMET) Compiled by Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck); see http://www.anglistikguide.de/cgi-bin/ssgfi/anzeige.pl?db=lit&ew=SSGFI &nr=000753. Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts 1999 Compiled by Josef Schmied, Claudia Claridge and Rainer Siemund; http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/LAMPETER/LAMPHOME.HTM. Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus 2006 Compiled under the supervision of Tony McEnery (Lancaster University); see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/newsbooks/; see also http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/newsbooks. Lexicons of Early Modern English see http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/public/. Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (1150–1325), A, version 2.1 (LAEME) 2007 Compiled by Margaret Laing and Roger Lass. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh; see http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html. Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, A, Phase 1 (1380–1500), A, (LAOS) 2008 Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh; see http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html. Literature Online (Lion) see http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/. Middle English Compendium see http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/. Middle English Dictionary (MED) 2001 See http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Middle English Grammar Corpus, The (MEG-C) project see http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/ihsl/projects/MEG/meg.htm. Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) Incl. MEMT Presenter by Raymond Hickey (CDROM) 2005 Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. MonoConc Pro see http://www.athel.com/mono.html. Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) see http://www.oed.com/.

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Oxford Text Archive see http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) tagged version 2006 Compiled by Arja Nurmi, Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, Terttu Nevalainen and the CEEC Project Team (University of Helsinki and University of York); see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English 2004 Compiled by Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini and Lauren Delfs; see http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-1/. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2) 2000 Compiled by Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor; see http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-2/. Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674 to 1913, The see http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/. Project Gutenberg see http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Pag. SARA see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/tools/. Sociopragmatic Corpus (SPC) = Sociopragmatic Corpus, a Specialised Sub-section of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 2007 Compiled by Jonathan Culpeper and Dawn Archer (Lancaster University). Svenska Akademiens ordbok see http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/. Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project (University of Michigan) see http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/. Uni Digital centre see http://digital.uni.no/. Xaira see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/tools/. York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry 2001 Compiled by Susan Pintzuk, Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Leendert Plug and Frank Beths; the annotation scheme implemented by Leendert Plug; see http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang18/pcorpus.html. York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) 2003 Compiled by Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk and Frank Beths (University of York); see http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm. Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) (1661–1791) Version 1.0 2004 Compiled by Udo Fries, Hans Martin Lehmann, Beni Ruef, Peter Schneider, Patrick Studer, Caren auf dem Keller, Beat Nietlispach, Sandra Engler, Sabine Hensel and Franziska Zeller (University of Zurich); see http://es-zen.unizh.ch/.

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References Archer, Dawn 2005 Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 135.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Archer, Dawn (ed.) 2009 What’s in a Word-list? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction. Farnham: Ashgate. Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper 2003 Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics. In: Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery (eds.), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, 37–58. (Łódz´ Studies in Language 8.) Bern: Peter Lang. Bailey, Richard W. 2004 The need for good texts: The case of Henry Machyn’s Day Book, 1550–1563. In: Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 217–228. (Topics in English Linguistics 45.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Baron, Alistair, and Paul Rayson 2008 VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. In: Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, 22 May 2008. Available at http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/conf_proceedings.html. Bax, Marcel 1983 Die lebendige Dimension toter Sprachen. Zur pragmatischen Analyse von Sprachgebrauch in historischen Kontexten. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 11: 1–21. Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan 1989 Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65.3: 487–517. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan 1992 The linguistic evolution of five written and speech-based English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 688–704. (Topics in English Linguistics 10.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996 Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. (Topics in English Linguistics 19.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 2006 Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 307–334. London: Blackwell.

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(ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008, 445–469. (Language and Computers 68.) Amsterdam: Rodopi. Huber, Magnus (2007) The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin and Arja Nurmi (eds.), Annotating Variation and Change. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1.) Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki. Available at: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/huber/. Jacobs, Andreas, and Andreas H. Jucker 1995 The historical perspective in pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 3–33. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Johansson, Stig 2008 Some aspects of the development of corpus linguistics in the 1970s and 1980s. In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), 33–53. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000 English historical pragmatics: Problems of data and methodology. In: Gabriella Di Martino and Maria Lima (eds.), English Diachronic Pragmatics, 17–55. Napoli: CUEN. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft 1999a Historical dialogue analysis: Roots and traditions in the study of the Romance languages, German and English. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 1–33. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.) 1999b Historical Dialogue Analysis. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 66.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2008a Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 229–244. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008b Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koch, Peter 1999 Court records and cartoons: Reflections of spontaneous dialogue in early Romance texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 399–429. Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985–1986 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43.

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Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher 1990 Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch. (Romanistische Arbeitshefte 31.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Kohnen, Thomas 2007a From Helsinki through the centuries: The design and development of English diachronic corpora. In: Päivi Pahta, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 2.) Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki; available at http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/02/kohnen/. Kohnen, Thomas 2007b Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 139–166. Kytö, Merja Forthcoming Corpus Linguistics. In: Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science / Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft.) Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Kytö, Merja, Peter Grund and Terry Walker 2007 Regional variation and the language of English witness depositions 1560–1760: Constructing a ‘linguistic’ edition in electronic form. In: Päivi Pahta, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 2.) Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki; available at http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/02/kyto_et_al/. Kytö, Merja, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds.) 2006 Nineteenth-century English: Stability and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kytö, Merja, and Terry Walker 2003 The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: How “bad” can “bad” data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31.3: 221–248. Kytö, Merja, and Terry Walker 2006 Guide to A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. (Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 130.) Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Kytö, Merja, Terry Walker and Peter Grund 2007 English witness depositions 1560–1760: An electronic text edition. ICAME Journal 31: 65–85. Lancashire, Ian (ed.) 2006 Introduction. Available at the Lexicons of Early Modern English website, http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/public/intro.cfm. Lass, Roger 2004 Ut custodiant litteras: Editions, corpora and witnesshood. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, 21–48. (Studies in Language and Communication 16.) Bern: Peter Lang.

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Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450, A, (LALME) 1986 Edited by Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels and Michael Benskin. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press. For e-LALME, see http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/research/ihd/projectsX.shtml. Lüdeling, Anke, and Merja Kytö 2008a Introduction. In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), v–xii. Lüdeling, Anke, and Merja Kytö (eds.) 2008b Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Volume 1. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science / Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 29.1.–2.) Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Lutzky, Ursula 2009 Discourse markers in Early Modern English: The case of marry, well and why. Unpublished PhD thesis, Vienna University. McDermott, Ann (ed.) 1996 Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see http://xml.coverpages.org/cup-johnson.html. McEnery, Tony 2006 The moral panic about bad language in England 1691–1745. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.1: 89–113. McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Wilson [1996] 2001Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, Charles F. 2002 English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Charles F. 2008 Pre-electronic corpora. In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), 1–14. Milic´, Louis 1990 The Century of Prose Corpus. Literary and Linguistic Computing 5.3: 203–208. Milroy, James 1992a Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. (Language in Society 19.) Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, James 1992b A social model for the interpretation of language change. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 72–91. (Topics in English Linguistics 10.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Moore, Colette Forthcoming Representing Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence. Its Forms and Socio-pragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 64.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

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Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1995 Constraints on politeness: The pragmatics of address formulae in Early English correspondence. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 541–601. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Pearson Education. Palander-Collin, Minna, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi 2009 The language of daily life in the history of English: Studying how macro meets micro. In: Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800), 1–23. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 183.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Petré, Peter 2009 Leuven English Old to New (LEON): Some ideas on a new corpus for longitudinal diachronic studies. Paper given at the Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics conference, University of Innsbruck, 5–9 July 2009. Rayson, Paul, Dawn Archer, Alistair Baron, Jonathan Culpeper and Nicholas Smith 2007 Tagging the Bard: Evaluating the accuracy of a modern POS tagger on Early Modern English corpora. In: Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2007, July 27–30, University of Birmingham, UK. Available at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~paul/public.html. Rissanen, Matti 1999 Syntax. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476–1776, 187–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rissanen, Matti 2008 Corpus linguistics and historical linguistics. In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), 53–68. Rissanen, Matti Forthcoming Corpora and the study of the history of English. In: Merja Kytö (ed.), English Corpus Linguistics: Crossing Paths. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Romaine, Suzanne 1982 Socio-historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 34.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rydén, Mats 1979 An Introduction to the Historical Study of English Syntax. (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis / Stockholm Studies in English 51.) Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Samuels, M. L. 1972 Linguistic Evolution, with Special Reference to English. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 5.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Edgar W. 2002 Investigating variation and change in written documents. In: J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 67–96. Oxford: Blackwell. Scott, Mike 2008 WordSmith Tools Help. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Available at http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version5/HTML/proc_tag_handling.htm.

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Shiina, Michi 2005 The use of vocatives in Early Modern English gentry comedies: A corpusbased approach. Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Short, Mick, Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper 1996 Using a corpus for stylistics research: Speech presentation. In: Jenny Thomas and Mick Short (eds.), Using Corpora in Language Research, 110–131. London: Longman. Short, Mick, Elena Semino and Martin Wynne 2002 Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach. Language and Literature 11.4: 325–355. Sitta, Horst 1980 Pragmatisches Sprachverstehen und pragmatikorientierte Sprachgeschichte. Methodologische Probleme der Rekonstruktion von historischen Verständigungsakten. In: Horst Sitta (ed.), Ansätze zu einer pragmatischen Sprachgeschichte. Zürcher Kolloquium 1978, 23–33. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 21.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. State Trials = A Complete Collection of State-Trials, and Proceedings for High-Treason, and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours; from the Reign of King Richard II. to the end of the Reign of King George I. In six volumes. With two alphabetical tables to the whole. The second edition, with great additions. Edited by Sollom Emlyn. London: Printed for J. Walthoe Sen. 1730. Svartvik, Jan, and Randolph Quirk 1980 A Corpus of English Conversation. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup. Taavitsainen, Irma 2006 Merchant in historical corpora. In: Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, Marina Dossena and Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli (eds.), Variation in Business and Economics Discourse: Diachronic and Genre Perspectives, 21–44. Rome: Officina Edizioni. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan M. Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2008 “Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 195–228. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Päivi Pahta (eds.) 2004 Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Forthcoming Medical Writing in Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Terry 2007 T HOU and Y OU in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 158.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin I. Herzog 1968 Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium, 95–195. Austin/London: University of Texas Press.

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3.

Historical sociopragmatics Jonathan Culpeper

1.

Introduction

Elizabeth Traugott (2004: 560) acknowledges that […] historical pragmatics requires going beyond decontextualised examples of semantic change, and paying attention to the discourse context in which the changes occur. To achieve a full picture, a macro-approach taking external factors such as cultural changes into consideration is, of course, also necessary.

Traugott does not actually do this herself; she makes this acknowledgement at the very end of an article reviewing historical pragmatics. Traugott’s focus is on more micro-considerations; in particular, how the conventionalising of implicatures contributes to semantic change. In this kind of enterprise, one can tap into (as Traugott does) relatively mainstream pragmatic theories (e.g. neo-Gricean theories of implicature) and fairly well-articulated processes of historical change (e.g. grammaticalisation, subjectification, metaphorisation). But if Traugott were to have tackled macro-considerations, to what theories and processes would she have appealed? The problem here is that macro-approaches vary considerably and many have no (explicit) theoretical substance. They do not constitute a coherent research endeavour. The key aim of this chapter is to lend definition to historical sociopragmatics and clarify the kind of macro-approaches that might fall within it. In this endeavour, it builds on the special issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics devoted to historical sociopragmatics (2009, 10.2), and, in particular, on parts of the introduction to that issue (Culpeper 2009). A preliminary problem in pursuing this aim is that sociopragmatics is not a well-recognised and agreed research area even within synchronic research. In particular, one’s view of sociopragmatics will change fundamentally according to one’s view of pragmatics. Thus, section 2 aims to elaborate what sociopragmatics is from both the perspective of pragmatics and social approaches to language, specifically, sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Section 3 places the notion of sociopragmatics in the context of areas of studies identified within historical pragmatics, notably by Jacobs and Jucker (1995), and the following section places it in the context of approaches overlapping with sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Section 5 contains a case study, which treats witchcraft in Early Modern England in terms of an activity type. Finally, before concluding, some consideration is given to methodological issues, including the discursive approach and its role in historical research.

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2.

Defining sociopragmatics

2.1.

From the perspective of pragmatics

There are various ways in which one might view the field of pragmatics, but two views are noteworthy, one being relatively broad and the other relatively narrow (see Jucker 2008a, who makes the same distinction and then introduces historical pragmatics). The narrow view offers a more viable identity for sociopragmatics, as I will explain, but I shall start with a brief discussion of the broad view. Of course, it should be remembered that these views are generalisations and exceptions are possible. The broad view is often identified as the “Continental European” view. Pragmatics is seen as a huge superordinate field, with disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and psychology as subfields. It is a “general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behaviour” (Verschueren 1999: 7). The middle part of this quotation proposes that pragmatics does not look at linguistic phenomena per se, but only at linguistic phenomena in actual usage (the abstract patterns that characterise many areas of linguistic theory are not to be found here). The last part of the quotation broadens the object of analysis to behaviour – what people do, whether with language or something else, in social contexts. In this view, pragmatics is a sociocultural perspective on the functioning of language. Herein lies the problem for sociopragmatics: if pragmatics is already a social enterprise, then sociopragmatics needs no separate identification (unless we are to pursue the tricky argument that it is the part of pragmatics that is even more social in orientation, something that would involve the problem of deciding at what point pragmatics qualifies as sufficiently more social). So, in this view of pragmatics, sociopragmatics is redundant. This would explain why, for example, sociopragmatics receives no mention in Jacob Mey’s weighty entry on pragmatics in the authoritative Concise Enyclopedia of Pragmatics – pragmatics itself already is “societally oriented and societally bound linguistics” (1998: 724). The narrow view of pragmatics is often identified as the “Anglo-American” view, as exemplified by the papers in Horn and Ward (2004). This view evolves from the work of the American philosopher Charles Morris (1901–1979), drawing on Charles Peirce’s work along with that of Rudolph Carnap. In his Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938: 6–7), Morris proposes a three-way distinction, which is summarised as follows: – Syntax (or syntactics) = mono relationship (relationships between linguistic signs); – Semantics = dyadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs and the things in the world that they designate); and – Pragmatics = triadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs, things they designate, and their users/interpreters).

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This distinguishes pragmatics as the area that deals with context, but also makes clear that it has some aspects in common with syntax and semantics. In this view, pragmatics is another component in a theory of language, adding to the usual phonetics, phonology, morphology, grammar/syntax and semantics (hence it is sometimes referred to as the “component” view of pragmatics). Moreover, the objective in this view is often to get pragmatics to “rescue” other, more formal areas of linguistic theory. It is in the Anglo-American view that the notion of sociopragmatics can be traced, and most clearly to the work of Geoffrey Leech (e.g. 1983) and Jenny Thomas (1981, 1983). Leech makes the following three distinctions: –

General pragmatics: “the general conditions of the communicative use of language” (1983: 10); – Sociopragmatics:1 “more specific ‘local’ conditions on language use” (1983: 10); and – Pragmalinguistics: “the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions” (1983: 11). Leech provides a diagram displaying the relationships between these areas, as reproduced in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Pragmatics: general pragmatics, pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (Leech 1983: 11)

Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics are not considered to be subcategories of general pragmatics, which “exclude[s] more specific ‘local’ conditions on language use” (Leech 1983: 10). Instead, the three areas are pitched as complementary areas of study within pragmatics as a whole. Regarding sociopragmatics, he elaborates: […] it is clear that the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle operate variably in different cultures or language communities, in different social situations, among different social classes, etc. […] pragmatic descriptions ultimately have to be relative to specific social conditions. In other words, socio-pragmatics is the sociological interface of pragmatics. (Leech 1983: 10)

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The key problem with Leech’s definition of sociopragmatics is that it neglects to spell out what these more specific, “local” social conditions might be. How local is local, and how specific is specific? As is clear from the above quotation, different “cultures”, “language communities”, “social situations” and social groups (e.g. “social classes”) can contribute to those local social conditions; in other words, any aspect of social context. Leech (1983: 18, footnote 13) actually attributes the formulation of the pragmalinguistic/sociopragmatic distinction to Thomas (1981, 1983). Thomas’s work was focused on cross-cultural pragmatics and, in particular, pragmatic failure. According to her: while pragmalinguistic failure is basically a linguistic problem, caused by differences in the linguistic encoding of pragmatic force, sociopragmatic failure stems from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behaviour. (Thomas 1983: 99)

Sociopragmatics is identified with the interaction between language and culture. Indeed, it is in studies of cross-cultural pragmatics and inter-language pragmatics that one can occasionally encounter the term “sociopragmatics”. However, placing “culture” at the heart of the definition and yet not elaborating further is not helpful as culture is a fiendishly slippery notion and one that can work at various levels of abstraction (e.g. national cultures, institutional cultures, social group cultures). A classic definition of culture is as follows: Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action; on the other, as conditioning elements of future action. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 181)

Note that this definition actually incorporates a historical dimension, as it suggests that cultures gain definition through some process of distillation over time. However, such a definition, though useful in a number of respects, might give the erroneous impression that culture consists of a relatively short list of stable features passed on from generation to generation – something that reflects an essentialist view. We need to be fully aware of the fact that cultures are multiple (they are certainly not limited to national cultures) and constantly undergoing change, and that people shift in and out of particular cultures (see, for example, Wright 1998; Gudykunst and Kim 2003). Recent approaches to culture emphasise that cultures involve groups who share practices and ways of exchanging meanings, something that of course involves discourses (cf. Hall 1997; Gee [1999] 2005). Recall that Leech refers to “specific” local conditions. With this in mind, one could define sociopragmatics as that area of study that concerns itself with any aspect of the social context that is specific to the pragmatic meanings of particular

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language use. The word “particular” is necessary here, in order to distinguish sociopragmatics from what Leech sees as the general role of pragmatics, that is, “meaning in relation to the speech situation” (1983: 15). This definition is not entirely satisfactory. From the point of view of the researcher, if we are only concerned with the specific and the particular, one can never make claims beyond the particulars of the specific data in hand, and thus the research enterprise is of limited value. From the point of view of the participant, a world of specifics and particulars would become cognitively overwhelming. People are cognitive misers (to use the expression coined by Fiske and Taylor 1984), using mental resources sparingly, making do with assumptions and defaults, and with generalisations. Furthermore, whether as a researcher or participant, in order to understand the specific, one needs to understand the more general norms. Holmes (1996: 316) points out that even forms which appear more immediately meaningful, such as pragmatic phenomena, may have acquired their “social significance on the basis of their distribution” (1996: 316), and, moreover, that “the patterns, generalizations, and norms of speech usage which emerge from quantitative analyses provide a crucial framework which informs and illuminates the way in which individual speakers use language” (1996: 325). Sociopragmatics focuses on the way in which speakers exploit such norms to generate particular meanings, take up particular social positionings, and so on. But at what level of abstraction are these contextual norms operating? This question is the same as that raised above, namely, how local is local, and how specific is specific? One way of approaching an answer is to think in terms of how people represent the world, including contexts, in their minds. Prototype theory is one theory designed to do just that (e.g. Rosch 1973, 1975; Rosch et al. 1976). The particular point of interest here is that Rosch and her colleagues proposed that categories are organised hierarchically according to inclusiveness. For example, a chair can be included within the category “furniture” and is therefore subordinate to it. Rosch and her colleagues argue that hierarchies have three levels, which are useful for different purposes (Rosch et al. 1976). There is a superordinate level (e.g. furniture), a basic level (e.g. table, chair), and a subordinate level (e.g. coffee table, kitchen table, rocking chair, armchair). The optimal level for cognitive activity is viewed as the basic level, since it is here that categories are both rich in attributes and well differentiated from one another. So, how does this translate into participants’ construal of the social context, or researchers’ attempts to describe and analyse it? Figure 2 captures different degrees of abstraction involved in cross-cultural pragmatic description. At the most micro level, we find linguistic description that is not (explicitly) contextual. Above that are three layers of contextual description. These vary from pragmatic (focusing on interpersonal meanings, such as the speaker’s intention behind, and the hearer’s uptake of, a particular utterance, and so on), to social situational (focusing on situated meanings such as the roles, relations and identities performed by participants in the particular speech event), and

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Figure 2. Degrees of abstraction in cross-cultural pragmatic description (Culpeper, Crawshaw, and Harrison 2008: 320)

finally to cultural (focusing on the ideologies of speech communities, that is, the belief systems of particular social groups). Coupland (2007:112), discussing “framing” (following Goffman 1974), also sketches three types of “discourse framing” as “theoretical options”. They are: “socio-cultural framing (macro-level social frames)”, “genre framing (meso-level social frames)” and “interpersonal framing (micro-level social frames)”. There are obvious similarities here across these schemes, although there are some slight differences with regard to the line between “genre framing” and “interpersonal framing”. We can also note that Halliday makes a three-way distinction: “text”, “context of situation” and “context of culture” (see, for example, Halliday and Hasan 1989: 44–47), although again with the lines drawn in slightly different places. Of course, we should not see these levels or types as discrete, operating in isolation or hard-edged. Particular cultures interact with particular social situations, and social situations interact with particular pragmatic/functional usages, which in turn interact with the language system. Note here that culture permeates all levels. Cultures can organise situational activities and influence linguistic behaviours. In my view, it is the contextual layer represented by social situations that is the medial layer, and that is so important for sociopragmatics – not least of all because it acts as a bridge between the micro and macro. Theoretical notions which operate at this level include “frames” (e.g. Goffman 1974), “activity types” (Levinson [1979] 1992) and “genre” (e.g. Fairclough 1992). I will return to frames and activity types in section 5, and illustrate their usage in relation to historical data (genres are covered elsewhere in this volume). 2.2.

Other perspectives on sociopragmatics: Sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis

Not all scholars have approached sociopragmatics from the perspective of pragmatics, of whatever kind. For example, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1995) and Nevala (2004a, 2004b), whose work will be briefly described below, move from the standpoint of sociolinguistics towards sociopragmatics. Wood (2004, 2007, 2009) has moved from the standpoint of critical discourse analysis towards sociopragmatics. In other words, they have moved from sociologically

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oriented language approaches – which might be positioned on the far right of Leech’s diagram in Figure 1 above – towards pragmatic issues. Consider, for example, that Brown and Levinson’s (1987) work on politeness is sometimes held up as a (possibly, the) monumental work within sociopragmatics (see, for example, O’Driscoll 2007). But it was published in a book series for interactional sociolinguistics. Work in sociolinguistics, according to Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 17–18; following Dittmar 1997: 99–100), falls into three different areas: “social dialectology” (i.e. “variationist sociolinguistics”), “interactional sociolinguistics” and the “sociology of language”. Note that these three areas bear some similarity to the three different levels of context outlined above in section 2.1. Here, too, we see a move from the more micro to the more macro; from the more linguistic to the more sociological. It is work in interactional sociolinguistics, with its medial level contextual concerns, that overlaps with work in sociopragmatics. However, even if the focus is similar, there is an important difference in emphasis between the research agendas of sociolinguistics and pragmatics scholars. This is clearly spelt out by Thomas (1995: 185, original emphasis), who is worth quoting at length: […] we could say that sociolinguistics is mainly concerned with the systematic linguistic correlates of relatively fixed and stable social variables (such as region of origin, social class, ethnicity, sex, age, etc.) on the way an individual speaks. Pragmatics, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with describing the linguistic correlates of relatively changeable features of that same individual (such as relative status, social role) and the way in which the speaker exploits his/her (socio)linguistic repertoire in order to achieve a particular goal. Sociolinguistics is static, offering a ‘snapshot’ of the language of a particular community at a particular moment in time. Pragmatics is dynamic, describing what a speaker from that community does with those resources, how he or she uses them to change the way things are or in order to maintain the status quo. Pragmatics is parasitic upon sociolinguistics, taking the sociolinguistic description of an individual’s repertoire as a point of departure: sociolinguistics tells us what linguistic resources the individual has, pragmatics tells us what he or she does with it.

Sociolinguistics has traditionally focused on the more micro aspects; in contrast, critical discourse analysis focuses on the more macro. Having said that, critical discourse analysis needs a way of analysing the more micro in relation to the more macro. Indeed, the more micro matters of discourse are seen to mediate the more macro social concerns and vice versa (Fairclough 1992: 86). Fairclough (1992: chapter 3) elaborates a “three-dimensional conception of discourse”, which attempts to bring together various analytical traditions. These dimensions are comprised of “text” (formal linguistic features), “discursive practice” (a type of social practice involving the production and interpretation of texts) and “social practice” (actions relating to social structures, e.g. ideologies, institutions, power relations). Again, it is the middle layer that bears the closest affinity with sociopragmatics.

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However, as with sociolinguistics, there are differences in research agenda. Critical discourse analysis is “critical”. It is “fundamentally concerned with analysing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak 2001: 2). My central argument in this section has been that sociopragmatics should primarily, though not exclusively, concern itself with the medial level of context (or aspects that comprise it). It links more micro, linguistically oriented considerations (the typical focus of pragmalinguistics) and more macro, sociologically oriented considerations (the typical focus of critical discourse analysis). To conclude this section, let us elaborate the definition of sociopragmatics thus: Sociopragmatics concerns itself with any interaction between specific aspects of social context and particular language use that leads to pragmatic meanings. Its central focus is on language use in its situational context, and how those situational contexts engender norms, which participants engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes.

3.

Locating sociopragmatics within historical pragmatics

Though designed for somewhat different purposes, three schemes for classifying research trends in historical pragmatics have emerged, as presented in Table 1. Table 1.

Three schemes for classifying research trends in historical pragmatics.

Arnovick (1999)

Brinton (2001)

Jacobs and Jucker (1995)

Micro

Discourse-oriented historical linguistics

Pragma-historical linguistics

Diachronically oriented discourse analysis

Diachronic pragmatics

Historical discourse analysis proper

Pragmaphilology

Macro

Whilst in themselves such classifications are of little consequence, they do serve to expose how the field is constituted. Let us consider how historical sociopragmatics might fit these schemes. Clearly there is a micro versus macro dimension running through all the schemes, though this is only explicitly labelled in Arnovick (1999). On the one hand we see studies focusing on a specific linguistic feature (or features) and a fairly limited linguistic context, and on the other hand we see a linguistic feature (or features), its (wider) co-text and cognitive and social contexts. Of course, the micro/macro dimension was flagged in my discussion of sociopragmatics in section 2. Note that in Arnovick’s scheme there are but two levels. In fact, there are essentially two levels in Brinton’s (2001) scheme. The lower two levels together comprise “discourse analysis”. One of these two levels is distinguished by the fact that it is diachronic, that is, it examines discourse over time; the other level

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is distinguished by the fact that it examines discourse at a particular point in time (i.e. it is synchronic in nature). However, in Jacobs and Jucker’s (1995) scheme there appears to be three levels (although the micro/macro dimension is not the only one along which they vary). In fact, Jacobs and Jucker (1995) divided historical pragmatics into the bottom two categories, “diachronic pragmatics” and “pragmaphilology”. I have added a third category, “pragma-historical linguistics”, which they discussed under approaches that map forms onto functions, and hence are predominantly micro in orientation. I shall focus on their scheme, largely because it is the earliest and has been the most influential. Historical sociopragmatics clearly does not fit the “pragma-historical linguistics” of Jacobs and Jucker’s (1995) scheme. This variety of historical pragmatics merges with historical linguistics. Studies typically consider a linguistic feature – a word, inflection, grammatical construction – and account for the way it changes over time, focusing largely on “internal” issues of language change. Let us turn to the other – the more macro – end of Jacobs and Jucker’s (1995) scheme, namely historical pragmaphilology. This variety of pragmatics merges with historical philology, which focuses on historical language at a particular point in time. Studies here typically consider linguistic features and account for their role in relation to the text in which they appear and/or context(s) of that text. Historical sociopragmatics fits well here. Note that studying linguistic features in relation to the text in which they appear is studying language in relation to genre, and genre, as noted in section 2.1, is a medial level contextual notion. Example studies include works on advertising (Gotti 2005), news discourse (Brownlees 2006; Jucker 2009) and letters (Fitzmaurice 2002). In addition, studies have considered language that is part of a situated spoken interaction, whether that situation is an institutionally recognised activity (as in the case of the courtroom) or a culturally recognised activity (as in the case of bantering). Example studies include works on courtroom discourse (Archer 2005; Kryk-Kastovsky 2006), bargaining (Lebsanft 1999; Becker 2003) and ritual challenges (Bax 1981, 1999, 2003). These all contribute to historical sociopragmatics, at least to some extent. However, more central examples of historical sociopragmatics focus more squarely on the relationship between language and its situational context, and, moreover, deploy theoretical concepts with which that relationship can be treated (see section 5). What about diachronic pragmatics in the middle of Jacobs and Jucker’s (1995) scheme? The works mentioned in the previous paragraph are largely synchronic, focusing on the pragmatic workings of language at a particular point in time, but historical pragmatics can also be diachronic. Diachronic pragmatics involves studying change in pragmatic phenomena, focusing on “the linguistic inventory and its communicative use across different historical stages of the same language” (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 11). This area of study is subdivided on the basis of methodology, whether proceeding from “form to function” or “function to form”. Form-to-function studies, which consider how a particular form has undergone

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functional change, constitute pragmalinguistic diachronic pragmatics. Functionto-form studies consider how a particular function has changed the forms it employs, and constitute sociopragmatic diachronic pragmatics. Examples of the latter include tracking particular speech-act functions (Arnovick 1999; some papers in Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008), social functions such as (im)politeness (some papers in Culpeper and Kádár 2010), or genre functions (Biber and Finegan 1997). The point about these studies is that to account for changes in function, whether in relation to speech acts, politeness or genre, it is necessary (at least to some degree) to identify the concomitant shifts in sociohistorical context. This is what makes these studies sociopragmatic and diachronic. An additional methodological approach not mentioned by scholars that lends itself particularly well to historical sociopragmatics of a diachronic kind has been proposed in Archer and Culpeper (2009). This method moves from context to function or form, “describing or tracing how historical contexts, including the co-text, genre, social situation and/or culture, shape the functions and forms of language taking place within them” (2009: 261), and can be either synchronic or diachronic. They label this approach “sociophilology”, and demonstrate how it can be pursued in trial proceedings via a corpus-based approach.2 It is important to stress that these areas of study are fuzzy-edged and often overlapping. In particular, the boundary between pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics is fuzzy. An accumulation of pragmaphilological “snapshots” can begin to create a diachronic narrative. For example, there are numerous studies (e.g. Hope 1993; Mazzon 2000; Busse 2002; Nevala 2004a; Walker 2007) on the English second-person pronouns you and thou in specific genres (e.g. witness depositions, correspondence and literary texts), and in specific periods (for address terms more generally, see the papers in Taavitsainen and Jucker 2003). Numerous studies focus on or at least briefly mention linguistic politeness (e.g. Brown and Gilman 1989 and Kopytko 1995, who focus on linguistic politeness in Shakespeare’s plays). One good example of a paper that splices the snapshots together is Jucker (2008b; but see also some refinements in Jucker 2010). In this paper, Jucker draws on a wide range of studies dealing with politeness in order to create a narrative to support his contention that politeness in English generally shifted from a positive politeness culture to a negative politeness culture (though terms of address appear to shift in the opposite direction). Of course, one must proceed in such an enterprise with caution, given that the methodologies deployed in various studies are not always entirely comparable.

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Locating historical sociopragmatics in sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis

The establishment of the field of historical sociolinguistics owes much to the work of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1996, 2003). They suggest that “[r]econstructing how language changes diffuse socially is one of the major tasks, if not the major task, of historical sociolinguists” (2003: 10, original emphasis). Studies in this area typically focus on a specific linguistic feature, usually grammatical, and track it over time and across social categories such as region, gender and social status. Moreover, the studies dealing with periods beyond the recent past must necessarily be concerned with genres, as that is what constitutes their data. The importance of genre, a medial level contextual notion, is twofold. One aspect is that the same situational and functional factors that motivate social dialectal variation also motivate register variation; as Finegan and Biber (1994: 319) put it: “speakers and writers from different social groups have differential access to, and characteristic involvement in, the potential range of spoken and written registers”. The other aspect is that the functions of genres influence the usage of linguistic items within them (see, for example, Culpeper and Kytö 2010: chapter 8). When scholars begin to explore the role of genres, they are moving towards sociopragmatics. Further to this, many of the linguistic features studied by historical sociolinguists play a role within the interactions represented in historical texts – they perform pragmatic functions. Even avowedly structuralist scholars such as Roger Lass, when it comes to items such as second-person pronouns in the late sixteenth century, end up admitting that “the choice is essentially determined by pragmatic factors” (1999: 150). Historical sociolinguists have embraced the study of the pragmatic import of such items. Thus, it is of no surprise to see Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg writing a chapter on “the pragmatics of address formulae” in Jucker’s (1995) formative volume on historical pragmatics. Deploying politeness theory (notably Brown and Levinson 1987), they consider whether the usage of forms of address in the salutations of letters relates to changes in interactional and relational contexts as one moves from late medieval to Early Modern English, and they find some evidence of a move from a dominant negative politeness culture towards a more positive politeness culture. (This apparent politeness shift in this period is supported by Nevala 2004a and 2004b, again based on correspondence. However, Jucker (2010) raises some significant problems with this shift, notably, that the kind of negative politeness of the early periods mediated in terms of address is not the stuff of facework as Brown and Levinson 1987 designed negative politeness to be.) For further work of this sociolinguistic-pragmatic type, see, in particular, the work of Nevala (2004a, 2004b, 2009) and Palander-Collin (2009). We should remember, however, the point raised in section 2 above; namely, that the emphasis in work approaching sociopragmatics from the direction of sociolinguistics tends to be somewhat different. The starting point is a

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sociolinguistic system of some kind (e.g. address formulae), and then the pragmatic enterprise is usually to look at deviations from the norms of that system (including whether there are so many deviations that the old norm is entirely subverted). Approaching historical sociopragmatics from the standpoint of critical discourse analysis is key to the work of Wood (2004, 2007, 2009). In her work, Wood examines the late fifteenth-century letters of Margaret Paston, focusing, in particular, on local contexts and expectations flowing from them. From critical discourse analysis, she draws on Fairclough’s (1992) work on discursive and social practices. In her 2004 paper, she reveals that the three dimensions of social practice, discursive practice and text are dynamically interrelated. Changes in the social system and the rise of commerce constituted changes in social conditions that determined the suitability of the type of letters people needed to write. Moreover, she reveals how processes of production and consumption are linked to the letter writing and letter writers of the time. In her 2009 paper, she probes the notion of local context, bringing in the more macro, sociological notions of context encompassed within the field of critical discourse analysis. Although Wood’s work does expose some power structures, it is not especially “critical”. Its contribution is in bringing some of the macro, sociological notions and social theories from critical discourse analysis to bear on communicative issues in texts. In this, it very much shares the goals of The Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices (SoReaL) research project, funded by the University of Helsinki, 2005–2007. The major goals of the SoReaL project are: (1) to develop corpus-aided sociopragmatic methodology for diachronic purposes in order (2) to understand in a diachronic perspective how sociocultural reality and language practices are intertwined and how changes in sociocultural reality are reflected in changing language practices. (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/soreal/project.htm)

The key output from this project is Pahta et al. (2010), a volume which should inspire further work in this area.

5.

A case study: Activity types and witches’ curses in Early Modern England

5.1.

Activity types and frames

According to Levinson, the notion of activity type […] refers to any culturally recognized activity, whether or not that activity is coextensive with a period of speech or indeed whether any talk takes place in it at all […] In particular, I take the notion of an activity type to refer to a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contribu-

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tions. Paradigm examples would be teaching, a job interview, a jural interrogation, a football game, a task in a workshop, a dinner party, and so on. (1992: 69, original emphasis)

Levinson goes on to say that because of the constraints on activities “there are corresponding strong expectations about the functions that any utterances at a certain point in the proceedings can be fulfilling” (1992: 79), and this has the important consequence that “[activity types] help to determine how what one says will be ‘taken’ – that is, what kinds of inferences will be made from what is said” (1992: 97). So, an activity type is an interactional notion, as elaborated in Thomas’s (1995: 187–194) checklist of its pragmatic constituents. This includes the goals of the participants, allowable contributions, orientation to Gricean maxims, orientation to interpersonal maxims, turn-taking and topic control, and the manipulation of pragmatic parameters. But it is also a cognitive notion, bearing similarities to Schank and Abelson’s (1977: 41) definition of a “script”, “a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defined a well-known situation” (1977: 41), and the role it plays in interpretation. Further papers on activity types include Allwood (2000), Sarangi (2000), and Linell and Thunqvist (2003). It should be noted that the notion of activity type overlaps with that of “frame” (e.g. Goffman 1974), particularly as defined by Tannen and Wallat (1993). Both activity types and frames constitute a bridge between micro, more linguistically oriented considerations and macro, more sociologically oriented considerations. Linell and Thunqvist (2003: 431), writing about activity types, argue: “it can be seen as a meso-level concept in providing a link between the micro- and macro-levels of sociological description, thus working against micro-macro dualism (cf. Layder 1994)”. Importantly, knowledge about activity type/frames is acquired through experience. Bednarek (2005: 690, original emphasis), discussing frames, remarks: […] knowledge structures are not innate but acquired through socialization, ‘constructed’ out of experience (out of our own experience or accounts of experiences by others etc.), and are hence both diachronically and culturally dependent.

Both Levinson (1992) and Bednarek (2005) flag the importance of culture: the activity type or frame is culturally recognised and dependent. They evolve as and are constituted by shared practices within a culture; they are shared understandings about joint actions. Differences in the experiences of different cultural groups or even different individuals will lead to them having differences in activity type/ frame knowledge. For example, trials constitute a specific activity type, but somebody in the present day will have different experiences of this activity type (whether direct or indirect) to somebody in the early modern world. This is especially true in England, where trials have undergone considerable change (e.g. in the past defendants lacked defence counsel, defendants could cross-examine witnesses, and there was no assumption of innocence). This would, of course, impact

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on language usage. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the activity type is itself partly shaped by language. Context shapes language just as language shapes context: they co-construct each other. 5.2.

Witches’ curses in early modern England

Here, I summarise some of the key points made in Culpeper and Semino (2000). In this paper, we highlighted the centrality of verbs relating to verbal activities in narratives of witchcraft in the Early Modern English period, focusing particularly on the speech-act verbs used to refer to the witches’ curses (notably to curse, to wish that, to wish harm/evil). Our particular aim was to compare the meanings / speechact values of verbs relating to curses in witchcraft texts with their main meanings / speech-act values today, but I shall concentrate on our use of the notion of activity type to elucidate witchcraft events. Our data were drawn from two types of texts: learned treatises containing narratives of witchcraft events and courtroom witness depositions. It is important to keep the historical context in mind. The period of the witch hunt in Europe spans the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and was more intense after 1484 (when Pope Innocent VIII incorporated within the doctrine of the Catholic Church the existence of witchcraft, its basis on the pact with the Devil, and its status as heresy). In England the witch hunt only started in the second half of the sixteenth century, and began to decline about one hundred years later. It also occurred on a smaller scale than on the continent, largely due to the fact that England had an independent Church, and consequently no Roman law and no Inquisition. Nevertheless, the death toll is estimated to be over 1,000 victims – the vast majority women, old and poor. A striking feature of witchcraft narratives is that the type of activity in which participants were most frequently involved was verbal in nature. A witchcraft event was usually triggered by an argument between the supposed witch and a neighbour over a fairly trivial matter (such as the borrowing of food, utensils or money). Typically, the “witch” was older and poorer than the “victim”, led a relatively marginalised life and relied on begging for her daily subsistence. It was after being refused what she had asked for that the witch uttered words which were (immediately or subsequently) interpreted as a curse – an act of witchcraft. The verbs most frequently used to refer to this central speech act in witchcraft narratives are to curse and to wish that or to wish harm/evil. An example is given below: (1)

Goody Smith Hen. Sanford wit. after 3 nights watchinge. She confessed to him yt she had cursed 2 childeren of Parkers and that they languished immediately an did giue the~ apples and wish they might doe him hurt and died wthin one quarter of a yeare (Suffolk Witches 1645, p. 293, my emphasis)

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In the witchcraft context, however, these verbs were used to refer to a speech act that was believed to result inevitably in some misfortune befalling the target. This was due to a set of beliefs where the words of particular people in particular circumstances had the power to harm others. In early modern England this power was attributed generally to those who had suffered a wrong and had no other means of redress, and more specifically to those who were believed to have made a pact with the devil, and were therefore invested with his supernatural force. In our witchcraft texts there are particular clusters of speech-act verbs, as displayed in Table 2. Table 2.

Speech-act verb clusters in witchcraft narratives (based on Culpeper and Semino 2000: 111–112; the spellings of the clusters are as per the original documents)

1. THE PACT The witch makes a contract with the devil. Typically, there is an agreement that if the witch renounces Christianity, the devil will empower the witch. The Witch: enter tearmes of a compact, make a contract, renounce, covenant, forsake

The Devil: assault with promises, enter tearmes of a compact, enthral, invassal, make a contract, promise

2. THE FALLING OUT The witch is thwarted by the future victim. Typically, a request for food or for some minor object – pins, a shirt – is denied. The Witch: beg, ask

The Victim: deny

3. THE CURSE The witch verbalises her anger and frustration and thereby causes something bad to happen to the addressee. The Witch: ban, curse, wish (evil/harm)

The Victim: be bewitched

4. THE TRIAL The witch is prosecuted and the accusation of witchcraft is confirmed. The Witch: confess, deny

The Others: accuse, arraign, commit, condemn, examine, find guilty, take (one’s oath / upon one’s death), testify (upon one’s oath)

We argued that the clusters relating to witchcraft reflected a “culturally recognized activity” – a structured set of speech acts with constraints on participants, the situation, and so on. Thus, the role of witch was constrained in that it was typically filled by somebody who was marginalised by society, most often by somebody who was a woman, who was old and who made a living by begging. It was crucial that an appropriate belief system existed, one that allowed for the possibility of someone’s words causing physical harm to another person. An important consequence of this “witchcraft activity type” was that it could be used to interpret acts and events retrospectively. Thus, if the witchcraft activity

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type was invoked, a simple wish, or a threat, or an expression of anger could be reinterpreted as a witch’s curse. A prototypical example might be as follows: if a woman who was both poor and old had had an argument with somebody, if that woman had attacked that person verbally, and if a bad event had subsequently happened to that person, then there would be sufficient evidence to invoke the witchcraft activity type and to re-interpret the woman’s utterance as a curse and, as a consequence, to brand the woman a witch. In this analysis, the power behind witchcraft lies not in the utterance of a witch’s curse, but in the instantiation of the witchcraft activity type. The instrument of power is no longer the witch’s words, but the judicial system, and the trigger of a witchcraft event is not the curse, but the accusation that someone had performed a successful curse. Since harming others by means of witchcraft was against the law, the accuser had the option of asking the authorities to confirm or disconfirm the accusation. The judges could then instantiate the witchcraft activity type, in order to re-interpret and to construct events within that frame. Once instantiated, the accused would find it very difficult to disprove an accusation because of the interpretative consequences of the activity type: NEGATIVE EVENT A proof of a successful curse THE CURSE A proof that the “curser” had a pact with the devil THE PACT A proof that the “curser” was a witch Moreover, activity types provide a context for the operation of the Gricean maxims (see Mooney 2004). In this activity type, witches cannot be cooperative – they cannot give reliable evidence. Thus, they cannot defend themselves during the trial.

6.

Methodology

As I have argued, activity types and frames are centrally concerned with the medial level of context, that level of context that is so important to sociopragmatics. This argument is consonant with that of Bax, who argues that frame analysis can offer a “unifying framework” (2001: 38) for historical pragmatics. Many studies contributing to sociopragmatics use various theories and concepts to pick out an aspect – such as a speech act, a politeness routine, a discourse formula – and consider its operation in relation to particular aspects of the context. This is a very atomistic approach, and one that is not at all psychologically realistic (people do not understand a politeness routine, for example, in isolation from its co-text and the broader context). What these studies lack is a notion that holds together and organises aspects of context. Frames and activity types provide such a framework. As noted and illustrated in the previous section, they not only comprise interactional phenomena but have a cognitive parallel. Hence, they also provide a mechanism for interpretive reconstruction, as illustrated in the previous section. Though not explicitly deploying the theoretical notion of activity type, Fitzmaurice’s (2009)

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examination of the eighteenth-century courtship conducted in the letters of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley is a further illustration. Fitzmaurice focuses on the sociopragmatic roles afforded the participants in their corresponding activity, courtship, and on how sociopragmatic meanings expressed by participants in that activity might be reconstructed by relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Of particular importance is the fact that activity types, frames or genres offer a way of mediating between language and the wider sociohistorical context. As Mikhail Bakhtin ([1979] 1986: 65) puts it, Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language. There is not a single new phenomenon (phonetic, lexical, or grammatical) that can enter the system of language without having traversed the long and complicated path of generic-stylistic testing and modification.

However, it is worth noting that Bax (2001: 60) views frame analysis as not yet fully up to the job: […] frame analysis is liable to favour the macroscopic, relatively large-scale, and probably also more conspicuous mechanisms underlying social practices, even if they are predominantly verbal. It is much less given to minute methodological enquiries into the linguistic insides of co-constructed speech behaviour. I will say this much for frame theory: that while frame analysis can be regarded as a useful supplement to standard pragmatic analysis, it is not adequately developed to be used on its own in the context of explorations into (the history of) linguistic usage.

I am more sanguine about activity types being adequately developed to be used on their own, possibly because some of the research I referred to in the previous section was produced after the time of Bax’s writing. I see the main impediment as being a practical one: to do justice in an analysis to all the aspects of a particular activity type is a huge undertaking. It is for this reason that scholars tend to focus on one particular aspect, and use the activity type, frame, genre, etc. as a supplementary backdrop. It is not the case that sociopragmatic analyses are necessarily qualitative in approach. In section 2, I stressed that sociopragmatics focuses on the way in which speakers exploit norms to generate particular meanings, and one way of revealing those norms is to use quantification. The studies mentioned in section 4, which have moved into sociopramatics from sociolinguistics, have been in the vanguard of this approach, deploying, in particular, corpus-based methods. Archer and Culpeper (2009) go even further. They use the contextual categories (including, for example, role) captured by a set of tags appended to participants’ utterances in their corpus of dialogic texts to discover how context is shaping language use. But norms, and indeed interpretative meanings, can be approached in other ways. Both Wood (2009) and Fitzmaurice (2009) use the meta-commentary of participants (their evaluations, for example) to reveal their perspective on what would count as normal or expected (e.g. a son’s acknowledgement of a letter from his mother

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within a reasonable timeframe). This, like the quantitative approaches, is not of course exclusive to historical texts. Scholars conducting pragmatic analyses of present-day texts are generally reticent to spell out their methods. An exception is Thomas (1995: 204–207), who lists sources of evidence in pragmatics, namely perlocutionary effects, explicit participant commentary, and co-text. All of these are also key to historical sociopragmatics. What is peculiar to historical sociopragmatics is that the (re)construction of contexts is entirely based on written records (there are no direct visual or aural data before the invention of audio recording). Even research conducted by social historians is underpinned by written documents, and, moreover, such research is often insufficiently detailed to assist in understanding the rich dynamics of particular situations. A key focus in historical sociopragmatics, therefore, is on how historical texts represent contexts (or even project their own contexts, especially in the case of fictional texts), through comments on aspects of the context, metapragmatic comments, participant reactions and responses, and so on. A particular complexity is that historical texts represent contexts within contexts. Thus, a trial proceeding (a genre) is produced by certain individuals for certain individuals performing certain roles and in certain circumstances with certain functions and meanings. But that trial proceeding will represent the discourse and context of the courtroom, and within that discourse and context there is likely to be represented the discourse and context of the crime scene, and so on. Moreover, multiple discourse levels can have important implications for the pragmatic status of linguistic features. For example, courtroom transcriptions always involve interpretation and selection: note-takers and editors may purposefully, according to their social and political agendas, present particular pragmatic devices, in order to recreate – or perhaps create – a particular interpretation. To illustrate, the decision to record a vocative expressing deference or a discourse marker expressing surprise may be part of a design to engender a particular interpretation, and that interpretation may or may not be the one that the original speaker intended and/or hearer construed. Hence the need for studies that focus specifically on how the identities and voices of individuals or groups are embedded in multiple discourses in a single text, deploying, for example, frameworks of speech presentation (e.g. Collins 2001; Palander-Collin and Nevala 2006; Culpeper and Kytö 2010: chapter 3).

7.

Conclusion

From the perspective of the Continental European view of pragmatics, the entire volume of which this paper is a part could be considered historical sociopragmatics, as many (if not all) of its papers take a sociocultural perspective on the functioning of language, at least at some point. This fact illustrates the problem that in this perspective the notion of sociopragmatics loses definition. It is in the perspective of the

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Anglo-American view of pragmatics that sociopragmatics takes on a clearer shape. Having said that, the seeds that were sown for sociopragmatics almost 30 years ago have been slow to germinate and provide the fruits of scholarship, whether synchronic or diachronic. The relatively recent advent of historical pragmatics, with its concern for historical contexts, has provided fertile ground for the development of historical sociopragmatics, a development that has been aided by separate inputs from historical sociolinguistics and historical critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics concerns itself with any interaction between specific aspects of social context and particular historical language use that leads to pragmatic meanings. Its central focus is on language use in its situational context, and how those situational contexts engender norms that speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. Theoretical notions of particular importance include activity type, frame and genre, all of which are culturally embedded. Historical sociopragmatics can be either synchronic (describing and tracing how language use shapes and is shaped by context at a particular point of time in the past) or diachronic (describing and tracing how, over time, shifts in language use shape context, shifts in context shape language use, and/or shifts occur in the relationship between language use and context). Methods are not restricted to qualitative analysis, but can include quantitative analysis. Given the importance of social context in sociopragmatics, historical sociopragmatics must pay particular attention to methods for (re)constructing contexts from texts. There is certainly a need for future research to describe further activity types or frames in a historical perspective. As we accumulate such descriptions, we will be in a position to make relatively accurate broader cultural generalisations, and then we can begin to explain interactions with the languages of those cultures. Methodologically, those descriptions can be achieved in various ways, including the use of the corpus-based approach to capture in situ language norms and the careful qualitative analysis of language and discursive practices. It is likely that historical sociopragmatics will continue to draw input from a number of different scholarly traditions. One area that could contribute to historical sociopragmatics is the discourse-historical approach of critical discourse analysis (see, for example, Reisigl and Wodak 2009). A particular aim of this approach is to cast light on dominant ideologies and discourses by viewing them in a historical perspective. Meanings are assumed to be the products of discursive change. Whilst the critical nature of critical discourse analysis is not a feature of historical sociopragmatics, there are clearly fruits to be yielded from the discourse-historical approach. Surprisingly, no historical scholars have yet done this, and even in critical discourse analysis the time-depth of case studies is very shallow (i.e. typically within living memory). Finally, it is worth pointing out that historical sociopragmatics can benefit from keeping abreast of developments in discourse analysis. As we saw in section 3, discourse analysis “proper” is strongly associated with historical sociopragmatics. Yet, the latest developments in discourse analysis have yet to be fully deployed in

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historical work. A particular example is the discursively oriented approach of Gee (2005: particularly chapter 7). Here we find a model that combines communicative meanings, activities, identities, relationships, politics, connections between things and other sign systems. As I did for activity types at the end of section 5.1, it emphasises the reflexivity of language, its ability to reflect reality and construct it at the same time. Furthermore, it places emphasis on the historical specificity of communicative actions and meanings as they are deployed at particular times, in particular places and situations. Research could usefully bring this into play.

Notes 1 In his 1983 book, Leech writes “socio-pragmatics” with a hyphen. In more recent years, it is generally solid. 2 Archer and Culpeper (2009) did not invent the label “sociophilology”. Wright, in his book Sociophilological Study of Late Latin (2003), claims to have invented it in 1996 to refer to linguistic analysis of texts that combines modern sociolinguistic insights with traditional philological analysis. This is a broader definition than that of Archer and Culpeper (2009), where it is linked to analyses that have a particular methodological approach, i.e. moving from context to function or form.

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III. Diachrony

4.

Grammaticalization Elizabeth Closs Traugott

1.

Introduction

Grammaticalization, understood as the development of grammatical markers involving a set of related functional, pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological changes, has become the focus of much work on historical morphosyntax and morphophonology since the 1980s. Currently there are two main competing construals of grammaticalization, one invoking reduction, the other extension (see Traugott forthcoming a). These two construals are complementary because they answer two different questions: the first about development of morphosyntactic form, the second about what kinds of functional changes take place (see Kiparsky forthcoming). 1.1.

Grammaticalization as reduction and increase in dependency

One construal of grammaticalization, sometimes referred to as the “narrow”, “traditional” or “prototypical” approach, focuses on reduction of structure and form, and on increase in dependency (see e.g. Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Lehmann [1982] 1995; Haspelmath 2004; Fischer 2007). The basic insight is that a lexical item or construction (in the sense of a string or phrase) becomes a grammatical item over time. This concept underlies the famous “cline” proposed in Givón (1979: 209): (1) discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero Here “discourse” is to be understood as relatively free, pragmatically (not syntactically) constrained word order. Typical recent definitions in this tradition are: “a diachronic change by which parts of a constructional schema come to have stronger internal dependencies” (Haspelmath 2004: 26), and “grammaticalization of a linguistic sign is a process in which it loses its autonomy by becoming more subject to constraints of the linguistic system” (Lehmann 2004: 155). A standard example is Lat. dare habes ‘give:INF have:2SgPres’ > 7th century Romance daras ‘you will give’. 1.2.

Grammaticalization as expansion

The other construal, sometimes referred to as the “extended” view of grammaticalization, focuses on grammaticalization as “the process by which grammar is cre-

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ated” (Croft 2006: 366), and admits expansion (e.g. Himmelmann 2004; Brinton and Traugott 2005). Minimalist approaches to grammaticalization may be included here (e.g. Roberts and Roussou 2003; and van Gelderen 2004), since Move and Merge involve movement “up” the parametric tree. Himmelmann (2004) hypothesizes that grammaticalization involves three types of context-expansion: i) hostclass expansion, ii) syntactic expansion, and iii) semantic-pragmatic expansion. For example, when a demonstrative develops into a definite article, the set of nominal hosts with which it occurs expands (cf. use with proper nouns, e.g. The Mississippi) and it becomes more type productive; its syntactic use is extended from core argument positions to peripheral ones, e.g. adpositions; and pragmatically it becomes available for associative uses (a concert – the soloist). Traugott (2003) argues that not all grammaticalization involves increased dependency. For example, the development of discourse markers such as indeed and anyway (used as reformulators and elaborators) are instances of grammaticalization, even though, in English, they are syntactically and phonologically detached from the clause or discourse over which they have scope (see section 3.1). These two traditions differ in part because “grammar” is conceived in different ways. In the first, pragmatics is outside of core grammar or at a different, discourse-pragmatic level (see e.g. Wischer 2000), whereas in the second it is part of grammar (see e.g. the architecture of radical construction grammar in Croft 2001).

2.

Semantic and pragmatic factors in work on grammaticalization

An issue cross-cutting the two traditions of reduction and expansion is the extent to which grammaticalization is viewed as a semantic or as a pragmatic phenomenon, at least in origin. In this section, these two views are outlined, and then some theoretical issues about the relationship between pragmatics and grammaticalization are discussed. Central to all discussion of pragmatic and semantic factors is that, at least in the initial stages, there must be compatibility between the earlier (“source”) and the later (“target”) meaning. 2.1.

The role of semantics

In most views, grammaticalization entails morphosyntactic change. However, while affirming the definition of grammaticalization as reduction, Heine and his colleagues emphasize semantics. Heine (1997: 76), for example, defines grammaticalization as “a process whereby a linguistic expression E, in addition to its conventional meaning M1, receives a more abstract and more grammatical meaning M2” (see also Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer 1991). In the late 1980s and early 1990s and under the influence of cognitive linguistics, metaphorizing was widely regarded as the predominant mechanism in

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grammaticalization (see also Nerlich, this volume). Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991: 48) suggested that the chain of metaphorical extensions of meaning in (2) is typical of grammaticalization: (2) PERSON > OBJECT > ACTIVITY > SPACE > TIME > QUALITY OBJECT > SPACE > TIME have been widely attested in grammaticalization, e.g. body part (object) > locative (space; cf. back, ahead in English), and locative > time (cf. before ‘in front’, after ‘further behind’, as in the aft of a ship). However, the other changes, though often found in lexical semantic change (cf. behind ‘mentally retarded’), do not appear to be involved in grammaticalization (see also Bybee 2007: 976). Rich cross-linguistic evidence for putative sources of spatial terms, largely in the area of grammaticalization, is provided in Svorou (1993), of temporals in Haspelmath (1997), and of a far larger set of lexical to grammatical concepts in Heine and Kuteva (2002). In these studies, evidence is based on examples from languages with known histories and sometimes projected onto polysemies in languages for which such histories are not available. “Bleaching”, also referred to as “desemanticization” (Heine and Reh 1984), or “generalization of meaning” (Bybee 2003), plays a central role in work on grammaticalization. It is sometimes understood as the loss of substantive, contentful, referential, or lexical meaning, but the retention of abstract or schematic meaning: “specific features of meaning drop off, leaving a semantic core” (Bybee 2003: 607). Examples include loss of possessive semantics in the development of haveperfects, of proximal or distal deictic meaning in the development of demonstratives into articles, or of purposive in the development of infinitive to. Discussing the development of marked negation, e.g. French ne … pas, from negative + spatial term, and of quantifiers, e.g. Greek ólos ‘all’ from Classical Greek hólos ‘whole, not lacking any integral parts, functioning properly’, Roberts and Roussou (2003: 193) suggest that bleaching is to be understood as “loss of non-logical content”. Of logical content, they say “[t]he basic intuition is that the logical content is independent of the external factors, or in von Fintel’s (1995) words, insensitive to facts about the world” (2003: 221). While granting that some content meaning is lost, others have pointed out that abstract meaning may also be gained. Interpreting grammaticalization as the partial metaphorical mapping from concrete source image-schemas to target schemas that are topological and abstract, Sweetser suggested that image-schematic inferential structure is preserved, but “the meaning of the target domain is added” (Sweetser 1988: 400, italics original). For example, go in be going to loses the sense of physical motion, but gains the sense of futurity, intention, etc. Similarly, Traugott (1988), while still developing the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (see next section), suggested that at least some instances of grammaticalization involve strengthening of informativeness, e.g. mere ‘pure, undiluted (as of wine)’ came to be grammaticalized as a scalar particle meaning ‘not more than

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specified’ (see also pure, as in pure nonsense); likewise Old English siþþan ‘since, from the time that’ was strengthened to ‘because’ (Traugott and König 1991). More specifically, grammaticalization entails the development of “procedural” uses, i.e. uses that constrain the inferences and computations needed to parse and comprehend an utterance. A further issue is that, like other changes such as subjectification, bleaching is not limited to grammaticalization. Lexical items may lose in substantive content, e.g. Old English þing ‘law court, assembly’ by metonymy > ‘thing, matter of concern, thing’; Lat. ambulare ‘walk’ > French aller ‘go’. Butt and Geuder (2003) argue that in Urdu “light verbs” are bleached and highly schematic, but nevertheless are not grammaticalized because they function as co-predicators and provide additional lexical, not functional content. Hypothesized motivations for bleaching depend on the theoretical framework within which the hypothesis is developed. According to Roberts and Roussou (2003), bleaching in the sense outlined above is associated with micro-parametric changes “internal” to grammar change. By contrast, Bybee (2006), understands generalization/bleaching as being correlated with the semanticization of invited inferences, and has attributed it not to internal, but largely to external, usage factors such as repetition and frequency. For example, referring to Haiman (1994) on ritualization, Bybee (2007: 975) suggests “frequency increases in themselves lead to bleaching through the habituation process”. 2.2.

The role of pragmatics

Focusing on attested historical and textual data, Traugott and König (1991) suggested that what appears to be metaphorical change based in analogical thinking is, in fact, the outcome of paying attention to, and using, pragmatic implicatures that arise in the syntagmatic flow of speech. For example, if I say I am going to deliver the hostages and mean that I am in motion with the purpose of delivering them, I am implying that I will do it, and hearers will infer this future meaning too. After grammaticalization, the formula MOTION > FUTURE looks as if metaphor and abrupt change were involved; however, the textual record shows that the change was gradual (i.e. occurred in small, incremental steps) and contextually constrained. Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991) refer to the effect of pragmatic conditioning as “context-induced reinterpretation”. The term implies that linguistic context is a motivating factor in change, a reason why change occurs; if the actors in communication are evoked, they are evoked as hearers rather than speakers. Traugott and König (1991), by contrast, refer to “invited inferencing”. The term is borrowed from Geis and Zwicky (1971), but used in an extended way to evoke speakers producing or even intending meanings beyond what is said, and hearers inferring such meaning – in other words, it is intended to evoke negotiation of

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meaning. Invited inferencing is not restricted to grammaticalization, but rather is conceived of as a major motivation for semantic change in general (Traugott and Dasher 2002). The theory, known as the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, draws primarily on neo-Gricean pragmatics (see Grice [1975] 1989; Horn 1984; Levinson 2000), which emphasizes information and belief. The Gricean maxim that is considered key to change is his Quantity 2 “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”, rephrased as “Say no more than you must, and mean more thereby”. This leads to rich interpretations and the conventionalizing and ultimate semanticization of the more abstract implicature, e.g. of future in the case of will (originally ‘to will’) or of be going to (see section 2.3 below). The neo-Gricean tradition is part of what Jucker (forthcoming) has called a more restricted Anglo-American “cognitive-inferential” conceptualization of pragmatics. As he points out, European researchers tend to work within a broader “socio-interactional conceptualization”. The distinction is readily apparent if one compares Grice’s maxims with those of Keller ([1990] 1994). Although building in part on Grice’s maxims, Keller’s are maxims of action, including not only “Talk in such a way that the other understands you” (1994: 98), but also “Talk in such a way that you are not recognizable as a member of the [other] group” (1994: 101), a maxim that is about identity rather than truth or belief. Much earlier work on historical pragmatics and grammaticalization was done in the neo-Gricean tradition, but, as discussed in section 2.5 below, interactional perspectives are currently being widely adopted as well, wherever the linguist is working. 2.3.

The role of context

Invited inferencing and context-induced reinterpretation both assume pragmatic polysemy and ambiguity (see Horn 1985 on metalinguistic negation; Sweetser 1990 on conditionals and conjunctions; and Geeraerts 1993 for some of the problems in determining whether there is polysemy). The question addressed here is whether such pragmatic ambiguity is a prerequisite for grammaticalization. Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994) cautioned that pragmatic factors are potential conditions for grammaticalization only in very limited morphosyntactic contexts. Go came to be grammaticalized as a future marker only in the context of imperfective be-ing, purposive to, and a following verb, not an adverbial. While I go to London to deliver the hostages is a possible sentence of English, it is not a context for the development of auxiliary be going to, since be and imperfect -ing are absent and an adverbial intervenes between to and the verb. Heine (2002) went on to hypothesize that pragmatic ambiguity in context is a necessary precondition for grammaticalization. He called this a “bridging context”. Evans and Wilkins (2000: 549) define such a context as one in which two (or more) meanings are possible, but one is “only contextually implicated”, and Enfield (2005: 318) defined it as a “speech

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context in which something inferable as utterance-meaning from an input sentence-meaning happens also to be true, and thus not defeasible in that context”, in other words, the ambiguity is not resolved. Putting more emphasis on structural constraints, Diewald (2002, forthcoming) proposed that pragmatic ambiguity and structural factors accumulate in one context, which she calls a “critical context”. Neither bridging nor critical contexts necessarily lead to grammaticalization (change never has to occur), but both authors hypothesize that grammaticalization does not occur without them. It occurs when a formerly ambiguous string is used in a new context that strongly favors or allows only the meaning that was originally pragmatically implied, not the original meaning, e.g. I am going to read a book (future is preferred), and You’re going to like that book! (only future is possible). This new context is a “switch context” in Heine’s terminology, an “isolating” one in Diewald’s. Since the prior bridging and critical contexts differ, these new switch and isolating contexts are not exactly equivalent. Switch contexts are those that no longer allow an interpretation in terms of the source meaning, isolating contexts separate out and crystallize the new meaning and function from among competing options (see Traugott forthcoming b). In some cases, such as be going to (Danchev and Kytö 1994) or German modals (Diewald 2002), there is strong textual evidence that there was a period when a large number of pragmatically ambiguous examples appear, compared to earlier periods when such examples are not found, or not found in any significant number, and compared to later periods when unambiguous examples abound, and ambiguous ones are relatively rare. However, in other instances this is not the case, e.g. the development of quantifier meanings of partitives like a lot of (‘a unit of’ > ‘much/ many’). In the sense of ‘part, share, unit of’ a lot of implies some size, so the invited inference of size is present from early times; texts do not, however, show a period when a large number of ambiguous examples occur. Much discussion of context has been restricted to the local context of the phrase, clause, or sentence. This may be because of the nature of the theory and/or the methodology espoused. Most theories do not include discourse functions, and contexts are difficult to handle in quantitative corpus-based studies, unless multivariate analysis is used. However, certain types of grammaticalization, particularly those that involve the development of marked (complex) negatives, adversative clause connectives (instead), or information-structure-related constructions like pseudo-clefts, appear to have developed in larger discourse contexts (Traugott 2008). In these cases, the discourses are contesting and evoke multiple viewpoints. Up to about 1600 strings of the type ALL NP DO BE TO V were purposive; all meant ‘everything’, to was purposive, and the temporality of do and V were typically different: V is implied to occur later than all that is done, as in example (3a). However, in the case of the pseudo-cleft, which has the same surface syntactic form, all means ‘only’, to is infinitive, and the temporality of do and V are the same (do is a kind of pro-verb), as in example (3b):

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(3) a. I loue thee dearer then I doe my life, And all I did, was to aduance thy state, To sunne bright beames of shining happinesse. (1601 Yarrington, Two Lamentable Tragedies; LION: EEBO) b. there is no possibilitie of overthrowing the new election which shalbe made when the place is voyd, and if it be so allready, or shalbe so, all you can doe is to do some good for the tyme to come,which if you can doe conveniently, and without much trouble, it wilbe woorth your labour (1624 Oliver Naylor to John Cousin; CEEC) In (3b) the prior discourse context involves a negative (no possibility), a conditional (if it be so or shall be so), and is followed by another conditional. In other words, the prior discourse context denies alternative eventualities. Internally to the construction, however, the modal can also introduces alternative eventualities. This kind of context came to be associated with and absorbed into the string, leading to the development of the pseudo-cleft construction, which can be considered to have grammaticalized when it occurs independent of such contexts. Close inspection of texts shows that many of the contexts in which grammaticalization occurs continue to be favored across the centuries. As long as polysemies persist, ambiguity may be found. Pseudo-clefts, for example, still appear frequently in contesting contexts, as does reformulating in fact. The status of such ambiguity is different prior to and after grammaticalization, since prior to grammaticalization defeasibility is impossible (there is no way to linguistically disambiguate it), whereas after grammaticalization it is possible. This has led some researchers to exclude ambiguous examples from counts of frequency increases once grammaticalization has set in (see e.g. Eckardt 2006: 97). However, such an approach ignores the reality that, at least in the early stages of a development, not all speakers will necessarily have the new structure because change is propagated across communities of speakers and genres at different rates (or not at all). Furthermore, continued use and exploitation of ambiguity for rhetorical purposes may function to maintain the link between the newer and older polysemies. It has also been suggested that, in some cases, avoidance of ambiguity in one genre may lead to changes that are not observed in other genres (see Moore 2007 on avoidance of the original sense of be supposed to ‘be thought to’ in favor of obligation and epistemic meanings in later nineteenth-century speech-related writing, but not in more formal genres). While local discourse contexts may remain relatively stable over several centuries, larger factors may lead to some striking apparent discontinuities. For example, it is often pointed out that English and many other languages of Europe underwent “syntacticization” in medieval and renaissance times. In English and French, this entailed the development of obligatory subject, shifts from syntactic ordering that was mainly discourse- (information-structure-)based to one which is subject-oriented, and the rise of distinctive subordination structures. Among hypo-

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theses about the unidirectionality of grammaticalization is that of parataxis > hypotaxis, or relatively loose clause connectivity to hierarchized embedding (for a recent account, see Lehmann 2008). An example in English is the shift from causal clauses with correlative markers for þæm þe … for þæm þe ‘for that that + clause … for that that + clause’ to a structure with distinct marking of main and subordinate clauses (because … (therefore)), with strong constraints on anaphoric reference across these clauses. When we find that in seventeenth-century plays there are examples of because-clauses without main clauses, and increasing evidence of loose clausal connectivity in the twentieth century, should this count as a counterexample to unidirectionality in grammaticalization, as Higashiizumi (2006) suggests, or as a change in cultural practices? It is likely that spoken English has always allowed because-clauses to occur independently of main clauses. Written English, being more formal and less context-dependent, has not. However, as the “colloquialization” of writing practices increased, in drama, then in representation of speech in novels and finally in writing generally (e.g. Leech 2004), the use of paratactic causal clauses was allowed to increase. It appears that here we may have a change in practices associated with registers and genres, rather than a counterexample to the unidirectionality of grammaticalization, since the hypotactic causal clause structure is still productive and available. Another example of this kind of “insubordination” is use of isolated if-clauses, e.g. If you could move your head (Stirling 1999). Such developments clearly need more study. 2.4.

Polyfunctionality

The larger clausal and discourse context serves an important function in communication because many grammaticalized expressions are polyfunctional, and ambiguity is defeasible only in the larger context (if then). The larger context allows for the interpretation of polyfunctional expressions such as so, albeit (for development of the latter, see Sorva 2007). It has been suggested that languages may vary quite considerably in the extent to which polyfunctionality occurs, e.g. Horie (1998, 2008) points out that modern Japanese is more polyfunctional (therefore more polysemous, and potentially ambiguous), than modern Korean with respect to case marking and aspect markers. In Japanese, -ni encodes “dative, allative, locative, cases, as well as time, passive agent, causee and experiencer” (Horie 1998: 148). In Classical Japanese, -ni was also used as a nominalizer in adverbial clauses, and polyfunctionality was particularly evident then. However, Korean tends toward greater specificity and differentiation. Horie (2008) attributes the difference to a greater degree of grammaticalization in Japanese. A question that deserves attention is, to what extent significant differences in degree of polyfunctionality are a function of differences among languages, or of certain grammatical subsystems within them, e.g. in English, discourse markers are notoriously polyfunctional. Alternatively, significant differences in the poly-

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functionality posited may be a function of differences in linguistic approach, for example whether the prime focus is on an individual expression (so, or Japanese -ni) or on the larger discourse contexts in which it occurs. In the first case, the expression is likely to appear polyfunctional, in the second, it is the discourse functions that may appear to be disparate, while the individual expression is thought to be underdetermined and accommodated to the disparate functions. 2.5.

Strategic interaction

As indicated in section 2.2, the concept of invited inferencing is based on neoGricean pragmatics, which focuses on cognition, especially information and belief. While neo-Gricean maxims can go a long way to account for semanticization of implicatures in grammaticalization (and semantic change in general), they do not go far enough in accounting for the pragmatics of examples like (3b) above. Appeal needs to be made in addition to argumentation and negotiation of viewpoints, specifically of “dialogicity” (see Schwenter 2000, drawing on e.g. Roulet 1984; Ducrot 1996). A dialogic perspective is one that entertains and articulates alternative, often contrasting, even incompatible, points of view. Waltereit and Detges propose that “different types of metatextual meaning arise in diachrony” (2007: 78, italics original) as the result of the routinization of different interactional strategies. While “argumentational moves negotiating common ground (‘What do I believe that you believe concerning the felicity of my speech act?’)” give rise to modal particles like French bien, cognate discourse markers like Spanish bien, used as a marker of disagreement, “arise in contexts where speakers negotiate their further verbal interaction (‘What are we going to do next?’)” (Waltereit and Detges 2007: 78). Detges (2006) proposes a particularly strong interactional approach to grammaticalization when he suggests that the rise of obligatory pronominal subjects in French was the result of self-selection in turn-taking. Old French was a null anaphor language, i.e. subject was optional, and the syntax was SOV. During Middle French subject-marking became obligatory. Detges proposes two conditions for the change. First, many of the turns in which the pronoun is used were originally contrastive (i.e. dialogic in the sense above), and, by hypothesis, stressed and emphatic. They often occur in the context of directive and commissive speech acts such as commander ‘command’, jugier ‘judge’, plevier ‘promise’. Second, overuse led to devaluation, de-stressing and eventually obligatorification of the pronouns. This change is associated with changes in the “typological shape” of French, and the shift to SVO order. For the early examples, Detges refers to highlighting in the texts of “the speaker’s responsibility for what is said” (Detges 2006: 88), as in (4). Example (4) is excerpted from a longer passage, in which Conon de Béthune is spokesman for the barons and addresses their complaint to the emperor of Constantinople in a challenging way; the pronouns are hypothesized to be stressed:

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(4) “Sire, nos somes venu a toi de par les barons de Sire, we are come to you on behalf-of the barons of l’ost … Et sache tu que il te reprovent le grant the:army … And know you that they to:you represent the great servise qu il t’ont fait, con la gent sevent.“ service that they to:you-have rendered, as the people know. ‘“Sir, we have come to you on behalf of the barons of the army. Know that they remind you of the great service that they have rendered you, as is apparent to everyone”.’ (1203–7 Villehardouin, Conquête de Constantinople § 213; Detges 2006: 91) The contexts which enable the change here are not pragmatically ambiguous, but pragmatically dialogic. The context for the onset of grammaticalization that Detges identifies is the frequent, therefore pragmatically devalued and phonologically destressed, use of the pronouns. Another change that has been noted to arise in contesting, argumentative dialogue is that of the German modal particle ruhig ‘calmly’ > ‘just/simply’. Diewald (forthcoming) shows that it first occurs in the eighteenth century in morphological imperatives in face-to-face dialogue, where it implies ‘contrary to what you may think’. Kuteva (2001) has discussed the development of the “avertive” (‘nearly realized’), counter-factual use of the past volitional verb for ‘want’ in Bulgarian, where ‘want’ comes to mean ‘nearly’, as in (5), an example from Old Bulgarian: (5) xoteˇaxa˘ padn˛oti want.1 SG .IMPRF fall.INF ‘I nearly fell’ (Kuteva 2001: 142, citing Zlatanova 1986: 121) She suggests the avertive use may have arisen as a mismatch between speaker and hearer discourse-world knowledge. This interpretation of the change assumes innovation by an individual, ambiguity and repetition (Kuteva 2001: 166). Evidence from textual data is needed to confirm the hypothesis. What is important about Kuteva’s hypothesis is that meaning is not always shared by interlocutors. The effect this may have on grammaticalization needs to be taken into consideration. The identification of different discourse strategies in the rise of different types of grammaticalization is a promising new area of research at the intersection of historical pragmatics and grammaticalization. 2.6.

Stance and grammaticalization

Among pragmatic effects of context are various kinds of stance (for some major kinds of grammatical devices used in English to express stance, and changes in stance marking patterns, see Biber 2004). The stance that has been studied most is

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subjectivity. This is a synchronic notion and has to do with the speaker’s attitude toward what is said. Subjectivity is always ambient in speech, but attention may be drawn to it by the use of evaluative expressions such as mere, brilliant, I guess. Over time, relatively neutral expressions may come to be associated with subjective stances: this is subjectification (e.g. mere ‘no more than specified’, as in mere nonsense originally meant ‘undiluted’ as in mere wine; pure is undergoing a similar shift). Like many other concepts discussed in this chapter, subjectification has been construed in different ways (see Brisard 2006; López-Couso, this volume). In one tradition, associated with Langacker (1990, 1999 and elsewhere), subjectification pertains to changes in construal of vantage-point. In recent work, Langacker has conceived of subjectification as a “kind of ‘semantic bleaching’ or ‘fading away’” of objectively construed, “on-stage” meaning. This leaves behind “off-stage” subjectivity that “was actually there, immanent in the latter [objective construalECT], (i.e. inherent in its conception)” (Langacker 2006: 21, bold original). By contrast, in the other tradition, associated with Traugott (Traugott 1982 where it was called “expressiveness”; Traugott and Dasher 2002; and elsewhere) subjectification pertains to change in the conceptual content of an expression, and the recruitment of meaning to encode and regulate attitudes and beliefs. The assumption is that in negotiating meaning the speaker not only chooses what to say, but in doing so also expresses a subjective point of view. If this point of view becomes associated with an expression, and is used by others in similar ways, the result may be the reanalysis of an expression. Subjectification is closely associated with grammaticalization because grammaticalization is, at least in part, the development of relational, functional expressions, and speakers select expressions of relationships and functions such as those in example (6) (Traugott 2010): (6) a. who does what to whom (case) b. how the situation is related to speech time (deictic tense) or to the temporality of a reference point other than speech time (relative tense) c. whether the situation is perspectivized as continuing and open-ended or not (aspect) d. whether the situation is relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modality, mood) e. whether entities referred to are construed as same or different (pronouns, indexicals) f. information structure (topic, focus) g. how utterances are connected to each other (connectives, discourse markers) Just as subjectivity is ambient in interaction, so is intersubjectivity, the recognition of the addressee’s needs in the interactive situation. Being conceptualized as metonymic to speaker-hearer interaction, subjectivity can shade into intersubjectivity. Sometimes the latter becomes newly encoded, in which case intersubjectification

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occurs. This is clearest in cases of addressee honorification as in Japanese (Traugott and Dasher 2002: chapter 5), but also occurs in some uses of discourse markers, e.g. hedges like well (Jucker 1997) and French enfin ‘well’ (Beeching 2007). It should be noted that while Langacker (2006) is concerned with intersubjectivity, intersubjectification is not readily incorporated in his view of bleaching of on-stage meaning (see Nevala on politeness, this volume). Subjectification has often been associated with syntactic changes such as raising (e.g. the extension of be going to to inanimate or “dummy” subjects, as in It’s going to rain) (see Langacker 1990, 1999), or the development of tense, aspect and modality (Traugott 1989; Langacker 1990). Together with intersubjectification it has also been associated with the development of pragmatic markers. While raising and auxiliation are standard cases of increased dependency, the development of pragmatic markers is not (see section 3.1 below). Furthermore, like most other factors interacting with grammaticalization discussed here, subjectification and intersubjectification are not limited to it. Subjectification also occurs in semantic change, e.g. silly < ‘blessed, innocent’ (cf. German selig ‘blessed’). Intersubjectification can be seen to operate in the development of taboo meanings of words, e.g. bathroom for any toilet, including one without a bath. A further methodological point is that (inter)subjectification leads to polysemies; therefore older, less (inter)subjectified meanings can, and typically do, coexist with more (inter)subjectified ones, as in the case of the modals in English. Recently there has been work on perspectivization, usually subjectification, but also intersubjectification, of already grammatical material. An interesting case of perspectivization is discussed by Rhee (2003), who points out that in Korean verbs of eating, mekta and most especially chemekta, have been grammaticalized as auxiliaries of achievement (telic aspect). In addition, they express the speaker’s assessment that the event is excessive, crude, or contemptible, as in example (7): (7) caysan-ul nalli-e.mek-ess-ta fortune-ACC fly-CONTEMPT- PST- DEC ‘(He) lost his fortune. (How stupid he is!)’ (Rhee 2003: 46) Here the subjectivity encoded appears to be cultural: “Koreans view eating as an egoistic, thus, undesirable, activity” (Rhee 2003: 48). Another interesting site is subjectification of case markers. In seventh- and eighth-century Japanese, the case marker -ni indicated static locations or (metonymically) the people in them (such people usually had an authoritative position, like the emperor). Host-class expansion to people in general occurred in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, -ni marked NPs (“dative subjects”) came to be used in first-person narratives to indicate a shift from reporter to experiencer role (Sadler 2007). One question that arises with examples like this is whether they demonstrate (inter)subjectification alone or (inter)subjectification correlated with increased grammaticalization. To the extent that changes in collocations with host-classes or

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(morpho)syntactic distribution occur, some degree of further grammaticalization of already grammatical material may be posited. However, if such correlations are absent, the collocations are at best potential contexts for further grammaticalization. Another concept related to perspectivization that is of considerable interest is “semantic prosody” or “harmony” (e.g. Stubbs 1995). Examples are collocations of expressions such as cause with negatively oriented hosts such as accident (?success), or redound to with positively oriented ones like credit (?detriment). More complex is the association over time of some expressions with negative polarity and also with positive or negatively oriented hosts, e.g. a shred of is strongly (but not obligatorily) associated with morphologically negative and with lexically positive expressions (honor, truth are preferred, while falsehood is dispreferred).

3.

Some domains of grammaticalization in which pragmatic factors are currently under discussion

In this section I outline a few of the main domains of grammaticalization in which research on pragmatic factors currently plays an especially significant role, and which are proving of particular interest for cross-linguistic work. I start with pragmatic markers, which have received most attention and are the most controversial with respect to grammaticalization. 3.1.

Pragmatic markers

Here I use “pragmatic marker” as a cover term for a number of different kinds of expressions of stance to text (discourse markers) and addressees (e.g. hedges), (see Fraser 1996). Brinton’s (1996) ground-breaking historical work on pragmatic markers, and more recently on comment clauses (Brinton 2008), draws attention to the fact that many show evidence of changes typical of grammaticalization, such as decategorialization (loss of morphological and syntactic characteristics of their sources), fixing and routinization, polyfunctionality, and (inter)subjectification. Many derive, not surprisingly, from verbs of saying or thinking, or from expressions involving paths or ends (anyway, French enfin < ‘in the end’). Among less obvious sources are pronouns. These include Old English hwæt ‘lo, listen up!’ (Brinton 1996); Finnish hAn ‘I wonder, as you know, after all’ < the logophoric third-person singular hän (Laitinen 2004); Japanese evidential no ‘I assure you’ < nominalizer < genitive pronominal (Yap, Matthews, and Horie 2004). Despite the similarities to grammaticalization, there are differences. Most especially, pragmatic markers tend to become less fixed syntactically than the expressions from which they derive (an exception is Old English hwæt, which is sentence-initial only, as opposed to the interrogative pronoun from which it presumably derives; Brinton 1996: 266); many can occur in a separate tone group from the proposition

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they comment on. Furthermore, despite the commonalities of some sources mentioned above, pragmatic markers tend to be derived from a more disparate set of sources than most grammatical items (see also Brinton, this volume). Because of the lack of syntactic fixedness of pragmatic markers and especially because of their pragmatic scope over discourse segments and their tendency to be disjuncts prosodically, Erman and Kotsinas (1993) and Aijmer (1996) argued that the change involved is not grammaticalization but “pragmaticalization”. This is a position shared by those who construe grammaticalization as increased dependency and reduction (e.g. Hansen 2008; Waltereit 2006), or regard pragmatic markers as outside of, or on a different level from, core grammar (e.g. Wischer 2000; Company 2006). Waltereit has suggested that discourse markers like Italian guarda ‘look!’, where there is nothing to look at, or diciamo ‘let us say’ when the interlocutor is not expected to speak, are instances of pragmaticalization. He proposes that the interactional strategy mentioned above (see section 2.5), “What are we going to do next?”, along with the other, structural criteria, can be used to distinguish pragmaticalization from grammaticalization. However, this distinction does not seem to hold if turn-taking is considered to be the discourse context in which the grammaticalization of pronoun into subject takes place, since this is a case that has all the hallmarks of “traditional” grammaticalization as proposed in Lehmann (1995), and this same interactional strategy is presumably used in turntaking. While not invoking pragmaticalization, Company (2006) takes a somewhat similar, but stronger, position that developments in Mexican Spanish of pragmatic markers like Dale! ‘not again!’ (from da ‘give’ + le clitic ‘it’), ¡A poco ‘Really!’ (from a ‘to’ + poco ‘few/little’) show that subjectification to the discourse-pragmatic level is correlated with loss of syntactic weight: “it is possible to say that structural weight is inversely proportional to pragmatic subjective weight” (Company 2006: 381). As much as two decades ago, Fraser stated that discourse markers, which he defined quite narrowly as specifying the relationship between what follows and the prior discourse, are “part of the grammar of a language” (Fraser 1988: 32). Those who adopt an extended view of grammaticalization embrace discourse markers, despite the fact that they do not fit some “traditional” criteria (e.g. Diewald forthcoming). In various writings, Diewald points out that there is a continuum in German from subjectified and pragmaticalized markers of modality such as epistemic auxiliaries (e.g. müssen ‘must’) to modal particles (e.g. aber ‘indicator of adversative stance’, ja ‘indicator of positive stance’), which are syntactically restricted to the “middle field” after the finite verb, and ultimately to pragmatic markers, which are syntactically disjuncts. If one were to exclude pragmatic markers from grammaticalization, the commonalities in the development of the range of modal expressions would be lost. Studies of the development of pragmatic markers from the perspective of historical pragmatics and grammaticalization or pragmaticalization in a number of

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different languages include Hansen and Rossari (2005) and Onodera and Suzuki (2007). The former is primarily about the development of discourse markers in European languages, the latter primarily about their development in Japanese. In many instances the history of Japanese is similar to that of the European languages: there have been shifts from i) contentful expression > connective > attitudinal marker, ii) neutral > subjective > intersubjective, and iii) position within the sentence/clause to its margin. Examples include: mono ‘thing, people’ > conditional (subjective, sentence internal) > marker of defensiveness or closeness to interlocutor (intersubjective, sentence-final); tokoro-de ‘place + locative’ > ‘because’ (subjective, sentence-internal) > ‘by the way’ (intersubjective, initial) (Shinzato 2007). In many Tibeto-Burman and East Asian languages, among them Japanese, discourse marker functions arise from non-lexical material, such as nominalizers (Yap, Matthews, and Horie 2004; Horie 2008). In Onodera (2004) and elsewhere, Onodera explores the hypothesis that discourse markers at the right margin are subjective in Japanese; when they come to be used intersubjectively, they may be moved to the left margin, the main locus of interjections and other intersubjective expressions in Japanese. It is widely recognized that the use of some kind of pragmatic marker is virtually obligatory in Japanese speech. Recent study of pragmatic markers in a variety of languages has shown that the same situation holds for most languages; absence of such markers signals non-interactive stances or is restricted by turn-taking conventions. Such observations have led Diewald (forthcoming) to propose that, in addition to the obligatoriness Lehmann (1995) identified as a characteristic of affixal grammatical markers, there is communicative obligatoriness: speakers must select an expression from a set of appropriate markers to convey their communicative intentions (this hypothesis also covers selection of voice and other clausal options). Contrastive studies of the development of pragmatic markers in cognate languages are proving particularly valuable in assessing i) the kinds of polyfunctionality that are favored in particular languages, ii) the directionality of the changes in terms of both semantic/pragmatic meaning and of syntactic position, iii) the degree to which subjectification and intersubjectification occur, iv) the degree to which there is a continuum from concrete to procedural meaning, v) the nature of the sub-systems of pragmatic markers that develop in language, and vi) the extent to which their use is governed by genre (e.g. Simon-Vandenbergen and Degand 2008). 3.2.

Scalar expressions

When an expression acquires scalar meaning, alternatives are invoked. These may be quantificational (e.g. very, mere(ly), pretty) or they may serve a focusing function (e.g. even, only, Mandarin Chinese lian ‘even’). The associated syntax is more

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restricted than for the source expression, and the scalar meaning is (almost) invariably more abstract than the source meaning: very < ‘true’ (< French verrai ‘true’); mere(ly) < ‘pure(ly)’; pretty < ‘crafty’; even < ‘having a horizontal surface’; only < ‘one-like’ (adverbs with zero derivation go back to adjectives marked with -e, which was lost in Middle English owing to phonological attrition); Mandarin Chinese lian < ‘including’ < ‘connect/unite’ (Xing 2004). 3.2.1.

Grammaticalization of post-determiners

Sparked by Adamson’s (2000) paper on the subjectification and leftward movement within the noun phrase of value adjectives like lovely, little, very, and the split of the last from the class of adjectives, there has been interest in determining when grammaticalization of an adjective to an adverb has occurred. The developments serve as a prime example of gradual, step-by-step change in abstractness and syntactic differentiation. They are also a prime example of the role of collocations (with noun types and types of following adjectives) as well as of subjectification in the process. Different adverbial expressions with zero affix have different histories: very and pure have been used adverbially since the fourteenth century, pretty since the fifteenth. Pure is considered primarily Scottish or vernacular, as in It’s pure easy. Vandewinkel and Davidse (2008), discussing pure, distinguish i) modifier use, e.g. pure unbleached cotton, which is equivalent to ‘cotton which is unbleached and pure’, ii) emphasizer use, e.g. pure paranoid fantasy, where pure modifies only the following adjective and can alternate with purely, and iii) submodifier use, e.g. He’s pure good, where pure modifies a predicate adjective and can alternate with purely (see also Nevalainen and Rissanen 2002 on pretty, in contrast with fairly). Other adjectives with similar histories include adjectives of difference which develop into quantifiers and markers of distributivity, such as several (‘many’ < ‘separate’), different ‘not same instance of’ < ‘index of degree of likeness between two entities’ (Breban 2008). A partially similar kind of semantic development has been identified in Japanese, where akiraka has, in the context of different affixes, undergone shifts from ‘bright’ > ‘understandable’ > ‘obviously’, somewhat like clear in English, but with greater morphosyntactic differentiation (Shindo 2008). 3.3.

Information structure

Central concepts for this section are identifiability and activation of referents, especially as they pertain to topic and focus. A distinction is made between information that is discourse-old or discourse-new (has or has not been referred to), and hearer-old or hearer-new (is assumed known to the hearer or not) (Prince 1992). Depending on the context, The President in The President campaigned in South Carolina today can be assumed to be hearer-old (known, iden-

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tifiable information), even though he has not been mentioned before. Ward and Birner (2004) and Gundel and Fretheim (2004) provide useful summaries of the issues. In recent work on grammaticalization, information structure has been considered as a context for change, as the structure undergoing change, and as the source of further developments. I discuss each of these in turn. 3.3.1.

Information structure as the context for grammaticalization

The well-known phenomenon known as the Jespersen Cycle has recently been revisited from the perspective of information structure. In the “Cycle” a negation marker comes to be strengthened by another marker, and eventually that second marker comes to be the sole marker of negation (e.g. French ne > ne pas > pas). In such examples the contentful small measure noun, e.g. pas ‘path’ loses its literal content and gains the more abstract sense of negation (presumably by metonymy from ne). Many studies of “non-canonical negation” of this type appeal to emphasis, e.g. recently Eckardt (2006). Eckardt notes that emphasis evokes alternatives, i.e. a scale, and hypothesizes that the small measure phrases associated with marked negation in French (mie ‘crumb’, goutte ‘drop’, point ‘point’, etc.) were negative polarity items: that is, like any, ever, they occurred in negative, conditional, interrogative, etc. contexts. By contrast, drawing on Catalan, Italian and ongoing changes in Brazilian Portuguese, Schwenter (2006) shows that the Cycle is at different stages of grammaticalization in these languages, and proposes that the context for the changes is information structure, specifically the proposition must be discourse-old (not hearer-old) and salient in the discourse at the time of utterance. This proposal is supported by Hansen and Visconti’s (forthcoming) contrastive study of the discourse contexts in which Old French mie and its cognate mica in Old Italian came to be used as reinforcers of negation. 3.3.2.

Grammaticalization of information structure

Meillet [1912] (1958) is remembered primarily for his observation that lexical items may grammaticalize, and many regard this as prototypical grammaticalization. He did, however, also use the example of fixing of SVO word order in Romance languages. Whether word order change construed as a purely syntactic change is a case of grammaticalization or not has been the subject of much debate. This is partly because it is a kind of reanalysis that is not unidirectional, partly because the change does not have semantic correlates or lexical sources (for a summary of issues, see Hopper and Traugott 2003). However, from a discourse pragmatic perspective, in which specific types of information structure patterning are differentiated in more restricted contexts, the case for grammaticalization is far

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more compelling. Other areas in which non-lexical sources of grammaticalization have been investigated include the rise of definite articles from demonstratives (e.g. Diessel 2006), of indefinite articles from the numeral one (e.g. Hopper and Martin 1987) and of information structure markers. For languages that have topic or focus markers or constructions, the question is how they arise. Topic markers are of two kinds: i) those that mark an entity as what the predicate is about; if present in a language (e.g. Japanese unstressed wa), they are the “default”, or “unmarked” case; and ii) those that are contrastive; the “marked” case, e.g. in English clauses introduced by as far as (see Rickford et al. 1995 for discussion of the development of this marker out of a clausal construction, e.g. as far as NP BE concerned). Both kinds of topic marker signal that the referent is “given” or recoverable in the discourse, but contrastive topics pick out a specific alternative from a set that is already given (the construction is therefore scalar). Focus markers are also of two kinds: i) those that mark the presentation of “new” information (presentational or “information” focus), and ii) those that draw attention to new information, or introduce it in a contrastive way. Both mark the constituent as asserted or non-presupposed. Drawing on Lambrecht (1994), Lehmann (2008) discusses the syntactic or morphological, as opposed to prosodic, marking of focus often associated in European languages with a “cleft” construction, i.e. one in which there are two clauses, e.g. It was John who left. In other languages, focus may be marked by a morpheme, not a complex clause structure, but the term “cleft” or “cleft-like” may still be used (e.g. Yap and Matthews 2008). Lehmann points out that individual parts of clefts cannot be singled out in considering change. Information structure is relational and therefore the whole construction must be taken into consideration (2008: 212–213). Typically, contrastive clefts arise out of already grammatical material. This includes the pronominals + copula familiar from English, French and other European languages (see example (8)), or a nominalizer (sometimes + copula) in Asian languages (Yap and Matthews 2008). Over time, the two-part construction may be reduced and/or the stress pattern may be reduced. The cleft construction may then become the only way in which default presentational focus is expressed (the structure in (8b) is unmarked and virtually obligatory in colloquial French) (Dufter 2008; Lehmann 2008): (8) a. C’est les étudiants qui ont raison ‘It’s the students who are right’ (Lehmann 2008: 213) b. Y a le téléphone qui sonne! There has the telephone which rings ‘The telephone is ringing!’ (Lehmann 2008: 114 [Lambrecht 1994: 194])

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3.3.3.

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Markers of information structure as sources for further grammaticalization

Markers of information structure may themselves be grammaticalized. Topic markers are frequently syntacticized as subject markers (Shibatani 1991). Fujii (1991) discusses the extension in narrative of Old Japanese topic marker ha (modern wa) from “the micro function of indicating local importance” to the “macro function of staging”, understood as episode chunking (1991: 231). Some conditional markers are homonymous with contrastive topics, e.g. Turkish -sA and Tagalog kung, one of several factors that contributed to Haiman’s (1978) suggestion that conditionals are topics. However, it is not always possible to determine in which direction the change occurred, and frequently there are different affixes associated with topic, on the one hand, and the conditional, on the other (see Yap and Matthews 2008). As indicated in section 3.3.2, these authors demonstrate that cleft and stance meanings arise out of nominalizers in many East Asian languages, and that both are used for perspectivization of an event or proposition. They posit the development cleft > stance in some instances.

4.

Some topics for future investigation

The domains discussed in section 3 are only a small fraction of those that are under active consideration. Pragmatic factors in grammaticalization have come to be of major interest as cognitive processing, parsing and other aspects of the semantics/ pragmatics interface have come to be better understood, and as formal and psycholinguistic analyses have been developed. Using invited inferencing theory, Ritz (2007) looks to genre to suggest how present perfect may have come to be the marker of narrative past in Australian English (and similarly the passé composé in French). She suggests that a fine-grained analysis of the phases of eventualities can be used to show that the past-phase, resultant state of a standard English perfect (I have looked back) can, in a narrative context, be understood by the hearer to overlap with the following event. This type of work combining corpus research (see Kytö, this volume) with such factors as inferences, context and genre is characteristic of current directions in work on grammaticalization and pragmatics, as are quantitative studies of factors like these as they interface with structural changes (e.g. Diewald and Ferraresi 2008). At the frontier of this work is the search for evidence for the conditions under which particular changes may come about. Jäger and Rosenbach (2008) suggest that priming can be a factor. Another area of research that is gaining interest in grammaticalization is language contact and areal distribution of features (e.g. Heine and Kuteva 2005, 2006). In a primarily syntactic study, Prince (1998) argues that the pragmatics of Yiddish focus movement was borrowed into English, result-

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ing in “Yiddish-movement”, and concludes that the borrowing of semantic and pragmatic meaning is “entirely unexceptional” (1998: 360), whereas borrowing of syntax is rare. This is a hypothesis that deserves to be tested.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Kaoru Horie, Mika Shindo, Graeme Trousdale, Jacqueline Visconti, Foong Ha Yap and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors of fact or interpretation are, of course, my responsibility.

Abbreviations used in glosses “accusative”, DEC “declarative”, IMPRF “imperfect”, INF “infinitive”, PST “past”, SG “singular”.

ACC

Electronic Corpus Data Sources CEEC Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Oxford Text Archive,

LION: EEBO. Chadwyck Healey website, Early English Books Online,

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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1989 On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65: 31–55. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2003 Constructions in grammaticalization. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), 624–647. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2008 “All that he endeavoured to prove was …”: On the emergence of grammatical constructions in dialogic contexts. In: Robin Cooper and Ruth Kempson (eds.), Language in Flux: Dialogue Coordination, Language Variation, Change and Evolution, 143–177. (Communication, Mind and Language 1.) London: Kings College Publications. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2010 Revisiting subjectification and intersubjectification. In: Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization. (Topics in English Linguistics.) Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs Forthcoming a. Grammaticalization. In: Silvia Luraghi and Vit Bubenik (eds.) A Companion to Historical Linguistics. London: Continuum Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs Forthcoming b. The status of onset contexts in analysis of micro-changes. In: Merja Kytö (ed.), IAUPE Corpus Linguistics. (Studies in Practical Linguistics.) Amsterdam: Rodopi. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher 2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 97.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Bernd Heine (eds.) 1991 Approaches to Grammaticalization. (Typological Studies in Language 19 1/2.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Ekkehard König 1991 The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), vol. II: 189–218. Vandewinkel, Sigi, and Kristin Davidse 2008 The interlocking paths of development of emphasizer adjective pure. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 255–287. van Gelderen, Elly 2004 Grammaticalization as Economy. (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 71.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. von Fintel, Kai 1995 The formal semantics of grammaticalization. NELS 25: 175–189. Waltereit, Richard 2006 The rise of discourse markers in Italian: A specific type of language change. In: Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to Discourse Markers, 61–76. Oxford: Elsevier. Waltereit, Richard, and Ulrich Detges 2007 Different functions, different histories. Modal particles and discourse markers from a diachronic point of view. In: Maria Josep Cuenca (ed.), Contrastive

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Perspectives on Discourse Markers, 61–80. Special issue of Journal of Catalan Linguistics 6. Ward, Gregory, and Betty Birner 2004 Information structure and non-canonical syntax. In: Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), 153–174. Wischer, Ilse 2000 Grammaticalization versus lexicalization – ‘methinks’ there is some confusion. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (eds.), 355–370. Wischer, Ilse, and Gabriele Diewald (eds.) 2002 New Reflections on Grammaticalization. (Typological Studies in Language 49.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Xing, Janet Zhiqun 2004 Grammaticalization of the scalar focus particle lian in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 81–106. Yap, Foong Ha, and Stephen Matthews 2008 The development of nominalizers in East Asian and Tibeto-Burman languages. In: María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane (eds.), 289–308. Yap, Foong Ha, Stephen Matthews and Kaoru Horie 2004 From pronominalizer to pragmatic marker: Implications for unidirectionality from a cross-linguistic perspective. In: Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon (eds.), 137–168.

5.

Subjectification and intersubjectification1 María José López-Couso

1.

Introduction

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in topics related to the notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, in particular in the diachronic processes of subjectification and intersubjectification,2 especially (though not exclusively) in relation to grammaticalisation. In spite of the growing popularity of these topics and of the pervasiveness of (inter)subjectification phenomena within and across languages, such notions remain relatively vague and elusive, still lacking airtight definitions. The following sections look at different applications of these terms in the literature, paying special attention to the two most prominent approaches to (inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification, represented here mainly by the work of Elizabeth Closs Traugott (section 3) and Ronald W. Langacker (section 4), and offering illustrative case studies from various domains and languages that represent the state of the art in subjectification and intersubjectification. Other key issues considered in the chapter include the relation between (inter)subjectification and grammaticalisation, the directionality of the processes of subjectification and intersubjectification, and attempts to identify structural correlates of (inter)subjectification.

2.

The importance of the expression of self: Early discussions of (inter)subjectivity

Reference to the distinction between the so-called emotive or expressive function of language and its referential and conative functions is widespread (cf., among others, Bühler [1934] 1990; Russell 1940; Jakobson 1960; Halliday 1975; Lyons 1977). Bühler (1990), for instance, establishes the existence of three distinct semantic functions of language: the representational function (Darstellung), related to objects and states of affairs; the expressive function (Ausdruck), associated with the sender “whose inner states it expresses” (1990: 35); and the appealing function (Appell), centred on the receiver “whose inner or outer behaviour it directs” (1990: 35). In spite of the strong tradition of considering the representational, referential or propositional function as the main function of language, it has now become widely recognised that “language and communication are much more than the exchange of formal propositional material for purposes of conveying information” (Scheibman 2002: 9). Rather than merely transferring propositional content, communication undoubtedly involves the expression of speaker stance, that is, of

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points of view, attitudes, feelings and evaluations relating to the proposition. As Ochs and Schieffelin (1989) note in their discussion of the wide variety of phonological, morphosyntactic and discourse features that languages may use to convey the “expression of affect”, […] beyond the function of communicating referential information, languages are responsive to the fundamental need of speakers to convey and assess feelings, moods, dispositions and attitudes. This need is as critical and as human as that of describing events. Interlocutors need to know not only what predication a speaker is making; they need to know as well the affective orientation the speaker is presenting with regard to that particular predication. (Ochs and Schieffelin 1989: 9)

Although (inter)subjectivity has received renewed attention over the last few decades as an essential component of language, interest in linguistic subjectivity is certainly not new. One of the earliest mentions of the notion of subjectivity is found in Bréal’s seminal work Essai de Sémantique [1897] (2005), where he identifies a number of mechanisms of, and motivations for, semantic change, and devotes an entire chapter (chapter 25 “L’élément subjectif”) to the subjective component in language. He considers that subjectivity relates to the expression of the speaker’s feelings and is conveyed through devices such as grammatical mood in Greek, Latin and French, or the use of adverbs like peut-être ‘maybe’ and probablement ‘probably’ in French. In addition to Bréal’s influential work, it is perhaps Benveniste [1958] (1966) who provides the most wide-ranging early account of subjectivity as a synchronic notion. Through his discussion of a number of linguistic contexts where subjectivity is prominent, including tense, deixis and performative uses of verbs like promise (1966: 186), Benveniste acknowledges the pervasiveness of the subjective component in language: Il est marqué si profondément par l’expression de la subjectivité qu’on se demande si, autrement construit, il pourrait encore fonctionner et s’appeler langage. (1966: 261) [Language is marked so deeply by the expression of subjectivity that one might ask if it could still function and be called language if it were constructed otherwise.] C’est dans l’instance de discours où je désigne le locuteur que celui-ci s’enonce comme “sujet”. Il est donc vrai à la lettre que le fondement de la subjectivité est dans l’exercice de la langue. (1966: 262) [It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject’. And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.] Le langage est ainsi organisé qu’il permet à chaque locuteur de s’approprier la langue entière en se désignant comme je. (1966: 262, original emphasis) [Language is so organised that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself the whole language by designating himself as I.]

In addition to subjectivity, Benveniste also recognises the intersubjective dimension of language. In his view, the mere fact of communication entails both subjectivity and intersubjectivity, inasmuch as the communicative dyad is made of two

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members, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, which are seen as complementary terms (1966: 260), and communication is successful only if the speaker pays attention to the needs of his/her addressee(s) in the speech situation: […] discours […] est la langue en tant qu’assumée par l’homme qui parle, et dans la condition d’intersubjetivité, qui seule rend possible la communication linguistique. (1966: 266) [Discourse is language in so far as it is taken over by the man who is speaking and within the condition of intersubjectivity, which alone makes linguistic communication possible.]

John Lyons (1977, 1982, 1994) also pays considerable attention to the notion of subjectivity, in terms of both how, and to what degree, different languages express subjective meanings, and, in particular, to the interdependence of subjectivity and deixis.3 Emphasising the fact that language is much more than “an instrument for the expression of propositional thought” (1982: 103), and that “one cannot reduce the speaker’s expression of himself in his utterance to the assertion of a set of propositions” (1982: 104), he defines subjectivity as “the way in which natural languages, in their structure and their normal manner of operation, provide for the locutionary agent’s expression of himself and of his own attitudes and beliefs” (1982: 102). In other words, subjectivity concerns “a speaker’s imprint” or “the linguistic expression of self” (Finegan 1995: 1).

3.

The Traugottian view of (inter)subjectification

3.1.

From propositional to expressive

Building on the synchronic analyses of subjectivity proposed by Benveniste (1966) and Lyons (1977), Elizabeth Closs Traugott has, over the last three decades, developed a theory of semantic change grounded in the notion of subjectification, broadly understood as the semantic-pragmatic mechanism through which meanings shift from the objective description of the external situation to the expression of the speaker’s internal perspective or attitude towards what is said. In her by now classic 1982 work, and drawing on the distinction proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), Traugott distinguishes three different functional-semantic components of language at the synchronic level: the propositional, the textual and the expressive domains (1982: 247–248). Whereas the propositional component (“ideational” in Halliday and Hasan’s terms) has to do with the resources used for the description of the speech event, the textual domain involves those devices that convey cohesion-making meanings (e.g. connectives, topicalisers, complementisers, relativisers, discourse markers, etc.). Finally, the expressive component (“interpersonal” for Halliday and Hasan) comprises various phenomena of a subjective and intersubjective nature, which convey the speaker’s evaluation and attitudes toward the proposition (e.g. modal elements, vocatives, etc.).

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In her discussion of the semantic-pragmatic changes taking place in a range of grammaticalisation processes in English, Traugott (1982: 253–256) suggests that, over time, items originating in the propositional component develop polysemies in the two remaining domains. The paradigmatic example chosen to illustrate this unidirectional shift from more concrete to more abstract, from less to more personal kinds of meanings, is that of the development of English while from the Old English phrasal combination þa hwile þe ‘at the time that’, to a connective of temporal overlap ‘while’, and later to a marker of concessivity ‘although’. Although the label “subjectification” is not yet used by Traugott at this stage, the tendency towards expressive meanings seems to be roughly equivalent to her later definition of subjectification. This original hypothesis of a diachronic increase in expressiveness (or subjectivity) is refined by Traugott in her later work. In her 1989 paper on the development of epistemic meanings in English, she recognises that the semantic shifts identified in grammaticalisation processes are in fact not limited to grammaticalisation (cf. section 3.4 below), but rather belong to a set of major tendencies in semantic change that seem to hold for a wide range of phenomena, cross-linguistically. With examples drawn from shifts from less to more subjective in English in three domains (modal auxiliaries, assertive speech-act verbs and modal adverbs), she proposes the following three general tendencies or paths of semantic change: Tendency I: “Meanings based in the external described situation > meanings based in the internal (evaluative/perceptual/cognitive) described situation” (1989: 34). Shifts of this kind include pejoration, amelioration,4 and a number of metaphorical extensions from concrete to abstract domains. Tendency II: “Meanings based in the external or internal described situation > meanings based in the textual and metalinguistic situation” (1989: 35). This shift is shown in the development of connectives coding cohesion (textual), as well as that of mental-state verbs into speech-act verbs (metalinguistic) (cf. section 3.3 below). Tendency III: “Meanings tend to become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition” (1989: 35). Shifts from temporal to concessive connective, from movement verb to future marker, and from deontic to epistemic modal illustrate this tendency (cf. section 3.3 below), which later came to be known as subjectification. Traugott claims that a clear distinction should be made between tendencies I and II, on the one hand, and tendency III, on the other: while the shifts characteristic of the former tendencies can be described in terms of metaphorical transfer and mapping from one domain onto another, those illustrating tendency III are best accounted for in terms of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures or pragmatic

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inferences (cf. Geis and Zwicky 1971), “used in the speaker’s attempt to regulate communication with others” (Traugott 1989: 51). The changes taking place in such meaning shifts involve pragmatic strengthening of speaker perspective (Traugott 1995: 36, 49). According to Traugott and Dasher (2002), tendency III prevails over the other two, so that subjectification can be considered as “the major type of semantic change” (2002: 97). They also offer a somewhat more refined definition of subjectification: Subjectification is the semasiological process whereby SP[eakers]/W[riter]s come over time to develop meanings for L[exeme]s that encode or externalize their perspectives and attitudes as constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, rather than by the so-called “real-world” characteristics of the event or situation referred to. (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 30)

In the context of Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) “Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change”, the development of subjectified polysemies involves changes along a cline of the following kind: coded meaning > utterance-token meaning (invited inference) > utterance-type meaning (generalised invited inference) > new coded meaning (2002: 34–40). 3.2.

From subjectivity to intersubjectivity

The developments outlined in the previous section indicate that the direction of semantic change usually proceeds from non-subjective to subjective meaning (although see section 3.6 below). In addition, subjectified meanings may in turn be recruited to convey the speaker’s attention to the addressee. In Traugott’s view, therefore, expressions can be organised along a synchronic cline or continuum of (inter)subjectivity: non-/less subjective – subjective – intersubjective (cf. Traugott 2010: 34). Traugott’s notion of intersubjectivity relies heavily on Benveniste’s original concept (cf. section 2 above), and is characterised as the “explicit expression of the SP[eaker]/W[riter]’s attention to the ‘self’ of addressee/reader in both an epistemic sense (paying attention to their presumed attitudes to the content of what is said), and in a more social sense (paying attention to their ‘face’ or ‘image needs’ associated with social stance and identity” (Traugott 2003: 128). Intersubjectivity thus defined is strongly dependent on the roles of the speaker/writer and addressee/reader as interlocutors in the speech event, rather than on their roles as referents in the described situation. Expressions of speaker attention to addressee self-image include euphemisms (e.g. the Lord for ‘God’) and politeness markers (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987; Nevala, this volume). Languages with honorific systems, such as Japanese, where the speaker makes morphosyntactic choices in accordance with his/her perception of his/her relationship to the addressee, will obviously show intersubjectivity to a significantly greater extent than languages without such a system, like English (cf. section 3.3).

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The historical or diachronic counterpart of the synchronic cline described above implies the following (potential) developments:5 non-/less subjective > subjective > intersubjective (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 40; Traugott 2003: 134, 2010: 35). The assumption here is that intersubjectified polysemies of a given item or construction always arise later than subjectified ones. The change from subjective to intersubjective therefore involves a process of intersubjectification, defined by Traugott as the “development of meanings that encode speaker/writers’ attention to the cognitive stances and social identities of addressees” (2003: 124). As in the case of subjectification, intersubjectification entails the reanalysis as coded meanings of pragmatic meanings which arise in the context of communication.6 The intimate relation between the two related processes of subjectification and intersubjectification becomes evident in Traugott’s words: There cannot be intersubjectification without some degree of subjectification because it is [the] SP[eaker]/W[riter] who designs the utterance and who recruits the meaning for social deictic purposes. Like subjectification, it is part of a mechanism of recruiting meanings to express and regulate beliefs, attitudes, etc. Therefore intersubjectification can be considered to be an extension of subjectification rather than as a separate mechanism. (2003: 134)

A possible further step in this diachronic cline is suggested by Fitzmaurice (2004) in her analysis of the semasiological changes undergone by the discourse markers you know, you say and you see. She maintains that, over time, these forms move from intersubjectivity, i.e. their use to encode the speaker’s attention to the addressee, to interactiveness, i.e. their recruitment as interactive markers of the exchange, used merely to “keep things going on in a conversation” (Fitzmaurice 2004: 438) and to grab the attention of the interlocutor or the audience (2004: 439).7 It seems questionable, however, whether the proposed shift from intersubjective use to interactive function results in the development of a newly coded meaning, or, on the contrary, represents just a new pragmatic meaning of the markers in the relevant contexts. 3.3.

The ubiquity of (inter)subjectification

Characterised in the way described above, subjectification and intersubjectification appear to be rather pervasive processes of semantic change, both intra-linguistically and cross-linguistically. In Traugott’s words: The reason for the ubiquity of subjectification presumably lies in the speaker’s attempts to communicate the relevance of what is said to the communicative event, which includes hearers as well as speakers, but which ultimately depends for its occurrence on the speaker. (Traugott 1995: 46)

It seems, however, that although subjectivity and intersubjectivity represent inbuilt qualities of language use, since speaker-hearer interaction necessarily contains (to

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a greater or lesser extent) the perspective of the speaker as well as the recognition of the addressee’s needs, the expression of the self is more prominent in some languages than in others. Lyons (1982: 115) mentions the case of the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi, which shows a higher degree of subjectivity than English. (Inter)subjectivity is also a widespread phenomenon in Japanese (see below).8 Maynard suggests that “when speaking Japanese, one simply cannot avoid expressing one’s personal attitude toward the content of information and toward the addressee” (1993: 4). It is not surprising, therefore, that the study of (inter)subjectivity has played such a crucial role in Japanese linguistics for several decades now. As Finegan (1995: 3) points out, languages also differ as to the means they use to express (inter)subjectivity. These range from specific morphological markers to prosodic markers (intonation) and word order.9 A particularly interesting and rich domain for (inter)subjectification across languages concerns the development of items and constructions expressing epistemic modality (cf. Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994). Illustrative cases include the rise of epistemic senses from root or deontic meanings in modal verbs such as English will, from its original meaning of volition to the sense of likelihood (Traugott 1989; Sweetser 1990: 49–75), must, originally expressing ability, permission and obligation (Traugott 1989; Goossens 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 120–137) and ought to, from its early sense of possession ‘owe’ to deontic and later epistemic readings (Myhill 1997; Nordlinger and Traugott 1997; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 137–143); the Spanish combination puede que ‘it may be that’ (RodríguezEspiñeira and López-Meirama 2008); and Chinese de, which evolved from a lexical verb meaning ‘obtain’ in Pre-Archaic Chinese to a modal expressing ability or permission in the Late Archaic Chinese period, and finally to a modal conveying epistemic possibility (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 144–147). Subjectification is also relevant to the development of the so-called emerging English modals have to / hafta and want to / wanna (Krug 2000: chapters 3 and 4). Subjectification and intersubjectification in the epistemic domain are also observable in the rise of performative uses of locutionary verbs such as promise in English, as in I promise to go (cf. Traugott 1996; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 204–210), which undergoes a change from non-subjective (content) meaning to subjective (content-procedural) meaning along the following lines: event verb > speech-act verb > performative (discourse deictic) verb (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 203). Similar uses are attested for the counterpart of promise in other languages, e.g. Dutch beloven (Verhagen 1995) and Spanish prometer (Cornillie 2004, 2005), as well as for hatan ‘promise’ and its derivatives (gehatan, behatan) in Early English (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 211–214). In Late Middle English times, promise underwent a further development to a formulaic epistemic parenthetical I promise you, thus also evincing intersubjectification: the parenthetical construction expresses not only the speaker’s degree of certainty about the utterance (subjectivity), but also the speaker’s recognition that the addressee may have

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doubts about the veracity of the message (on epistemic parentheticals, see below). Other instances of the development of performative uses discussed in Traugott and Dasher (2002: 214–219) include Chinese bao (from its original physical meaning ‘defend’ to speech act-meaning and later to performative function) and Japanese aisatu (originally referring to physical action, over time it underwent increased subjectification and intersubjectification, finally becoming a declarative performative to name a formal greeting). (Inter)subjectification also applies in the development of epistemic adverbs, such as probably, possibly and apparently (cf. Hanson 1987; Traugott 1989: 46–47), and in the shift from manner adverbs to stance adverbs. (Inter)subjectification processes are also particularly relevant to the histories of pragmatic markers,10 given that such forms indicate the speaker’s stance towards the discourse (subjectivity) and/or towards the addressee (intersubjectivity). Prototypical examples include the development of English indeed (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 159–165), actually (Powell 1992; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 169–170), in fact (Schwenter and Traugott 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 165–169) and Old English soþlice ‘truly, really’ and witodlice ‘certainly’ (Lenker 2000), as well as forsoothe and truly (Lenker 2007), which came to function as highlighters and markers of discourse discontinuity. All these forms follow similar courses of development, starting as clause-internal adverbials, then coming to be used as sentence adverbials with epistemic force, and finally developing discourse-marking functions in the speech-act domain. By way of illustration, consider the history of in fact, summarised in example (1a–c) (from Traugott and Dasher 2002: 166–168).11 The seventeenth-century instance in (1a) shows the original meaning of in fact: ‘in practice, in reality’. From this sense the combination evolved into an adversative adverbial conveying the idea of contrast to a prior proposition (1b). Finally, it became a discourse marker (1c), expressing the speaker’s attitude at the discourse level and signalling that what follows is a stronger assertion than what precedes. (1) a. But it is evident in fact and experience that there is no such universal Judge, appointed by God over the whole World, to decide all cases of temporal Right (1671 Tillotson, p. 445) b. That the Turkey Merchants do Ship out much Cloth, I deny not; but as true it is, that they have Shipt out more Yearly since the great encrease of the East-India Trade, and since themselves have made this Complaint, than they did in former Years. So that in Fact it doth not follow that the encrease of the East-India Trade, and particularly of their Importation of Silk, doth hinder or diminish the Exportation of Cloth to Turkey, but rather the contrary. (1681 ecb 1. 33 [Lampeter Corpus]) c. I should not have used the expression. In fact, it does not concern you – it concerns only myself (1816 Austen, Emma, vol. III, chapter 10, p. 393)

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A classic example of a discourse marker that has developed intersubjective meanings over time is the Present-day English hedge well. Jucker (1997) traces its origin to an Old English epistemic adverbial conveying the meaning ‘certainly, definitely’, as in example (2a), most likely derived from a manner adverb meaning ‘in good manner’ through subjectification in pre-Old English times. In the course of the Middle English period, well begins to occur in a discourse marker function, as a “frame-maker and text-sequencing device” (Jucker 1997: 99), used in represented discourse at the beginning of a conversation turn and serving an interpersonal function (meaning ‘if this is so, OK then’), as shown in (2b). (2) a. Cwæð he:Wel þæt swa mæ, forþon hi englelice ansyne habbað said he well that so may because they angelic faces have ‘He said: “Well may that be so, since they have the faces of angels”.’ (Bede, Ecclesiastical History ii.i (Schipper); from Jucker 1997: 100) b. “Ye sey welle,” sayde the kynge, “Aske what ye woll and ye shall have hit and hit lye in my power to gyff hit.” “Well,” seyde thys lady, “than I aske the hede of thys knyght that hath wonne the swerde …” ‘“You say well,” said the king. “Ask what you will and you shall have it if it lies within my power to give it.” “Well,” said the lady, “then I ask the head of the knight who has won the sword.”’ (Malory, Morte d’Arthur; from Jucker 1997: 99) Comparable instances of the relevance of subjectification and intersubjectification to developments in the domain of pragmatic markers can be found in a wide range of languages. Examples include the following: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

The uses of be’emet ‘really, actually, indeed’ (literally ‘in truth’) in contemporary spoken Hebrew, which functions mainly in the interpersonal domain, as a discourse marker, to ratify a previous stance, or to latch onto a new topic, rather than as an adverb with a referential function (Maschler and Estlein 2008). The development of the Spanish discourse particles bien ‘well’ (Detges and Waltereit 2007) and de hecho (analogous to English in fact; Fanego 2010). The latter undergoes a shift from manner adverbial to epistemic adverbial with confirmatory function, and finally, in the course of the seventeenth century, to discourse marker signalling additivity and elaborating a previous utterance. The development of (inter)subjective meanings of various discourse markers in Mexican Spanish, such as dale (Company 2006a, 2006b; cf. section 6 below), which indicates annoyance with obstinacy; tate and ándale (Company 2004: 11–14, 2006a: 386–388, 2006b, 2008); híjole and órale (Company 2004: 14–15); the exclamative marker poco (A poco), which conveys the speaker’s surprise or admiration regarding the hearer’s utter-

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ance (Company 2006a: 388–389); and the markers dizque, sepa and pues (Company 2004: 15–20). (iv) The German modal particles, such as ja, doch, eben, etc. (cf., among others, Molnár 2002, who examines a corpus of Early New High German texts and describes the changes undergone by these particles in terms of subjectification; Diewald 2006; Diewald and Ferraresi 2008). (v) The history of Portuguese pois (Lima 2002), which evolved from preposition, adverb and conjunction in Old Portuguese to discourse marker, then to affirmation marker (affirmative answer to yes/no questions, alternative to sim ‘yes’), and later to phatic marker with a metacommunicative function, “by which a speaker signals attention to the partner’s utterance, especially when this utterance constitutes a long stretch of discourse, causing the speaker to utter the phatic marker at intervals” (Lima 2002: 363). In the latter function, pois is sometimes reduced to pos in informal speech. (vi) The acquisition of discourse-marking functions of French enfin ‘well’ from its original meaning ‘in the end’ (Beeching 2007). (vii) Japanese markers such as demo and dakedo, which developed discourse functions, like floor-claiming, topic shifting and opening a conversation, from their original function as intra-sentential clause-combining devices (Onodera 1995, 2000, 2004: chapters 3 and 4); the interjection na (and variants), which underwent a change from less to more interpersonal meanings, from ‘exclamation’ to addressee-oriented ‘summons’, tag-like element, and involvement marker (Onodera 2000, 2004: chapters 5 and 6, 2007);12 ga, from concessive subordinator to main clause marker (Matsumoto 1988); wake, from a noun meaning ‘reason’ to a pragmatic particle meaning ‘no wonder’ or ‘you see’ with a clear intersubjective function (Suzuki 1998); tte, which in its development from quotative to utterance-final pragmatic particle instantiates both subjectification and intersubjectification (Suzuki 2007); and sate, which also shows increasing degree of speaker’s perspective as well as addressee’s involvement in its historical development: from deictic manner adverb ‘thus’ in Old Japanese to discourse marker connective ‘then’, to scene-shifter signalling a new topic of discussion, to exclamatory lexeme with a hedging function, and finally to an epistolary formula used at the beginning of a letter after the introductory formal greeting in order to introduce the topic of the letter (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 178–187). (viii) The increase of subjective meaning of the adverbial connectives yinwei ‘because’, suoyi ‘so’ and ranhou ‘then’ in Mandarin Chinese on their way to becoming discourse particles associated with the speaker’s attitude toward discourse flow, including resumption of previous topics, initiation of new topics, afterthoughts, etc. (Wang and Huang 2006).

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(Inter)subjectification also applies in the development of focus modifiers, such as English only (Brinton 1998; cf. also König 1991), even (König 1991; Traugott 2006), barely (Traugott 2006) and Italian perfino and addirittura (Visconti 2005), of quotatives (cf. the recent shift of like from approximative to focuser and finally to discourse marker introducing reported speech and thought discussed in Romaine and Lange 1991), of intensifiers, such as lovely (Adamson 2000), downright (Méndez-Naya 2008) and pure (Vandewinkel and Davidse 2008), and of epistemic parentheticals of the type I know, I think, I guess, you know, etc. (cf. Thompson and Mulac 1991; Aijmer 1996; Brinton 2007a, 2007b, 2008). Additional instances of the development of a main verb construction into a discourse marker where (inter)subjectification is at work can be found in the evolution of let’s see and let alone (Traugott 1995: 37–38), which have lost verbal properties and acquired a metalinguistic function in the recent history of English, and in the development of imperative say before questions to a parenthetical disjunct in the Early Modern English period, which “undergoes a change from a request by the speaker to the hearer for information to a subjective marker of speaker impatience or an intersubjective attention-getter” (Brinton 2007b: 58). Particularly interesting instances of the rise of (inter)subjective meanings in pragmatic markers with a clausal origin concern the development of the courtesy markers pray (from I pray you), prithee (from I pray thee) (Akimoto 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 252–255) and please (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 255–258; Brinton 2007b; TiekenBoon van Ostade and Faya-Cerqueiro 2007), which convey social deictic meaning and express the speaker’s attention to the addressee’s needs. Additional examples of the development of referent honorific meanings are the second-person personal pronoun T-V contrast found in many contemporary European languages such as Spanish, French and German, and in the Late Middle and Early Modern English use of the second-person plural pronouns ye/you for polite address to a single person (cf., among others, Brown and Gilman 1960). Social deictics marking relative social status and (non-)intimacy play a particularly prominent role in cultures such as Japanese and Korean, which are greatly conscious of the addressee and of his/her status. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Japanese language (especially spoken Japanese), being so highly (inter)subjective, provides a wide range of examples of honorification processes involving a shift from conceptual meaning to procedural meaning and increasing (inter)subjectification (cf. Traugott and Dasher 2002: chapter 6). Thus, through subjectification, referent honorifics (both respectful and humiliative) are derived from non-honorific sources, such as verbs of motion and accomplishment of an action, among many others, in order to make explicit the speaker’s social position relative to the participants in the communicative event. Examples include the following (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 242–252):

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(i)

The development of kudasaru from a verb expressing directed motion (‘send down’) in Old Japanese to a honorific encoding the social status of the subject relative to the speaker in Late Middle Japanese (‘[respectful] give’). The shift of speech-act verb oFosu ‘command’ to an honorific meaning ‘[respectful] say’. The change of ukagau ‘peer, wait (for an opportunity)’ to ‘[humiliative] ask, enquire’.

(ii) (iii)

On the other hand, intersubjectification accompanies the development of addressee honorifics from earlier referent honorifics. Examples of such addressee honorifics, which index the relationship between the speaker and the addressee independently of their possible roles in the described event, include mairasu ‘[humiliative] give’ > ‘give [polite]’, moosu ‘[humiliative] say’ > ‘say [polite]’, and saburahu ‘[humiliative] be’ > ‘be [polite]’ (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 258–276). The processes of honorification just described are suggestive of the close interrelation between (inter)subjectivity and cultural and social norm, which has recently been explored by Onodera (2007) in her analysis of the meaning shifts undergone by the Japanese na elements as involvement markers (see above). Onodera describes the interplay of (inter)subjectivity and social norm, which makes speakers constantly choose intersubjective expressions according to their assessment of the relation with their interlocutors in accordance with sociocultural rules, in the following way: The speakers of languages embracing grammaticalized honorific systems choose a linguistic form out of alternative forms to realize his/her interpersonal strategy or to output the most appropriate form in the given communicative situation. The speaker makes this choice based on his/her (inter)subjective judgment, by consulting social norms. (Onodera 2007: 248)

Another prolific area for (inter)subjectification processes concerns clause connection. According to Traugott, “[h]istorically, virtually all grammatical markers of clause combining can be shown to have developed out of some earlier more ‘objective’ function” (1995: 39). In addition to the case of the development of English while, mentioned in section 3.1 above, from temporal connective to subordinator of more abstract meanings such as concession (Traugott 1982; Traugott and König 1991: 199–201), contrast, cause and addition (González-Cruz 2007), or its German cognate weil (Traugott and König 1991), examples of clause combining devices signalling speaker’s perspective on relationships between propositions include: (i)

The evolution of the Medieval Portuguese phrase em boa hora ‘in good hour’ into the Modern Portuguese concessive connective embora ‘although’ (Lima 1997).

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(ii)

The development of English since from temporal subordinator to causal and concessive marker (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994: 196–197).13 (iii) The evolution of the Spanish concessive connective a pesar de (que) ‘in spite of (that)’ from the Old Spanish combination preposition a ‘to’ + noun pesar ‘sorrow, regret’ + preposition de ‘of’ + human adnominal (Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter 2007). In the process, semantic change applies to the transformation of the notion of sorrow or regret deriving from the noun pesar to a broader, more abstract notion of opposition or obstacle first, and later to one of contradiction or incompatibility. (iv) The transformation of Portuguese pois, originally a temporal preposition, adverb and conjunction, into a causal subordinator (Lima 2002). (v) The rise of conditional and concessive subordinators from spatial postpositions in Newari (Genetti 1991). (vi) The evolution of Japanese -tewa into a marker of negative conditionality (Akatsuka 1997). (vii) The acquisition of conditional meaning of Spanish mientras ‘while’ from its original sense of simultaneity (Company 2008). (viii) The development of the Old English preposition (on)butan, meaning ‘except, outside of’, to the adversative conjunction meaning ‘on the contrary’ after a negative clause, and later (in Middle English) to a meaning similar to ‘yet’ (Nevalainen 1991). The review of subjectification and intersubjectification phenomena offered in this section is by no means exhaustive, but may provide the reader with some sense of the pervasive and ubiquitous nature of the two processes in semantic change as well as of the wide variety of linguistic domains where subjectification and intersubjectification are observed, both intra- and cross-linguistically. The range of additional topic areas where the impact of (inter)subjectification can be clearly felt includes such diverse fields as expletives (see Gehweiler, this volume), features of word order (cf. inversions in English; Stein 1995) and auxiliation, as shown in the history of be going to (Traugott 1995: 34–36), in the grammaticalisation of the perfect in English (Carey 1995; Detges 2000) and in Spanish (Detges 2000) and in developments in the use of the progressive (Wright 1995; Kranich 2007, 2008). 3.4.

The intersection between (inter)subjectification and grammaticalisation

The wide range of examples of (inter)subjectification phenomena in the preceding section suggests the existence of a strong correlation between (inter)subjectification processes and grammaticalisation (cf. Traugott, this volume). It is indeed the case that many instances of grammaticalisation, such as the development of English modals and the rise of concessive connectives such as English while,14 Spanish mientras and Portuguese embora (cf. section 3.3 above), among many

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others, also involve increased subjective meaning. As Brinton and Traugott (2005: 108) note, “[s]ince grammaticalization involves shifts toward more abstract, less referential, markers, the prime function of which is to represent the speaker’s perspective on the situation or to get others to do things, it is necessarily the case that subjectification is characteristic of grammaticalization”. Though admitting that there is a close connection between subjectification and grammaticalisation, it seems reasonable to keep the two types of processes apart on the following grounds. On the one hand, the semantic shifts associated with subjectification do not constitute a sufficient condition for the operation of grammaticalisation. A clear example of the fact that subjectification is not restricted to developments in the grammatical domain, but can also be evinced in the lexical domain, is found in the rise of speech-act verb meanings in lexical items such as promise and insist (cf. Traugott 1989: 43–45, 1995: 32; section 3.3 above). Additional instances of subjectification processes utterly unrelated to grammaticalisation include those operating in amelioriation and pejoration (cf. section 3.1). On the other hand, subjectification may be minimally involved – or not involved at all – in certain grammaticalisation phenomena. Traugott (2010) cites the example of the development of terms for relational space or body parts into case markers, where subjectification is not implicated to any significant degree. In view of this, defining subjectification as “the discourse-pragmatic type of grammaticalization” (Fischer 2007: 260) or as “a kind of grammaticalization” (Company 2008: 204) may actually be misleading. A further interesting point here concerns the relevance of the distinction between primary and secondary grammaticalisation: it seems that subjectification is more likely to occur in the change from lexical to grammatical material (primary grammaticalisation) than in the shift from grammatical into more grammatical material (secondary grammaticalisation) (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 82; Fischer 2007: 259; Traugott 2010: 41). This is so because it is precisely the early stages of grammaticalisation that require the strengthening of pragmatic inferences characteristic of subjectification processes (cf. section 3.1). Grammaticalisation may also intersect with intersubjectification, but only rarely. Examples include the development of certain discourse markers and interjections (cf. section 3.3). On the other hand, as in the case of subjectification, intersubjectification occurs in instances of semantic change that are unrelated to grammaticalisation, but, rather, involve a lexical item acquiring a new attitudinal meaning. Instances of this kind are found in the rise of taboo meanings of words like English bathroom for any kind of toilet, not necessarily those with a bath (Traugott, this volume) and in the development of polite uses of lexical items like Japanese moosu ‘say’ (cf. section 3.3; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 261; Traugott 2010: 38).

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Gradience in (inter)subjectification

As seen above, in the Traugottian tradition subjectification is seen as a “gradient phenomenon, whereby forms and constructions that at first express primarily concrete, lexical, and objective meanings come through repeated use in local syntactic contexts to serve increasingly abstract, pragmatic, interpersonal, and speakerbased functions” (Traugott 1995: 32, my emphasis). Similarly, the idea that subjectivity is a matter of degree is defended by Lyons, who states that “the distinction between the subjective and the objective is gradual, rather than absolute” (Lyons 1982: 105). An interesting step beyond the recognition of the gradient nature of subjectivity and subjectification is provided by De Smet and Verstraete’s (2006) attempt to establish a typology of different subcategories or levels of subjectivity. On the basis of two case studies, one concerning attitudinal adjectives in Dutch and one on causal conjunctions in English, they demonstrate how apparently similar “subjective or diachronically subjectified expressions display diverging syntactic behaviour”, which “is indicative of underlying differences in function which can be described in terms of speaker-relatedness” (2006: 373). Their analysis of the Dutch adjectives leuk and dom shows that, although both forms have undergone a parallel semantic development in terms of increased subjectivity, i.e. from adjectives expressing objective meanings to items conveying speaker-related meanings, they behave remarkably differently under various syntactic tests, like coordination with other adjectives, gradability, modification, negation and questioning. Formal differences are also detected between various English causal conjunctions, such as after, as and since, traditionally recognised as having undergone a process of subjectification from their original meanings in the domain of temporal relations (cf. Traugott and König 1991: 209, among others; also section 3.3). The existence of such remarkable formal discrepancies leads De Smet and Verstraete to distinguish between three types of subjectivity: one pragmatic and two semantic types. Pragmatic subjectivity is inherent in language use and relates to the speaker’s conceptualisation of reality and his/her motivations for choosing a particular expression at the expense of others. By contrast, the two types of semantic subjectivity, which are distinguished on the basis of syntactic criteria, relate to speaker involvement with respect to the expression’s inherent meaning, though they function in different components of the utterance. De Smet and Verstraete’s “ideational subjectivity” functions in what Halliday and Hasan (1976) called the ideational component (cf. section 3.1), and therefore involves the description of speaker-internal content. On the other hand, “interpersonal subjectivity” functions in Halliday and Hasan’s interpersonal component, and thus refers to the enactment of the speaker’s position with respect to the content of the message and his/her interaction with the interlocutor.15 The difference between these two types of semantic subjectivity is clearly illus-

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trated in the comparison of the syntactic behaviour of various causal conjunctions. Whereas since and after, for instance, show the same degree of ideational subjectivity inasmuch as they both convey causal relations, they are not equally subjective at the interpersonal level: the fact that the conjunction after can be focused, questioned and negated from the perspective of the main clause, while since cannot, indicates that only the latter functions in the interpersonal component of the utterance. 3.6.

Unidirectionality in (inter)subjectification

As seen in section 3.1 above, the idea that semantic change normally proceeds in the direction of increased subjectivity has been present in Traugott’s work on subjectification from the start (cf. Traugott 1982, 1995: 45; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 87, among many others). Though recognising that possible counterexamples to unidirectionality do exist, Traugott (2003: 128) maintains that the tendency is very robust, particularly in the early stages of the process of change, and can be empirically tested across domains and languages (cf. the cases discussed in section 3.3). One possible (partial) counter-example to Traugott’s claims on the unidirectional drift in language change towards meanings that are more grounded in the speaker is found in Adamson’s (1995) analysis of the development of the so-called empathetic narrative from empathetic deixis in English. She argues that the development can be seen as illustrating desubjectification (“de-subjectivisation” in Adamson’s terms), “in the sense that terms which originally derive their meaning by reference to the speaker or the context of speaking (for example, now, here, oh) are progressively recentred in the non-speaker” (1995: 218). Unidirectionality in subjectification is also called into question in developments like that of the present perfect into a hodiernal past, rather than a past with current relevance, in certain dialects of Peninsular Spanish. Schwenter (1994) argues that the frequent use of the present perfect in contexts reporting anterior situations that occurred on the same day as the speech event may lead to the inference that such contexts are in fact part of the meaning of the perfect, resulting therefore in the erosion of its original sense of current relevance. It should be noted, however, that the development at issue here involves only partial desubjectification, given that one of the functions of tense is precisely that of conveying the “relation to speaker time” (cf. Traugott 1995: 46). Other potential counter-examples to unidirectionality in (inter)subjectification have been suggested by Herring (1991), Shinzato (2007) and Cornillie (2008). In her analysis of the grammaticalisation of rhetorical questions in Tamil, Herring maintains that the historical development of such forms illustrates both subjectification, in the shift from interrogative question meaning to rhetorical question meaning, as well as desubjectification, in the later grammaticalisation of certain

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types of rhetorical questions to “autonomous clause-linking elements” (1991: 279), which carry textual (or discourse-organisational) functions. In turn, Shinzato (2007: 196–198) suggests the existence of a possible case of desubjectification in the development of directives to concessive conditionals (shiro/seyo/are) in Middle Japanese and to conditionals (-te miro) in Early Modern Japanese. However, Traugott (2007: 303–304) convincingly shows that these changes do not in fact qualify as shifts from intersubjective to subjective meaning. Finally, Cornillie (2008) claims that in his data the Spanish evidential constructions parecer que ‘seem that’ and resultar que ‘turn out that’, which show intersubjectivity, historically precede the epistemic constructions parecer + infinitive and resultar + infinitive, which allow for a subjective reading only. Although some of the aforementioned cases may indeed run counter to the widely recognised unidirectional shift non-subjective > subjective > intersubjective, they do not necessarily invalidate the unidirectionality hypothesis. Given that instances of this kind are rather uncommon, they simply demonstrate that “no change is likely to be exceptionless” (Traugott 2003: 124).

4.

Subjectivity as cognitive construal: The Langackerian perspective on subjectification

As opposed to Traugott’s rather broad characterisation of subjectification, and somewhat overlapping with it, Langacker (1985, 1990, 2003, 2006, among others) looks at subjectivity from a synchronic perspective within the framework of cognitive grammar and defines subjectification in narrower terms. Starting from the premise of cognitive semantics that meaning equates with conceptualisation, so that it is determined by the way in which language users construe a particular entity or situation and how they portray them (1985: 109–110, 1990: 5–6), he maintains that there exists an inherent and fundamental asymmetry between the perceiving individual or conceptualiser16 and the entity perceived, i.e. the target of conceptualisation. This asymmetry is reflected in the distinction between subjective and objective construal: the construal of an entity, referent or process within the conceptual scene is maximally objective when the conceptualiser views a given element of conception, which is placed onstage as the focus of attention, as maximally distinct from himself or herself. By contrast, an entity is construed with maximal subjectivity when it is implicit, non-salient and remains in the offstage region (1990: 7, 1999: 149, 2003: 3–4, 2006: 18). Subjectivity is seen by Langacker as a gradient phenomenon synchronically, so that linguistic expressions can be arranged along a subjectivity scale (1985: 126–127, 1990: 7, 1999: 155, 2006: 18). A case illustrating these varying degrees of subjectivity is given in example (3a–d), from Langacker (1990: 17, 20).

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(3) a. b. c. d.

Vanessa jumped across the table. Vanessa is sitting across the table from Veronica. Vanessa is sitting across the table from me. Vanessa is sitting across the table.

The preposition across in (3a) is maximally objective since it refers to “spatial motion on the part of an objectively-construed participant” (1990: 19). In turn, (3b–c) are more subjective in that across does not represent objective motion, but rather “subjective motion (mental scanning) on the part of the conceptualizer” (1990: 19). Whereas (3b) defines how the two participants, Vanessa and Veronica, are seated with respect to each other, in (3c) the spatial configuration denoted by the preposition across includes the speaker represented in the from-phrase. In addition, in Langacker’s view, expressions where a ground element is left implicit are construed more subjectively than those in which it is explicitly mentioned (1985: 138). This “subjectifying impact of implicit reference” (1985: 140) is illustrated by the contrast between (3c) and (3d): the former, in which the ground from me is overtly expressed, represents the observing speaker and is therefore more objective than the latter, in which the ground is not overtly expressed but remains implicit, thus representing a more subjective expression. In this context, Langacker initially defines subjectification as “a semantic shift or extension in which an entity originally construed objectively comes to receive a more subjective construal” (1991: 215). In other words, subjectification is conceived of as a transfer or a “realignment of some relationship from the objective axis to the subjective axis” (Langacker 1990: 17). In later works (1999: 151–156, 2006: 21), however, Langacker offers a revised conception of subjectification, characterised in terms of semantic bleaching or attenuation in subject control, rather than in terms of replacement (objective construal is replaced by subjective construal). In Langacker’s words, the “subjective component is there all along, being immanent in the objective conception, and simply remains behind when the latter fades away” (1999: 151, original emphasis; cf. also 2006: 21). Thus, for instance, once the original meaning of objective motion of the preposition across in example (3a) above is removed or fades away, the subjective meaning (mental scanning through space) becomes more apparent, as in (3b–d). Examples of the operation of subjectification in the Langackerian sense can be found in the development of modal verbs in various languages, such as English, Spanish, German and Dutch (cf., among others, Langacker 1990, 1999, 2003; Cornillie 2006; Mortelmans 2006; Pelyvás 2006), the evolution of motion verbs meaning ‘go’ into future markers (Langacker 1990, 1999), the grammaticalisation of perfective markers from verbs of possession (Langacker 1990) and of the get-passive in English (Langacker 1999), and the relation between subjectivity and the different (premodifier, postmodifier and predicative) positions adjectives may occupy (Athanasiadou 2006).17

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Langacker’s definitions of subjectivity and subjectification discussed above differ considerably from these terms as understood in the Traugottian sense (cf. section 3).18 Although in his 1999 article Langacker maintains that “[t]he issue is purely terminological” (1999: 150),19 the differences are rather profound and seem to derive from the authors’ respective theoretical assumptions about the way language is shaped as well as from their different views on the role of the “subject” with respect to the utterance. In Breban’s (2006: 272) words, “for Traugott, the activity of the speaker is to ‘express’ (and in the second place, to organize what he/ she expresses), whereas for Langacker, the subject ‘construes’”. While for Traugott, subjectification concerns the meaning of an expression becoming more subjective as a result of an increase in coding of speaker attitude, for Langacker meaning comprises both objectively and subjectively construed elements (Langacker 2006: 18) and what is therefore relevant is the (subjective or objective) construal of particular conceptual elements within the overall situation: the less explicit the presence of the speaker in a given expression, the more subjective that expression will be. In other words, if subjectivity is understood in terms of speaker-relatedness, as in the work of Traugott, both Langacker’s subjective and objective uses would be speaker-related and therefore subjective in Traugott’s terminology. The relation between the two approaches is aptly illustrated in Figure 1, from De Smet and Verstraete (2006: 370), where the two axes represent the Traugottian and the Langackerian views of subjectivity.

Figure 1. Langacker’s vs. Traugott’s definitions of subjectivity (from De Smet and Verstraete 2006: 370)

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Despite the substantial differences between the two conceptions, Traugott’s and Langacker’s approaches to subjectivity and subjectification nevertheless show certain points of convergence. Thus, for example, both traditions emphasise the role of the speaker as conceptualiser of observed phenomena. Moreover, certain diachronic changes can be said to represent subjectification in both the Traugottian and the Langackerian senses of the term. A pertinent example is afforded by the development of epistemic modals in English, which represents a prototypical case of subjectification for Langacker (1990: 25–29, 1999: 163–164, 2003: 9–15) and also instantiates Traugott’s increase in speaker assessment, attitude or viewpoint (cf. section 3.3 above). Another development that can be interpreted as evincing subjectification in both senses is that displayed by the English adjectives of general comparison different, other, same and identical (Breban 2006). In addition, as in the Traugottian approach (cf. section 3.4), subjectification in Langacker’s sense is seen as a type of semantic change that commonly occurs in the process of grammaticalisation (1990: 16). Besides, he also recognises that “subjectification is not the only factor involved in grammaticization, nor do all instances of subjectification result in grammatical elements” (Langacker 2006: 28). Finally, both Traugott (cf. section 3.5) and Langacker consider subjectification as a gradient phenomenon:20 Thus I do not envisage attenuation and eventual full subjectification as occurring in a single step. It is more likely a gradual evolutionary process involving small steps along a number of possible parameters. This will usually result in the coexistence of alternative values at a given diachronic stage, with gradual shifts in preference being responsible for changes that in retrospect appear to be discrete. (Langacker 1999: 155, my emphasis)

Particularly interesting comparisons of the two approaches are provided by Carey (1995) in her analysis of the grammaticalisation of the English perfect and Breban (2006) on the grammaticalisation and subjectification of English adjectives of comparison (see above).21 Carey shows how the development from resultative to perfect constitutes an instance of subjectification in both the Traugottian and the Langackerian senses of the term. She maintains that this convergence is not accidental but reflects the common interest of both approaches in the critical role that conversational implicatures play in semantic change. In her own words: In the case of the shift from resultative A perfect, the conventionalisation of implicatures in particular localised contexts simultaneously brings about the following two changes: (i) the notion of result becomes more and more an expression of speaker attitude/judgement; (ii) the locus of relevance shifts from the subject (a linguistically coded, objectively construed entity) to the here-and-now of the speech situation (the ground), which is not linguistically coded and therefore subjectively construed. (Carey 1995: 101)

Carey’s conclusion is that the two approaches to subjectification can be seen as complementary models, which emphasise different aspects of the same process.

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For Breban, by contrast, although the two models can be applied to the same item or construction, they actually represent opposing views on the same phenomenon: When in Langacker’s terms the construal becomes more subjective, the conceptualizer, i.e. the ground, necessarily becomes more objective […] and it is exactly this process of ‘objectification’ that characterizes subjectification in Traugott’s sense, according to which the speaker becomes more visible in the construction. (Breban 2006: 272)

5.

Other ways of looking at (inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification

In addition to Traugott’s and Langacker’s approaches, (inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification have been interpreted in various other ways. Thus, in Sanders and Spooren’s (1996) analysis of epistemic modality in Dutch, the term subjectivity is related to inferential, non-observable evidence. It thus contrasts with non-subjectivity, which is characteristic of directly observed evidence. On the other hand, starting from the recognition that a human being’s thoughts and beliefs may be different from those of his/her conspecifics, Verhagen (2005) views intersubjectivity from the perspective of argumentation theory in terms of “humans’ ability to engage in deep cognitive coordination with others” (2005: 4). A narrow view of (inter)subjectivity is also found in Schiffrin (1990) and Nuyts (2001a, 2001b, 2005). Schiffrin discusses the principle of intersubjectivity as related to communication and to conversation, and characterises it in terms of “common understanding” (1990: 131) and “audience recognition of actors’ intentions” (1990: 138). Intersubjectivity thus defined frequently plays a rather pervasive role in the entire process of communication, particularly since it relies on “shared background knowledge for creating and interpreting messages” (1990: 143). Similarly, in his analysis of various linguistic manifestations of the semantic domain of epistemic modality in Dutch and German (e.g. modal sentence adverbs, predicative adjectives, mental state predicates and modal auxiliaries), Nuyts (2001a: 34) defines subjectivity and intersubjectivity in terms of personal vs. shared responsibility. Taking (inter)subjectivity as a subtype of the global notion of evidentiality, an evaluation is subjective if “the speaker assumes strictly personal responsibility for the epistemic qualification”; by contrast, it is intersubjective if the speaker does not have exclusive authority for the information provided, but shares it with the hearer. Similar definitions of (inter)subjectivity in terms of speaker’s knowledge vs. speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge have been proposed by Nuyts elsewhere: [A]n evaluation is subjective if the issuer presents it as being strictly his/her own responsibility; it is intersubjective if (s)he indicates that (s)he shares it with a wider group of people, possibly including the hearer. (Nuyts 2005: 14)

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From this perspective, therefore, mental state predicates, such as think, would be seen as subjective, while epistemic adverbs like probable would be characterised as intersubjective. The contrast between this way of looking at (inter)subjectivity and the Traugottian and Langackerian approaches discussed in the preceding sections is immediately obvious. In Langacker’s view, for instance, modals are highly subjectified, whereas for Nuyts they are not subjective at all (Nuyts 2001a: chapter 4). On the other hand, mental state predicates are less subjective in Langacker’s analysis, while they are highly subjective in Nuyts’s approach (2001a: chapter 3).

6.

Moving beyond the intuitive notion of (inter)subjectification

As seen in the previous sections, (inter)subjectification has essentially been defined in semantic-pragmatic terms (cf. sections 3.1, 3.2 and 4), while the potential liaison between (inter)subjectification and structural change has traditionally remained in the background. However, a strong interest has recently emerged in moving beyond the rather intuitive notion of (inter)subjectification by identifying and exploring in some detail the syntactic correlates of the semantic and pragmatic changes involved. One particularly relevant context for the identification of formal criteria accompanying (inter)subjectification is that of positional changes in the phrase, clause or sentence. Several of the studies in Stein and Wright (1995) establish a connection between subjectivity/subjectification and word order. Consider, for example, Stein’s article on the history of inversions in English; or Keller’s analysis of the development of German factual weil, which shows the verb in clause-final position, into epistemic weil, which shows verb-second (main clause) order. A number of recent studies have also shown that subjectified elements tend to be moved to a peripheral position within the relevant constituent. Adamson (2000), for instance, explores the link between subjectivity and the left periphery in the domain of the noun phrase. She explains how the subjectification of the descriptive adjective lovely to the value adjective lovely expressing the speaker’s approval, from the seventeenth century onwards (cf. section 3.3), goes hand in hand with a tendency for the subjectified adjective to move to the leftmost position in the adjectival string. According to Adamson, it is precisely this increased frequency in left configuration that enables the reanalysis of lovely as an intensifier in the Late Modern English period (2000: 53–55). In the domain of the sentence, in the developmental cline clause-internal adverbial > sentence adverbial > discourse particle found in the history of forms such as indeed (cf. section 3.3), the shift to speakeroriented meaning is also accompanied by a change to the left-periphery position (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 159–165). Other instances of the correlation between subjectification and leftmost position at the phrasal, clausal or sentential levels in English include the shifting of epistemic modals to the periphery of a complex verb

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phrase (Bybee 1985: 34–35, 196–200; Fischer 2007: 261–274), the history of the s-genitive (Rosenbach, Stein and Vezzosi 2000), and the uses of the nouns sort, kind and type in the noun phrase (Davidse, Brems and De Smedt 2008). The connection between (inter)subjectification processes and movement to the left or right periphery of the clause has also been widely observed in Japanese, as shown in several of the contributions in Onodera and Suzuki (2007). Shinzato (2007), for instance, aligns the semantic-pragmatic changes taking place in (inter)subjectification with syntactic shifts in her layered model of the Japanese sentence structure. More specifically, she suggests that the change from propositional meaning to subjectified and intersubjectified meanings is matched by structural shifts from the core to the outer layers, towards the right (e.g. the development of nouns like mono, wake; Shinzato 2007: 179; section 3.3 above), towards the left margin (e.g. connectives such as dakedo ‘but’, demo ‘but’ and tokorode ‘by the way’; Shinzato 2007: 180), or in both directions (e.g. the quotative particle to and the speech-act verb iu; Shinzato 2007: 181). Claims about the link between (inter)subjectification and outward movement are also made by Onodera (2007; cf. also 2004) for interjectional na-elements (cf. section 3.3), and Suzuki (2007) for the quotative marker tte. Company (2004, 2006a, 2006b) has also explored the potential syntactic correlates of subjectification. She believes that the process is not merely a semanticpragmatic change, but constitutes “a specific syntactic change in and of itself” (2006a: 380), which leaves “structural traces” (2006a: 381) during the historical development of a form or a construction. Among the various formal consequences of subjectification identified in the literature, Company mentions the following: weakening or loss of agent control, movement to the leftmost or the rightmost position (see above), widening of predicational scope, fixation of form, autonomy of predication and loss of syntactic capacities, for example, as regards modification and complementation (2006a: 378–380, cf. the references therein). More specifically, Company maintains that subjective expressions are “deprived of syntax” (2006a: 380), and therefore the process of subjectification implies a gradual syntactic impoverishment or syntactic cancellation (cf. also Company 2004: 2), which she summarises in the motto “zero in syntax, ten in pragmatics”. In her view, syntactic isolation is in fact a regular feature of many processes of subjectification in the history of Spanish, such as those resulting in the formation of the Mexican Spanish discourse markers discussed in section 3.3 above. Evidence of this cancellation of syntax can be found in the development of the pragmatic marker dale, shown in example (4b), from a form of the ditransitive verb dar ‘give’, as in (4a) (Company 2006a: 386–388). (4) a. porque le dieron a su padre siete u ocho mantillas because him-dat gave-they to his father-dat seven or eight little blankets-acc ‘because they gave his father seven or eight little blankets’

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b. ¡Y dale! ¿Pero no ves tú lo que cuesta mantener una familia? and dale but not see you it what costs to support a family ‘And dale! Don’t you see how expensive it is to maintain a family?’ In (4a), the verb dar displays full syntactic capacities: it is inflected for person, number, tense and mood in the form dieron and it subcategorises a dative participant (a su padre), which is doubled by the anaphoric dative clitic pronoun le preceding the verb. Here the clitic pronoun can be omitted (porque dieron a su padre), the verb allows other tenses (e.g. daban) and can be paraphrased by a substitute from the same lexical field (e.g. entregaban). By contrast, in (4b) the form dale cannot be analysed as verb + anaphor. The ditransitive valency of dar is annulled: it no longer means to hand an object to a recipient, the verb cannot inflect for other forms apart from the imperative, and the verb and pronoun form a fixed expression that normally appears at the leftmost position, being isolated from the other constituents. Dale has thus been reanalysed as a subjective discourse marker that expresses the speaker’s annoyance to the addressee. For Company, these and other formal features of the items and constructions undergoing subjectification over time suggest that “structural weight is inversely proportional to pragmatic subjective weight” (2006a: 381; cf. also 2004: 22). 6.1.

In search of quantitative measures of subjectification

The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in the application of multivariate statistical methods to the study of subjectification by comparing distributional patterns over the diachronic trajectory of a particular form or construction. Drawing on corpus-based quantitative work on structural patterns of subjectivity in contemporary language (cf. Scheibman’s 2002 analysis of the expression of speaker point of view in American English conversation), interesting proposals have been made to demonstrate subjectification empirically. One of the most thorough attempts to identify structural manifestations of subjectivity and to devise quantitative or operational measures of subjectification is provided by Aaron and Torres Cacoullos (2005) in their analysis of the development of the Mexican Spanish counter-expectation marker salirse ‘go out, exit, leave’ through the combination of the intransitive motion verb salir and the thirdperson reflexive clitic se. Synchronically, the authors compare the occurrences of salir and salirse in the data from the Habla Culta and Habla Popular Mexico City corpora and try to ascertain empirically that the se-marked form, as in example (5a), is more subjective than the zero-form, shown in (5b), and is therefore used for those cases in which the speaker does not merely state a proposition, but, rather, expresses his/her point of view. Notice that the formal distinction between salirse and salir in (5a) and (5b) conveys a meaning difference of (un)expectedness: the natural order of events is for people to go out from doors, not from windows.

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(5) a. “Se salió por la ventana”. ¡Se brincaba la ventana! (Habla Popular, 411) ‘“He went out-SE through the window.” He would jump through the window!’ b. en esos momentos venía saliendo en la puerta (Habla Popular, 70) ‘just then he was coming out-0 at the door’ Aaron and Torres Cacoullos identify two key structural changes in the process of subjectification of salirse from Old Spanish to present-day spoken Mexican Spanish. On the one hand, the evidence suggests that speaker’s viewpoint acquires more weight over time: the proportion of inanimate subjects is reduced by half (from 29 per cent to 14 per cent), while that of first-person singular subjects increases from 11 per cent to 38 per cent (Aaron and Torres Cacoullos 2005: 627, Table 4). More interestingly, the data also reveal a dramatic decrease in the use of co-occurring preposition de ‘from’, as in example (6), which drops from 58 per cent in Old Spanish to 21 per cent in present-day Mexico City Spanish. Such a decline is taken by Aaron and Torres Cacoullos to represent the shift in the use of salirse from physical, concrete spatial limits to non-physical, abstract ones. In other words, the primary locus of change in the subjectification of salirse seems to lie in the “increasingly speaker-based construal of (counter-)expectation” (Aaron and Torres Cacoullos 2005: 609, 626), once contextual meaning (‘exit from’) in the frequent de-construction is absorbed into the salirse form itself. (6) ¡Se salía de la escuela, señora! (Habla Popular, 411) ‘He would leave-SE school, madam’ Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter (2007) also draw attention to the fact that most of the research on subjectification has relied mainly on an intuitive, rather than an operational, notion of the process of change. The case study they select as an example of how one can move beyond the intuitive evaluation of subjectification concerns the development of the concessive connective a pesar de (que) in Spanish (cf. section 3.3 above), shown in (7b) below, from the Old Spanish combination a ‘to’ + pesar ‘sorrow’ + de ‘of’ + human adnominal, illustrated in the twelfth-century example in (7a). (7) a. fue preso Daniel, a pesar del rey que lo querie enparar (XII, La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, f. 67r) ‘Daniel was imprisoned, to the regret of the king who wanted to protect him’ b. este piso a pesar de que tiene sesenta y cinco metros, parece que es más grande (XX, COREC, CCON007A.95) ‘this apartment in spite of having 75 meters, seems larger’ In their analysis, Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter succeed in identifying changing distribution patterns in the history of a pesar de, which imply an expansion of the functional range of the construction to wider contexts and thus provide empirical

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proof for its process of subjectification. Verifiable evidence of degrees of subjectification is found in the data in three different environments: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

7.

Shift from non-coreferential subjects to coreferential subjects: from 41 per cent in the seventeenth century to 63 per cent in the twentieth century (2007: Table 2). Increase of irrealis uses (i.e. non-factive a pesar de que + subjunctive) from originally factive structures: from 3 per cent in the nineteenth century to 10 per cent in the twentieth century (2007: Table 3). Increased preposing of the a pesar de phrase with respect to the main verb: from 35 per cent of the tokens with inanimate noun phrase adnominals in the seventeenth century to 61 per cent in the twentieth century (2007: Table 4). Concluding remarks

This chapter has shown how subjectification and intersubjectification, understood mainly in the Traugottian sense, are pervasive and widespread phenomena both within and across languages. It is not, therefore, surprising that the development of meanings expressing the speaker’s attitudes, beliefs and viewpoints or his/her attention to the addressee’s self has recently become one of the most attractive and prolific areas in the study of semantic change. A great deal has already been accomplished in (inter)subjectification studies, particularly in the form of analyses of changes taking place in the domains of modality, discourse markers, honorifics, connectives, etc. in languages like English, Spanish and Japanese, among others. There is, however, still much room for further research, both in the areas and languages examined in the present chapter and, especially, in others not yet investigated. Particularly valuable insights may come from the discussion of hotly debated issues such as the connection between (inter)subjectification and grammaticalisation, and the controversy over the validity of the unidirectionality hypothesis in (inter)subjectification. Another challenging and promising topic is the search for quantitative measures of subjectification and intersubjectification. The empirical analyses described in section 6.1 undoubtedly represent significant contributions to our understanding of the way in which subjectification processes take place. However, the natural question that arises here is whether the operational measures proposed for the processes of subjectification of Spanish salirse and a pesar de que are construction-specific (even language-specific), or, on the contrary, whether they can reasonably be extrapolated to account for other developments along the (inter)subjectivity path. The relevant factors identified so far in this stimulating search for operational measures of gradience in subjectification are so varied that only future work will tell whether structural regularities can be discovered that may be applicable beyond specific constructions or functional domains in particular languages.

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Notes 11 I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and European Regional Development Fund (grant no. HUM2007–60706) and of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grants 2008–047 and INCITE 08PXIB204016PR). Many thanks to Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Belén Méndez-Naya, the editors of this volume, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own responsibility. 12 Also known as (inter)subjectivisation (cf., for example, Stein and Wright 1995, and some of the contributions therein). 13 A similar position to that of Lyons concerning the close connection between subjectivity and deixis is taken by Bühler [1934] (1990). 14 In Traugott and Dasher’s words, “[a]melioration and pejoration are the direct outcomes of subjectification at the content level” (2002: 282). 15 Notice that the shifts on this cline are possible changes rather than necessary ones, and that the newer (inter)subjectified polysemies may co-exist with the old meanings of the item or construction undergoing (inter)subjectification (cf. Hopper and Traugott’s 2003: 49 notion of “layering”). 16 Traugott (2010) calls due attention to the fact that intersubjective meaning rarely becomes semanticised; rather it remains, for the main part, pragmatic in nature. Therefore, “what may look like it is a case of intersubjectification actually may not be. If it is derivable from the context, it is only a case of increased pragmatic intersubjectivity” (2010: 37). 17 According to Fitzmaurice (2004), the development of such interactive uses of the English discourse markers she analyses takes place from the eighteenth century onwards. 18 Horie (2007) mentions that Japanese shows a higher degree of (inter)subjectivity not only than English, but also than Korean, a language that exhibits significant structural similarities to Japanese. 19 On the relation between word order and (inter)subjectivity/(inter)subjectification, cf. section 6 below. 10 On the evolution of pragmatic markers, see Brinton (1996, 2006, and this volume) and Hansen and Rossari (2005), among others. 11 Parallel paths of development could be provided for the other discourse markers mentioned here. 12 In Onodera (2000, 2004) the shifts undergone by the na elements over time are described in terms of subjectification, while in Onodera (2007) these functional changes are re-examined in light of the process of intersubjectification. 13 Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994) do not use the labels subjectification and intersubjectification. They refer, however, to meaning changes involving the “development of speaker-oriented sense” (1994: 194) and “pragmatic strengthening” (1994: 288). 14 For a different view on the development of English while, as coming close to lexicalisation rather than as involving grammaticalisation, see Fischer (2007: 144, 154). 15 The reference both to speaker’s positioning and to interaction with the interlocutor is highly suggestive of the distinction between subjectivity and intersubjectivity established in Traugott and Dasher (2002: 21–24) and Traugott (2003: 128–129), among others.

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16 The conceptualiser is mainly identified with the speaker, but can also be associated with the addressee or with some other individual whose viewpoint is adopted – or considered – by the speaker or the addressee (cf. Langacker 1990: 9). 17 For other applications of Langacker’s approach to subjectivity and subjectification, see the remaining studies in Athanasiadou, Canakis and Cornillie (2006). 18 In contrast to Traugott’s approach, where speaker-hearer interaction plays a crucial role in semantic change, in Langacker’s model intersubjectification is not an issue, given that the focus is on the speaker and his/her conceptualisation of reality. 19 In his 2006 article, however, Langacker recognises the existence of significant differences between the two conceptions of subjectification (2006: 17). 20 See also Langacker (2003: 6, 2006: 18), as well as his notions of “subjectivity scale” (1985: 126–127, 1990: 7) and “extreme subjectification” (2003), which suggests in itself a gradient. 21 Additional comparisons of the two approaches to subjectivity and subjectification can be found in Mortelmans (2004), Athanasiadou, Canakis and Cornillie (2006: Introduction), Brisard (2006) and De Smet and Verstraete (2006).

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Onodera, Noriko O. 2007 Interplay of (inter)subjectivity and social norm. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.2: 239–267. Onodera, Noriko O., and Ryoko Suzuki (eds.) 2007 Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.2 [Special issue on subjectivity, intersubjectivity and historical changes in Japanese.] Pelyvás, Péter 2006 Subjectification in (expressions of) epistemic modality and the development of the grounding predication. In: Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis and Bert Cornillie (eds.), 121–150. Pérez-Guerra, Javier, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso and Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds.) 2007 ‘Of varying language and opposing creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English. (Linguistic Insights 28.) Bern: Peter Lang. Powell, Mavo Jo 1992 The systematic development of correlated interpersonal and metalinguistic uses in stance adverbs. Cognitive Linguistics 3.1: 75–110. Rodríguez-Espiñeira, María José, and Belén López-Meirama 2008 On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que. In: Elena Seoane and María José López-Couso (eds.), 293–314. Romaine, Suzanne, and Deborah Lange 1991 The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech 66: 227–279. Rosenbach, Anette, Dieter Stein and Letizia Vezzosi 2000 On the history of the s-genitive. In: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, David Denison, Richard M. Hogg and Chris B. McCully (eds.), Generative Theory and Corpus Studies: A Dialogue from 10 ICEHL, 183–210. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Russell, Bertrand 1940 An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. London: Allen & Unwin. Sanders, José, and Wilbert Spooren 1996 Subjectivity and certainty in epistemic modality: A study of Dutch epistemic modifiers. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 241–264. Scheibman, Joanne 2002 Point of View and Grammar. Structural Patterns of Subjectivity in American English Conversation. (Studies in Discourse and Grammar 11.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schiffrin, Deborah 1990 The principle of intersubjectivity in conversation and communication. Semiotica 80: 121–151. Schwenter, Scott A. 1994 The grammaticalization of an anterior in progress: Evidence from a Peninsular Spanish dialect. Studies in Language 18: 71–111. Schwenter, Scott A., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 2000 Invoking scalarity: The development of in fact. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 7–25. Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) 1960 Style in Language. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

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Seoane, Elena, and María José López-Couso (eds.) 2008 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization. (Typological Studies in Language 77.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Shinzato, Rumiko 2007 (Inter)subjectification, Japanese syntax and syntactic scope increase. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.2: 171–206. Stein, Dieter 1995 Subjective meanings and the history of inversions in English. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), 129–150. Stein, Dieter, and Susan Wright (eds.) 1995 Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suzuki, Ryoko 1998 From a lexical noun to an utterance-final pragmatic particle: wake. In: Toshio Ohori (ed.), Studies in Japanese Grammaticalization, 67–92. Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers. Suzuki, Ryoko 2007 (Inter)subjectification in the quotative tte in Japanese conversation: Local change, utterance-ness and verb-ness. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.2: 207–237. Swan, Toril, and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.) 1996 Modality in Germanic Languages. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Sweetser, Eve 1990 From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Sandra, and Anthony Mulac 1991 A quantitative perspective on the grammaticalization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), vol. II, 313–329. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, and Fátima María Faya-Cerqueiro 2007 Saying please in Late Modern English. In: Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso and Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds.), 421–444. Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Scott A. Schwenter 2007 Towards an operational notion of subjectification. In: Rebecca T. Cover and Yuni Kim (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Prosodic Variation and Change, 347–358. Berkeley, CA.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1982 From propositional to textual and expressive meanings: Some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In: Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics, 245–271. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1989 On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 57: 33–65.

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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1995 Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), 31–54. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1996 Subjectification and the development of epistemic meaning: The case of promise and threaten. In: Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), 185–210. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2003 From subjectification to intersubjectification. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for Language Change, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2006 The semantic development of scalar focus modifiers. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), 335–359. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2007 (Inter)subjectification and unidirectionality. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.2: 295–309. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2010 (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment. In: Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), 29–71. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher 2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Bernd Heine (eds.) 1991 Approaches to Grammaticalization, 2 vols. (Typological Studies in Language 19.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Ekkehard König 1991 The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), vol. I, 189–218. van Kemenade, Ans, and Bettelou Los (eds.) 2006 Handbook on the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell. Vandewinkel, Sigi, and Kristin Davidse 2008 The interlocking paths of development to emphasizer adjective pure. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9.2: 255–287. Verhagen, Arie 1995 Subjectification, syntax, and communication. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), 103–128. Verhagen, Arie 2005 Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Visconti, Jacqueline 2005 On the origins of scalar particles in Italian. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.2: 237–261. Wang, Chueh-chen, and Lillian M. Huang 2006 Grammaticalization of connectives in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study. Language and Linguistics 7.4: 991–1,016. Wright, Susan 1995 Subjectivity and experiential syntax. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), 151–172.

6.

Pragmaticalisation and Discursisation Claudia Claridge and Leslie Arnovick

1.

Introduction

Pragmaticalisation, a term that was apparently first introduced by Erman and Kotsinas (1993), is not a process or term that is universally accepted and thus it is not easy to find a definition. Erman and Kotsinas see it as one of two paths in the change from lexical item to function word, one of them resulting in the creation of grammatical markers, functioning mainly sentence internally, the other resulting in discourse markers mainly serving as text structuring devices at different levels of discourse. We reserve the the term grammaticalization for the first of these two paths, while we propose the term pragmaticalization for the second one. (Erman and Kotsinas 1993: 79, italics original)

The difference between the two lies in the type of use made of the item undergoing change (Erman and Kotsinas 1993: 80). Similarly, Fleischman (1999: 18, fn. 11) simply calls pragmaticalisation the “pragmatic analogue of [g]rammaticalization”.1 Arnovick (1999: passim) talks about “pragmatic strengthening”, the process whereby a conversational implicature attached to an expression turns into a conventional one and is thus semanticised; otherwise she does not provide an independent definition but quotes Aijmer (1997). The latter (1997: 2–3) uses the term for changes and resulting items that involve the speaker’s attitude to the addressee, are governed by conversational principles (e.g. in the Gricean sense) and do not contribute to truth-conditional meaning. Frank-Job (2006: 361), finally, defines pragmaticalisation as “the process by which a syntagma or word form, in a given context, changes its propositional meaning in favor of an essentially metacommunicative, discourse interactional meaning”. What is important for Frank-Job (2006: fn. 6, 373), as it is for Erman and Kotsinas quoted above, is that the resulting output functions in the domain of discourse, not within the (grammatical) system of a language. Items treated by the above authors – and thus instances of pragmaticalisation in their view – are the markers of emphasis/ continuation/turn structure ba’ in Swedish and you know in English (Erman and Kotsinas); the focus/hedge/quotative particles like in English and genre in French (Fleischman); the greeting good-bye (Arnovick); the modal particle I think (Aijmer) and various Italian discourse markers, such as va bene, adesso, guarda (Frank-Job). Of these, I think and like have also been classified as grammaticalised, i.e. they represent disputed cases as to what type of change produced them. The grammaticalisation point of view is followed, e.g., by Palander-Collin (1999), who treats I

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think / methinks in a diachronic perspective, and by Brinton (2006). Wischer (2000) added the process of lexicalisation as an additional aspect in the case of methinks. Good-bye was treated by Arnovick as discursisation rather than as a straight case of pragmaticalisation, her argument being that it had already been a pragmatic element before it turned into a greeting. This chapter will therefore treat pragmaticalisation at least partly in conjunction with related processes. We start by outlining what pragmatic(s) is and which items/constructions may be seen as possible endpoints of pragmaticalisation (section 2). Then we present six case studies of pragmaticalisation to illustrate possible pathways and outcomes of pragmaticalisation (section 3). On the basis of these examples, we outline common characteristics of pragmaticalisation processes and outputs (section 4). The fact that pragmaticalisation can apply progressively to the same item (thus including input material already pragmatic in nature) in several distinct steps is then highlighted (section 5), emphasising one of these steps, namely discursisation, as a particular subtype. We close this chapter with a discussion of pragmaticalisation versus grammaticalisation (section 6), arguing for the former as the more suitable label for the development of pragmatic markers.

2.

Realms and objects of pragmaticalisation: Pragmatics and pragmatic expressions

A very simple paraphrase of pragmaticalisation is of course “becoming pragmatic”, which necessitates a clear understanding of pragmatics. Pragmatics in the narrower sense covers those aspects of meaning that arise in language use but are not explicitly part of coded linguistic meaning. In this understanding, aspects for pragmatic investigation are, for example, implicature, presupposition, (indirect) speech acts and deixis. Pragmatics in the wider sense covers, beyond this, patterns of interaction in specific social situations and within particular cultural systems. In this sense, pragmatic research extends also to matters such as turn-taking or politeness (cf. Jucker forthcoming). We will work on the basis of this wider definition, which necessarily includes the narrower one. This means that items with the following dominant functions will tend to be pragmatic in nature: (i) interpersonal/interactional – oriented towards the speaker (in particular his/her mental/emotional disposition as far as relevant to the discourse, and conversational goals) and/or the hearer (e.g. establishing rapport), (ii) textual, discourse-oriented – structuring the discourse or commenting on (parts of) it in a (quasi-) metalinguistic way. Pragmatics is not governed by rules, but characterised by principles and tendencies, based on the greater or lesser degree of appropriateness, expectedness or acceptability of certain expressions in given situations. Items of pragmatic interest are thus elements that realise one or several of the above functions and are not obligatory in any strict sense of the word. A further as-

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pect of importance in the present context is that items regarded as pragmaticalised should have a dominant pragmatic function, sufficiently detached from their previous (and potentially still parallel) propositional and/or grammatical functions. Past-tense forms, for example, can be used for politeness reasons and the use of progressive aspect can signal a certain speaker attitude or emotiveness. Nevertheless, both past tense and aspect have primarily grammatical significance and functions, so that one would not speak of the pragmaticalisation of, say, the progressive aspect. Items that retain too much of their propositional meaning in their pragmatic use can also not be called clearly pragmaticalised; there may be too little difference, for example, between initial sentence adverb fortunately and the same form integrated into the sentence structure. Candidates for pragmaticalisation output are thus pragmatic/discourse markers, hedges, interjections, swearing expressions, politeness markers and conversational/textual routines. This small list does not necessarily contain clearly distinct or well-defined classes. Pragmatic markers, discourse markers and hedges might be seen as identical or not, while both interjections and swearing expressions, and polite expressions and conversational routines overlap to a certain extent. Brinton (1996: 33–35) gives the following characteristics of pragmatic markers (inter alia):2 (i) they “are ‘short’ items […], which are often phonologically reduced […] or unstressed”, (ii) they have “little or no propositional meaning”, (iii) they represent a heterogeneous set of marginal forms with no clear wordclass allegiance, (iv) they are found “outside the syntactic structure or only loosely attached to it” (accordingly often “form a separate tone group”) and “have no clear grammatical function”, (v) they can occur in varying positions of a syntactic structure and (vi) they are predominantly oral (cf. also Brinton, this volume). Fraser (2006: 189–190) subdivides this class into “basic pragmatic markers” signalling illocutionary force (please, I promise), “commentary pragmatic markers” (assessment: fortunately; manner-of-speaking: frankly; evidentiality: certainly; hearsay: reportedly), “parallel pragmatic markers” (deference: your honor; conversational management: now, well) and “discourse markers” signalling a relation between the discourse segment they occur in and the preceding one (anyway, however, but). The last of these would most likely occur sentence- or utterance-initially (cf. also Schiffrin 1987). Hedges, as originally understood by Lakoff (1973: 471), i.e. “words whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy” (e.g. sort of, roughly, literally), fall into Fraser’s commentary/manner-of-speaking group. Good examples of pragmaticalisation among those given above are probably please, now, well, anyway and sort of. Interjections are a group of short, often phonological aberrant words, which are expressive of the speaker’s emotions and which do not take part in syntactic constructions, such as oh, ow, yuk, hey, tsk-tsk. Interjections are usually phonological (imitative) coinages, but in (probably) rare cases they can also be the result of pragmaticalisation, as will be illustrated below. Swearing or generally expletive expressions, which we would like to keep separate

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from interjections proper, are usually taken from the propositional store of the language, often from various taboo areas (religion: oh my God, zounds, damn; sex: fuck; bodily excretions: shit), and thus represent typical cases of pragmaticalisation. Polite expressions, such as please, thanks, sorry, serve to smooth interaction and are mostly evolved from propositional material. Conversational routines or formulae are fixed expressions, frozen illocutionary chunks “for the realisation of recurrent situational moves” (Coulmas 1981: 69), mostly linked to the structure of discourse (e.g. greetings, the “sneeze blessing”, cf. Arnovick 1999 and section 3.6 below).

3.

Six illustrative examples

This section presents six case studies that can be seen to present typical, but at the same time diverse, instances of pragmaticalisation, even if they were not (always) regarded as such in the literature (cf. especially sections 3.2 and 3.3). The examples have been chosen with a view to providing a variety of inputs and outputs to the change as well as differing processes, in order to be as representative as possible for the likely paths of pragmaticalisation. Section 4 will then highlight the common features of these processes. 3.1.

A discourse marker: Well

Jucker (1997, 2001) charts the historical development of the modern discourse marker well. He posits five categories to encompass possible modern uses of well, of which (ii) to (v) represent the discourse marker: (i) the adverbial or adjectival use with full propositional meaning, (ii) frame marker, (iii) face-threat mitigator, (iv) qualifier and (v) pause filler. As discourse marker, well has both textual and interpersonal functions, which usually overlap to some degree. The development of the above discourse marker functions seems to have started in late Middle English,3 although the nature of historical sources may have obscured possible earlier occurrences of some functions. The first pragmatic use to be found is the frame marker (ii), which occurs in the fourteenth/fifteenth century in the very restricted context of introducing direct speech (example (1a)) and diversifies to other contexts, such as topic boundaries (example (1b)), in Early Modern English. The marker is thus clearly discourse-structuring and serves a textual function (emphasis added in all examples). (1) a. ‘Ye sey well,’ seyde the kynge. ‘Aske what ye woll and ye shall have hit and hit lye in my power to gyff hit.’ ‘Well,’ seyde thys lady, ‘than I aske the hede of thys knyght that hath wonne the swerde …’ (HC, cmmalory 1470)

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b. Moyses was a meruelous man, a good man. Moyses was a wonderful felowe, and dyd his dutie being a maried man. We lacke suche as Moyses was. Well, I woulde al men woulde loke to their dutie, as God hath called them, and then we shoulde haue a florishyng christian commune weale. (HC, ceserm1b 1549)4 The meaning in such early examples is paraphrasable roughly as “if this is so” or “o.k. then”, representing an acknowledgement or acceptance of some preceding point. According to Jucker (1997, 2001), these uses have probably developed directly out of propositional uses of the adverb well. He gives two relevant meanings as likely precursors, namely “in a way appropriate to the fact or circumstances; fittingly, properly” (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 5) and “with good reason; naturally; as a natural result or consequence” (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 8a). It is this move from propositional meanings to textual (and later interpersonal) functions that Jucker terms pragmaticalisation in his 2001 treatment (216–217, 230), whereas he had not labelled the change described in the 1997 article. In Early Modern English, a new function of well as a face-threat mitigator develops. This is illustrated in example (2), where a husband prefaces with well his disagreement to a statement made by his wife. (2) Alas poore soule, this reward she hath for good will. I wis I wis, she is more your friend, then your are your owne. Well let her be what she will sayd her husband: but if shee come any more in my house, shee were as good no. (HC, cefict2b 1619) This is a clearly interpersonal use, but it also still has shades of the earlier textual discourse marker use. This new function thus represents an elaboration and diversification of the discourse marker use, which is not in itself based on a previous propositional meaning. The same is true of the qualifier and the pause filler uses, both of which occur in Modern English, which take up and further develop facets of earlier discourse marker uses. These two are predominantly interpersonal in nature. Well thus exhibits a development from predominantly textual to predominantly interpersonal meanings, which Jucker (1997, 2001) connects with Traugott’s notion of subjectification: with time, well increasingly expresses the speaker’s emotions and attitudes towards the situation and the addressee, i.e. takes on typical pragmatic interactional meanings. Cases similar to well, in the sense of proceeding from individual words taken from (often) minor word classes, can be found in the discourse markers now, why and like.

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A politeness marker: Pray (you) / prithee

Whereas the previous example was concerned with an individual word, the change here proceeds from a clausal construction towards a word. A form used originally as a full verb came to be used as a courtesy marker, a process that is charted by Akimoto (2000). The grammatical source construction for the marker is a main clause followed either by another main clause with an imperative, or by a subordinate that- or a to-infinitive-clause, as illustrated in example (3). (3) a. I prey you lete it be suyd … (PL 32) b. I pray you that at this feast I may be your chamberlain. (Malory 275) c. I pray you to counsel me. (Malory 150) In such fifteenth-century examples, the pray-clause in the overwhelming majority of cases occurs initially (two cases in medial position). In the sixteenth century, possibilities become more varied: the following clause can now also be a question (wh- or yes/no); the shortened forms I pray and pray you occur; medial position becomes somewhat more frequent (five instances) – cf. example (4) for a combination of these (the new possibilities account for 40 per cent of all instances). (4) Now, I pray, what do you imagine him to be? (Nashe 57) The seventeenth century brings a further reduction of the form to simple pray (example (5a)), while the full form I pray you becomes much less frequent (31 cases / 39 per cent for simple pray vs. 4 cases / 5 per cent for full form). The contracted prithee (example (5b)), from pray thee, appears for the first time in this data and is fairly frequent, with 34 instances or 43 per cent of all cases (although the Oxford English Dictionary also gives sixteenth-century attestations). (5) a. Pray therefore rise, and go into the solitary wood. (17th Anthology 174) b. Prithee, why cam’st thou ashore? (Behn 11) c. What was it, pray? (Farquhar 10) In the eighteenth century, simple pray becomes more frequent (132 instances), while prithee retains relatively low frequency (15 instances) and other combinations are no longer attested. Positionally, it still occurs mainly at the front, but end-position is especially common with wh-questions (example (5c)), of which 53 are attested in the data. There is a tendency for it to co-occur with honorific titles. From the seventeenth century onwards, pray-constructions occur only with imperatives and questions, i.e. with directive speech acts. In the nineteenth century, occurrences become rarer, falling from 146 instances (in c. 247,000 words) in the eighteenth century to only 36 in the nineteenth century (in c. 268,000 words), leading ultimately to the disuse of pray and replacement by please. Akimoto regards the development of pray as an instance of grammaticalisation. The original verb underwent semantic bleaching to become a “meaningless

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interjection” (2000: 80) with a mitigating/polite function. He sees Hopper’s (1991) principles of grammaticalisation reflected in the case of pray: (i) layering, as the forms I pray you / I pray / pray coexist, (ii) divergence, because full verb form and courtesy marker exist side by side, (iii) specialisation for the politeness function (in contrast to similar forms such as I beseech you), (iv) persistence of vestiges of the original verbal meaning of pray in the politeness marker, and (v) decategorialisation, i.e. loss of its verbal characteristics. For Jucker (2001: 227), in contrast, the development from the full clausal form with propositional meaning to the abbreviated forms with primarily pragmatic meaning represents a partial pragmaticalisation process.5 Other pragmatic expressions which may have developed out of (matrix/main) clausal structures are look (Brinton 2001), mind, say, I think / methinks and I mean, some shrinking to single words/items and others retaining some internal structure. 3.3.

Swearing and interjections: Jesus! and gee!

The expressive function of language is epitomised by expletives and interjections. The development of one such item from Jesus (noun, proper name) to Jesus (secondary interjection) to gee (primary interjection) is described by Gehweiler (2008).6 In modern English, the two interjections have textual and interpersonal functions, such as in turn-taking management (gaining the floor), marking a discourse boundary, highlighting the information structure (old vs. new information) and expressing speaker attitude. The secondary interjection Jesus ultimately derives from real invocations in prayers, oaths, etc. in religious/ritual contexts, in which uses Jesus has a clear reference (to the ‘son of God’), as in example (6) found in Middle English. Still within the Middle English period, the invocation Jesus came to be used outside of religious contexts, as in example (7a), which led to a backgrounding of the reference to Jesus as a person and the foregrounding of a pragmatic meaning component (e.g. ‘averting/protective’ meaning). Frequent use in such profane contexts caused complete decoupling from the original referential meaning (cf. 7b) and the establishment of the new interjection roughly towards the end of the Middle English period. (6) Jesu defende us from dethe! (MED, a1470, s.v. Je–su˘) (7) a. Bi iesus, with here ieweles, owre iustices she shendeth. (OED, 1377, s.v. Jesus) ‘By Jesus, with her jewels, she disgraces your justice.’ b. Mer. [imitating Tybalt] By Jesu, a very good blade! a very tall man! a very good whore! (Romeo and Juliet II.iv.29–31 64, quoted in Fischer 1998: 35)

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(8) “What is it?” Iris stepped forward, saw, and turned away in horror, her eyes like black holes in a face the colour of bleached bones. “Something wrong?” One of the telephone engineers, alarmed by the shrieks, appeared behind them. Dumbly, they pointed to the open door. “Jesus!” he gasped, and fainted. (BNC) A typical modern use is provided in example (8), which exhibits subjectification, as Jesus encodes a negative reaction or attitude of the speaker. The negative meaning component is imparted by the fact that the expletive touches on a taboo area (cf. the injunction of “not taking the name of the Lord in vain”). As examples (6) and (7) show, Jesus occurred in sentence-initial position and thus in syntactic isolation, which was an important precondition for its reuse or reinterpretation as an interjection. The development is seen as a clear case of grammaticalisation by Gehweiler, but apart from pointing to subjectification and divergence (Hopper 1991) she does not spell out precisely what makes it so. The primary interjection gee derives directly from the secondary interjection, from which it is a clipping and tabooistic distortion for euphemistic reasons. It is found first at the end of the nineteenth century. As it no longer has any connection to the primary religious use of Jesus, it also does not necessarily always have a negative meaning component, as is illustrated by example (9), where it just indicates surprise. (9) ‘Gee, I believe you’re right!’ he exclaimed. (OED, 1909, s.v. gee, int.2) The semantic change to a more general-purpose interjection was made possible by phonological non-transparency, which allowed hearers to infer the meaning from context alone. On the whole, the semantic development is characterised by loss of content/referential meaning and a gain in subjective meaning, in procedural meaning and in scope over propositions. Profane oaths from original religious invocations, including euphemistically remodelled forms, are extremely common in the history of English, especially from Early Modern English onwards (cf. Hughes 1991), so that the change reported here has quite a number of (sometimes short-lived) parallels. Interjections, such as marry (Fischer 1998) and gosh, essentially work like gee. 3.4.

A hedge: As it were

This example concerns another textual and in particular metalinguistic pragmatic expression. The phrase as it were is used as hedge in example (10) in so far as it marks the part of the utterance following it as linguistically (word choice) or content-wise not perfect or not completely applicable. Choosy in example (10a) is a word that goes better with human agents than with newts and the statement in example (10b) might capture only imperfectly what Mill meant to say.

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(10) a. newts seem to be as it were very choosy in where they er go, bearing in mind the existence of at least three other ponds in Skelton, … (BNC FMP: 718) b. So erm Mill wants to protect minority from within the democratic procedure, that is he wants to set up erm a system of democracy which is as it were proof against majority corruption. (BNC HUF: 184) While as it were here precedes the element it “modifies”, it can also follow it or intervene in it, and is in fact completely mobile within the sentence. From the modern perspective the form is highly irregular, apparently representing the initial chunk of a subordinate clause with an aberrant verb form. Its origin lies in fully grammatical relative and conditional comparative clauses found in Middle English and Early Modern English, as illustrated in examples (11a) and (11b) respectively, where the verb form represents a subjunctive. (11) a. Aftyr this cryste schewyd me a partye of his passyone nere his dyinge. I sawe that swete faace as yt ware drye and bludyelesse with pale dyinge, sithen mare de pale langourande; (HC, cmjulnor) b. The fyrst day, as Saynt Jerom sayth, þe see schall aryse vp yn hyr styd, soo þat þe watyr schall be hear then ayny hyll, by xlti cubytys, stondyng styll yn her styd, as hit wer a wall. (HC, cmmirk) The more common use, and also the more relevant one, is the conditional comparative clause (11b), where simple as is an alternative to as if, a use that continued into Early Modern English. The meaning of approximativeness that is important for the modern hedge is present in these cases. Already in Middle English we also find clear instances of the marker use, cf. example (12). (12) it bihoueþ þat it be be-goon aboute wit swiche goldene hemmes þat is to seyn wit þe bri|tnesse of charite, þe wyche mowen conteyne and bynde alle vertus in oon and make oon of manye, departyngge to alle here clernesse, and so cleuyngge to alle vertus þat as it were þey alle bete not manye, bote oon. (HC, cmaelr3) The hedge interpretation and use may have been brought about or influenced by two facts. There are a quite high number of cases in Middle English and Early Modern English that are ambiguous between the conditional comparative clause and the hedge reading, depending on the pause and intonation structures one imagines for them, cf. example (13a) and (13b). (13) a. e, þof it be a ful synful soule – þe whiche is to God as it were an enmye – … (HC, cmcloud) b. The colour of the water of the baynes is as it were a depe blew se water, and rikith like a sething potte continually, having sumwhat a sulphureus and sumwhat onpleasant savor. (HC, cetrav1a)

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The second point is that as it were is found as a translation for Latin quasi in, e.g., the Wycliffe Bible. This slightly different approximator use may have reinforced the possible hedge readings. An indicator for the increasing independence of the hedge use and the petrification of the form is found in cases like example (14), where the subjects do not agree although the referent should be the same (on a conditional comparative reading). (14) He looked as it were a wilde boor. (HC, cmctvers) With the increasing regularisation of explicit as if for the conditional comparative from Early Modern English onwards, as it were turned more and more into an isolated form available for further specialisation. Unsurprisingly, clear marker uses thus already account for two-thirds of all occurrences of the string in Early Modern English. (For a more detailed description cf. Brinton 2008, who sees the process as grammaticalisation, and Claridge forthcoming, who sees it as pragmaticalisation.) Subordinate clauses of various types (adverbial, relative) have also been the origin of other pragmatic markers, e.g. please, I guess (Brinton 1996), if you like and so to speak. 3.5.

A conversational formula: Good-bye

This and the following example are treated in detail in Arnovick (1999), the main points of which we will summarise here. The origin of the modern form good-bye lies in the phrase God be with you, which is attested in the Chadwyck-Healey electronic corpus of English plays (Middle English, Early Modern English, Presentday English) from the late fifteenth century (1496). The Chadwyck-Healey database contains 181 Early Modern English and Present-day English God be with you utterances. Within the corpus, the phrase God be with you occurs only in Early Modern English closing sections, where it demonstrates a dual illocutionary meaning as well as a stable organisational role within dialogue. Initially, the illocutionary force is two-fold: the fully articulated, Early Modern English God be with you essentially counts as a blessing as well as a courteous closing recognition of the hearer by the speaker. Close reading of extended passages as well as broader illocutionary context speak to the power of God be with you as a blessing. The response to God be with you, for example, is often the hearer’s own blessing in acknowledgment. “God be with you Peter” elicits in return, “blesse thee my boy” (Anon., The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England, 1591: lines 1296–1297). Similarly, “Cryst make the strong” follows “Syr, god be with you” (John Rastell, Calisto and Melebea, 1527: lines 314–315). Other blessing forms appear regularly in the corpus and function similarly to God be with you. Shakespeare’s characters, for example, repeat “God save you” among the many blessings they deliver (Spevack 1969: 1,170–1,174).

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God be with you blessings routinely close conversations. The stage direction Exeunt ‘Exit’ follows sections of dialogue terminating with God be with you, both within Shakespeare plays and within the larger Chadwyck-Healey corpus. The line reading “Than God be with yow;/ we leave ye here behynde” leaves little doubt about the closing (John Bale, Three Laws, c. 1540: line 146). In Love’s Labor’s Lost we hear the objection “O, stay” in response to “God be with you” (example (15)): (15) Costard. I thank your worship, God be wi’ you! Berowne. O, stay, slave; I must employee thee. (Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, 3.1.150–151) During this period, the ability to close may be a property of blessings more generally. Other blessings perform the same function as God be with you closes, as in the parting lines in examples (16) and (17): (16) Now god be your good spende (Anon., Hyckescorner, 1515: 71.l.30). (17) God be your defender (John Phillips, Patient Grissel, 1566–1594: 175). The data reveal, in short, that in contemporary usage the blessing God be with you was recognised as a terminal utterance. In the late sixteenth century, the phrase undergoes contraction (cf. example (15) above) and gradually comes to be treated as one word: the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, s.v. good-bye) finds godbwyes in the Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey (1573) and the corpus offers lexicalised instances, such as godb’w’y, godbwye and god buy’ye, from the next half century. Eventually, the closing function of God be with you becomes dominant. Blessing force is supplanted as the formal change just outlined blurs the locutionary act. The non-transparent nature of the form in typical exchanges, such as example (18), must have contributed to further opacity: (18) Sir Davy. If I can possibly, I will. Sir Jolly. Well God b’w’y Exit Sir Jolly Sir Davy. God b’w’y heartily good Neighbor (Thomas Otway, The Souldiers Fortune, 1681: 5.1.70) The timing of this shift, traceable in the Chadwyck-Healey corpus, seems to coincide with the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries when the blessing falls out of use. A further formal development occurs when good is substituted for God (Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, s.v. good-bye). Good forms, probably in analogy to good-day and similar items, can be found in the corpus no earlier than the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and only after the contraction of be with you, yielding good-b’wy, goodby.7 By the mid-seventeenth century, the trun-

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cated form bye is attested in both the corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary; the first half of the eighteenth century brings the duplicated bye, bye to dialogue found in the database (e.g. Henry Carey, The Disappointment, 1732, line 73). In its most contracted forms, the illocutionary force of greeting alone prevails, for any other force becomes less distinct as articulatory processes transform the expression. From this point on, the usage of good-bye quickly supersedes that of the earlier phrase. Approximately 457 good-bye forms appear in the database, all dating from 1676 to 1919. Four hundred postdate 1750, the time in which the usage of good-bye as the common close is secured. Even before the predominance of the form, by the advent of good-bye, blessing is hard to detect in the close. This closing form is propositionally vague and declaratively empty. Indeed, the analogy with good-day and related forms may have been facilitated because people no longer recognised the original illocutionary force of the expression. Upon the formal evolution of present-day good-bye, then, the blessing implicit in its ancestor ceases to function. When good-bye appears in conversations dating from the late seventeenth century onward, a greeting close alone survives: no religious meaning accompanies the fully contracted, lexicalised forms. All function as the closing greeting does today. The illocutionary clarification that occurs when a combined blessing-greeting becomes a singular greeting represents an increase in politeness and discursive organisation. Speaker intention is also clarified when unambiguous blessing supplements the close. Yet, the story of God be with you does not end with its metamorphosis into goodbye. After being subsumed into the close, the locution re-emerges with a modified pragmatic purpose. In the late nineteenth century, the original blessing re-emerges in a fully analytic form. Twenty-six God be with you blessings appear in the corpus between 1851 and 1900, after the presence of only eight of them in the previous one hundred years (1751–1850). God be with you fails to work as a parting greeting in its resurrected state, behaving instead as any other independent blessing. Dislocated from the parting close, the separate blessing God be with you operates freely within discourse and gains conversational mobility. The modern reintroduction of God be with you as an independent blessing emphasises the altered function of good-bye. 3.6.

A conversational formula: Bless you!

In Present-day English, bless you is the conventional thing to say when someone sneezes. Its primary meaning is an expression of politeness. Responding to a sneeze, the speaker uses the formula to acknowledge the sneezer, to offer comfort and to excuse a disruption of the social interaction. In this way, the formulaic expression encodes linguistic politeness, while the conversational routine advances discourse through its non-salient automaticity. Twenty-first-century usage relies on direct observation and allows us to generalise about bless you in a synchronic description. Four kinds of illocutions coexist in

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Present-day English. Some speakers intend bless you as a religious blessing. They mean literally what they say, perhaps even specifying God bless you. Some recall a superstition about sneezing as a sign of something harmful and its call for a quick bless you or Gesundheit. Some speakers recognise both forms as a vague wish that the sneezer stay well or regain good health. Still others are motivated solely by politeness. The first three kinds of speakers act politely by way of performing a primary speech act of blessing or wishing. The fourth kind utter a polite formula, the only function and intended purpose of which is social and discursive. The picture that emerges of the sneeze bless you is of a set of related acts that vary in their illocutionary force. We might envision a continuum of functions having a Judeo-Christian magical blessing at one pole and a formulaic conversational routine at the other:

These present functions can be linked to the historical development. Of the four main meanings attached to the utterance, its earliest and primary use is as a blessing. In the Helsinki diachronic corpus, the verb bless is attested in Old English (bletsian) and in Middle English (blessen) onward. It is used with second-person pronouns to bless (examples (19) and (20)): (19) Old English: We ðec bletsiaþ, Fæder Almihtig (Daniel 400). (20) Middle English: Crist carped þanne […] “Thomas […] Blessed mote þow be […] And blessed mote þei alle be in body & in soule That neuere shal se me” (Piers Plowman B, 19.173). Although we lack particular evidence of bless you following a sneeze in the corpus texts, the form bless you consistently blesses in secular settings elsewhere. In the Middle English Dame Siriz, for instance, the lady exclaims, “Blesse þe, Blesse þe, leue knaue!/ Lest þou mes-auenter haue” (line 201). In such uses, the intention is still quasi-religious (superstitious) or magical, but the form has moved at least partly outside of its original institutional context of the Christian Church. Bless you blessings remain current into the modern period. The phrase alternates occasionally with periphrastic variants, such as God bless you, Christ bless you, The Lord bless you and Heaven bless you (example (21)): (21) Early Modern English: Heauen blesse your Expedition (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV: 1.4.248). Formally, the Middle English and Early Modern English examples (cf. heauen blesse vs. heauen blesses) make use of the optative subjunctive to express a bless or a wish. The two other functions belonging to the locution, the wish and the polite formula, originate in the blessing. Given the nature of historical linguistic sources,

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examples of these functional shifts are difficult, if not impossible, to find; therefore we have to approach this change from an oblique angle. Wishes resemble blessings except that they are non-religious speech acts. An important difference is that the speaker cannot bring about what is being wished for, but simply expresses a mental state favourable to the addressee. In the sneeze context, the implied wish is one for good health. While available historical corpora yield no wishes related to sneezing, the following example from the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English (CONCE)8 establishes a link between drinking to somebody’s health and the use of bless you (22): (22) Gintlemen, I drink his health – Desmond, my long loved frind, bless ye! [All rise solemnly and drink – “Mr. MacUsquebaugh.”] (CONCE, t2drarob, 1850–1870) The everyday, secular wish is completely removed from the religious sphere. The same goes for the polite formula, which is essentially semantically empty. While greeting uses similar to God be with you are attested (“Blesse thee Throte. – Maister Smalshanke welcome”, Corpus of English Dialogues, d2cbarre), sneeze contexts again prove hard to attest. The only link between bless you and sneeze is found in an unexpected context, a poem by Tennyson, which may attest to a conventional connection between the two in the nineteenth century, however (example (23)): (23) ’Friend Edwin, do not think yourself alone Of all men happy. Shall not Love to me, As in the Latin song I learnt at school Sneeze out a full God-bless-you right and left? (Tennyson, “Edwin Morris”, 1851) The diachronic change observed in the sneeze blessing may be understood as a redistribution of pragmatic function, the net result of which represents a pragmatic strengthening. Saying bless you, the present-day speaker no longer participates in a religious ritual, but instead engages in a conversational routine that furthers discourse and reinforces sociocultural cohesion through a demonstration of politeness. Finally, the local illocutionary performance of blessing gives way diachronically to a convention, the larger purpose of which is conversational. The use of bless you as a conversational routine has led to its sequential fixation, which means that it occurs only at a certain point in discourse and is triggered by the occurrence of another form. In this use, it is the immobile second element of an adjacency pair, whose first member is non-linguistic. It shares this discourse-sequential specialisation with good-bye. In contrast to the former, it is noticeable, however, that bless you has not undergone any formal change; like, for example, God save the Queen, it has also fossilised the main-clause use of the subjunctive. This last example has highlighted a problem in an extreme form that applies to all pragmaticalisation research, that of lack of data. None of the sources we checked

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(Chadwyck-Healey, ICAME CD corpora, Corpus of English Dialogues and Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English) contained any sneeze blessings. The Tennyson example above was found through a full-text search of the Oxford English Dictionary9 and is the only one of its kind. The only corpus that clearly attests our form is the British National Corpus, with 23 out of 42 bless you’s in the spoken part representing sneeze blessings. In the 90 million words of the written part of the British National Corpus, however, there are only three fictional examples of sneeze bless you (out of 110 occurrences). This shows how rarely authors record this form and probably other, similar ones that rely on or react to non-verbal context in particular.

4.

Characteristics of pragmaticalisation and pragmaticalised items

The developments described above with the help of six selected examples are characterised by the following features. All forms develop from a fully propositional (or referential) meaning to meanings that are more textual/discourse-oriented (well, as it were, good-bye, bless you) and/or interpersonal (well, pray/prithee, Jesus/gee, bless you (again)). Semantic bleaching of the original propositional or illocutionary meaning has in each case been accompanied by pragmatic strengthening with the new pragmatic sense(s) becoming conventionalised. In each of the examples, the original meaning feeds important semantic components into the new pragmatic use, even if this happens rather indirectly via the taboo element in the case of the oath Jesus. There is thus often some persistence of the lexicogrammatical meaning of the source construction. In the case of good-bye, however, the formal development has obscured all such connection. In so far as the new form-meaning pairings serve to highlight specific attitudes and viewpoints of the speaker, they have also undergone subjectification. This is visible in as it were, gee and especially in bless you when used as a wish for good health. In the case of bless you, the development of a wish out of a blessing strengthens speaker perspective through a pragmatic reanalysis or inferential realignment, just as it does in the derivation of expressive “cussing” out of religious cursing (Arnovick 1999: 73–94; cf. Traugott 1995: 36, 50). The objective force of the performative blessing gives way to a subjective expressive. Similarly, its concrete and literal proposition is transformed into one that is abstract or vague, just as its lexical meaning is made to serve an interpersonal function (cf. Traugott 1989, 1995, 1997). Altogether this pragmatic change is consistent with that seen in subjectification, the pragmaticsemantic process through which “meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state, or attitude toward what is said” (Traugott 1989: 35, 1997: 185). The speaker expresses his or her individual wish rather than participating in the ritualised event of blessing. In this way, wishing refocuses perspective on the speaker, saying to the hearer, in effect, “these are my good feelings for you”. Collectively, then, the movement from blessing to wishing favours an

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orientation internal to the speaker at the expense of one external to him or her (Traugott 1995: 47). Strongly interpersonal items of course also exhibit a certain degree of intersubjectivity. The semantic developments are accompanied by syntactic changes. While lexical well has scope over a verb or an adjective phrase, pragmatic well has scope over a whole proposition or utterance. The same goes for pray. Good-bye in a sense has scope over the whole preceding discourse. Pragmaticalisation can thus go hand in hand with scope extension of the item in question. The state of affairs just described fits very well to the paths of directionality in semantic change described by Traugott and Dasher (2005: 40; see Figure 1): truth-conditional content scope within proposition nonsubjective

> > >

> content/procedural scope over proposition subjective

> > >

non-truth conditional procedural scope over discourse intersubjective

Figure 1. Paths of directionality (Traugott and Dasher 2005: Figure 1.4)

Accordingly, Gehweiler (2008) also treats the development from Jesus (proper name) > Jesus (interjection 1) (treated in section 3.3 above) as an instance of a change induced by invited inferences. Pragmaticalisation can thus be seen as a specific subtype of semantic change. The status of the pragmaticalising item within the language is affected, in so far as it changes the category it belongs to. The formal development in our six cases may be summarised as in Figure 2: (1) well:

lexical item (adjective/ adverb)

> lexical item (adverb?, unclear word class?)

(2) pray/prithee:

matrix clause

> lexical item (adverb?, unclear word class?)

(3) Jesus/gee:

lexical item > lexical item (proper noun) (expletive)

(4) as it were:

subordinate clause (adverbial)

> phrasal chunk / fixed formula (idiom)

(5) good-bye:

main clause

> lexical item (full form) (unclear word class)10

(6) bless you!:

main clause

> main clause OR phrasal chunk (idiom)11

Figure 2. Formal development of six pragmatic markers

> lexical item (interjection)

> lexical item (short form: bye)

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In three cases, namely (2), (4) and (5), the change proceeds from a fully fledged grammatical category (clause) to a lexical(ised) item with a pragmatic function. Two other changes, (1) and (3), remain within the lexical realm throughout, but move from a more major to a more minor (or more indeterminate) category within the lexicon. Thus one can speak of decategorialisation going on, in the sense that the item loses morphological and syntactic properties that previously identified it as a member of a (more) major grammatical category (cf. Hopper and Traugott [1993] 2003: 106–107). In the above list, (6) is the only item where perhaps no decategorialisation takes place, i.e. which might be regarded as an intact main clause both before and after the pragmatic change (apart from the deletion or omission of an explicit subject12). Due to its use of the subjunctive, which is no longer productively used in main clauses, it is an ossified form, however. It is not always easy to clearly categorise the endpoints of these changes. The word class of (1) and (2), for example, is rather elusive; adverb is an option but this class in itself is not well defined and contains extremely diverse members. Another option would be to posit a word class “pragmatic marker” for all the endpoints, which Brinton (2006) seems to be doing when she posits developmental paths like adverb > conjunction > pragmatic marker (for why), matrix clause > parenthetical disjunct > pragmatic marker (for I think). The common (formal and functional) features partly listed in section 2 above could then be used to define them as a class, but it has to be noted that the defining power of these features may not be very convincing. Brinton (this volume) indeed concludes that discourse markers are not to be seen as a formal grammatical class – whereas grammatical categories (the focus of Figure 2) are usually defined on formal morphological and distributional grounds. Regarding the connection of the emerging pragmatic forms to other linguistic forms, the following can be noted. The source construction usually keeps on functioning in its lexical and grammatical way, so that there is a split, leading to polysemy and – with increasing opacity of the connection – ultimately homonymy. This is what is called divergence in grammaticalisation research. Well, pray and Jesus still exist in their full lexical sense as adverb, full verb and proper name, respectively. Bless you, as stated above, can still be intended in its religious or quasi-religious sense. Only as it were is formally completely isolated, since conditional comparative clauses have come to be unambiguously expressed by as if instead of by simple as. With respect to pray, the divergence came to an end when the pragmatic item pray was discontinued at some time in the nineteenth century. This latter point hints at the transience of some (or most?) pragmatic markers and a process of continual emergence or renewal of forms (Brinton 1996), as with the newer form please stepping in for pray. As it were has coexisted with similar pragmaticalised forms throughout its history, such as if you will (cf. Brinton 2008), so to speak/say. The oath Jesus joined and is joined by other originally religious terms, while gee can be linked in kind and partly in function with marry (< Virgin Mary)

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(cf. Fischer 1998). For certain pragmatic functions one thus finds several layers of older and newer forms. The four originally non-main-clause forms treated here have acquired optionality in the process; while, e.g., pray in example (3c) above is necessary for the syntactic structure, this is no longer so in examples (4) and (5), and the same applies to as it were in example (11b) versus (12). This goes together with the fact that the pragmatic forms in question usually occupy, strictly speaking, extra-sentential positions. This also gives them positional flexibility and mobility. While pragmatic well is most commonly found clause-initially, it is not really restricted to this position, and pray, as illustrated by the examples above, can occur in clause-initial, -medial and -final positions. As it were can also be found in all clausal positions, though of course close to the propositional part it immediately modifies; it can precede, follow or even intervene in this element. Pragmaticalisation can lead to new lexical items: a new meaning/function-form pairing that is stored as a unit in the lexicon. Brinton and Traugott (2005: 96) characterise a lexicalised form as having “formal and semantic properties that are not completely derivable or predictable from the constituents of the construction or the word formation pattern”. In a way, this applies to all of the forms here, but it is most noticeable in those cases where a formal change or irregularity is involved. Prithee and good-bye show partly or completely opaque phonetic form through fusion and coalescence, while the clipped and respelled form gee is also thereby disconnected from its base form. Fusion, or idiomatic fixation, is also present in as it were, which is also a form that no longer conforms to the syntactic rules of the language. Most pragmatic expressions are probably not phonetically “deviant”, however (e.g. well, bless you). Nevertheless, their increased freedom in itself can make them more lexicalised in nature. Pray, for instance, has gained greater lexical autonomy by shedding its clausal environment and its verbal characteristics. All the forms treated here function on the level of discourse, i.e. they arise in discourse and their functioning remains wedded to the realm. Their origin and consequent use is governed by conversational goals and principles. They play a role in the expression of politeness, for example, as illustrated by pray being used within negative politeness strategies and good-bye, bless you in what might be called politic behaviour (Watts 2003). As it were relates both to the Gricean maxim of manner (if it refers to way of phrasing) and/or to the maxim of quality (if it refers to applicability/truth of content). Well in its hesitation or qualifier use can mark dispreferred turns (Pomerantz 1984) in discourse. Such uses highlight another kind of optionality: these forms do not have to be used following any linguistic rules in the strict sense. Discourse completely lacking in pragmatic expressions will normally be judged as “unnatural”, “awkward”, “disjointed”, “impolite”, “unfriendly” or “dogmatic” (judgements collected from the literature by Brinton 1996: 35–36), but that still leaves speakers the freedom to make their individual choices as to the number and type of expressions to be used.

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Beyond pragmaticalisation: Discursisation

Pragmatic change proceeds in a gradual and step-wise development. This also means that pragmaticalisation can “deepen”, or be followed by a distinct second phase. The first case is visible in the example of well, with a textual use developing first and then diversifying into more interpersonal uses. A second pragmaticalisation step can be seen in the development of the oath Jesus to the interjection gee, or the shortening of good-bye to bye. Similar to the process of grammaticalisation, items once pragmaticalised can then acquire new/further pragmatic functions. Good-bye and bless you, however, complicate the pragmaticalisation model and need further explanation, as noted originally by Arnovick (1999). Specifically, God be with you and bless you have an illocutionary (rather than primarily propositional) function at the onset. In that these forms are already pragmatic, the term pragmaticalisation on its own proves opaque. To recognise the historic phenomenon in its own right, Arnovick (1999) deemed the resultant process a special kind of pragmaticalisation, calling it discursisation. Discursisation recruits discursive markers from illocutionary material. The discursisation model explains good-bye’s illocutionary “smoothing” and subsequent highlighting of discourse function; increased organisational clarity can be supposed to motivate the discursisation of God be with you. The closing salutation good-bye displays pragmatic strengthening in its historical development. In the discursisation of good-bye, a larger discourse function supersedes the local illocutionary function expressed by God be with you. The earlier semantic content and the blessing evoked by the phrase are lost from good-bye; its declarative force diminishes. A highly important communicative purpose is achieved in virtue of these changes. An immediate conversational goal is met and an organisational strategy accomplished politely and unequivocally with the new closing formula.13 When bless you fails either to bless or to wish, it may also behave as a conversational (routine) formula. Today, the expression has become conventionalised to the point where the sneeze bless you contains no religious content and lacks the force of a blessing. Because the words belie their force, non-native speakers of English have to be taught the pragmatic idiom. In light of its function, the shift from blessing to politeness indicator should not be regarded merely as a bleaching (Arnovick 1999). In this case, semantic content and illocutionary force have been altered rather than lost, adaptively reused in service of the larger discourse. The trajectory of change suggests an underlying cognitive-communicative motivation. While the formula stands as an expression of sympathy, its conventionality prevents the utterance from representing a subjectivised act (as opposed to the wish bless you, cf. above). The utterance is not so much personal as it is traditional. Losing semantic content and illocutionary force, bless you comes to signal linguistic politeness. There is no doubt that discursisation yields a pragmatic strengthening. Following a sneeze, bless you furthers discourse, offers sympathy, maintains inter-

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personal accord and reinforces social bonds. The sneeze formula reiterates the speaker’s commitment to the social interaction and the conversation even while its earlier illocutionary function is sacrificed. The descriptive merit of the discursisation hypothesis encourages new questions about its exact mechanics. Perhaps we can flesh out Arnovick’s (1999) model in light of its logical implications. In the case of the sneeze bless you, discursisation operates via a net de-institutionalisation14 of extra-linguistic religious context associated with the broader historical shift of secularisation. Three distinct episodes of de-institutionalisation yield the different, later meanings and uses of bless you: Blessing >>>> PARTIAL DE-INSTITUTIONALISATION >>>> Superstitious blessing Blessing >>>> DE-INSTITUTIONALISATION >>>> Wish Blessing >>>> DE-INSTITUTIONALISATION >>>> Polite formula In other words, de-institutionalisation neutralises (i.e. secularises) the extra-linguistic context of the blessing, compromising its force. While blessing may no longer remain viable in a particular speech situation, de-institutionalisation does not in itself recruit the old locution for new discursive duty. De-institutionalisation alone might yield an expression that was archaic, ironic or simply inappropriate after a sneeze. Rather, the process of discursisation seems to take advantage of deinstitutionalisation to produce the polite formula out of newly secularised words. In light of historical evidence, the second process presumably depends on the first or necessarily acts in conjunction with it. That is, once it is emptied of illocutionary force, the blessing locution then becomes available for (further) pragmatic exploitation. Subsequently it is reanalysed or reinforced as a pragmatic indicator and conventionalised in this use. Data from the corpora mitigate against the opposite scenario. It seems less likely that discursisation recruits illocutionary material directly, with no loss of its force, until de-institutionalisation follows, when force diminishes. The history of God be with you reveals that the pragmatic closing role of good-bye is enhanced (by becoming an exclusive function) when the locution loses its capacity to bless. De-institutionalisation of context again seems to precede, and therefore to enable, pragmatic reinforcement. Discursisation strengthens conversational implicature as a formula emerges with a single function, namely to close the conversation. Discursisation and de-institutionalisation as outlined in this chapter can be seen respectively as a subtype of and a contributory process to pragmaticalisation. They create new pragmatic items, but the difference from straightforward pragmaticalisation is that they work on material that is already pragmatic in nature. If one went beyond illocutionary material as input, potential further examples for discursisation might be discourse deixis and the item videlicet as treated by Moore (2006). In the first case, deictic elements, such as here, above, below, are recruited and re-

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modelled for highlighting textual structure and thus enhancing discourse clarity. In the second example, videlicet, used as a metalinguistic textual element (‘namely’, ‘i.e.’), develops into a text-organising unit indicating the onset of quoted material (and concurrent code-switching) in the legal register.

6.

Pragmaticalisation versus grammaticalisation

A number of the characteristics mentioned in section 4 are also treated in grammaticalisation research, namely semantic bleaching, persistence, subjectification, decategorialisation, divergence and coalescence. Thus “discourse markers appear to undergo many of the morphosyntactic and semantic changes associated with grammaticalization” (Brinton 2006: 308), which has led many researchers, for example Brinton or Traugott, to argue that pragmatic expressions, such as the one illustrated here, are in fact grammaticalised. In analysing the marker look/lookit/ looky/look-a-here, Brinton (2001: 193) finds that decategorialisation, coalescence, phonological attrition, desemanticisation, pragmatic strengthening, subjectification and divergence apply in this case – which for her is a case of grammaticalisation. A common definition of grammaticalisation is: “the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions or grammatical items develop new grammatical functions”, of which a prototypical example is the development of be going to into a marker of future tense (Hopper and Traugott 2003). In Givón’s well-known scheme (1979: 209) the process in the long run proceeds from free use in discourse via bound use to the ultimate demise of an item (discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero). It is certainly true that some processes are shared by both grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation, but (i) this is not (completely) true for all processes and (ii) some of the processes seem to be actually better suited to pragmaticalisation than to grammaticalisation.15 Let us look at (i) first, taking into account aspects mentioned in Lehmann (1985), Hopper (1991), Hopper and Traugott (2003) and Heine (2003). Pragmatic items do not become obligatory, i.e. their presence is not enforced by any linguistic/co-occurrence rule. Pragmatic items are not paradigmaticalised in so far as they do not join a grammatical paradigm (cf. Brinton 1996). As stated above, pragmatic items exhibit scope extension and positional freedom, whereas grammatical items show scope condensation and largely fixed syntactic positions. Brinton and Traugott (2005: 140), however, note that scope reduction has been challenged in grammaticalisation as well. These preceding four points can nevertheless be seen to be extremely important for grammaticalisation; their absence in pragmatic changes is therefore highly relevant. Coalescence was mentioned above as occurring in pragmatic changes, but not in the same sense that it

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occurs in grammatical items: in the latter it means morphological bonding of the whole item with another, so that the item in question becomes affix-like, whereas pragmatic items as a whole remain free forms16 (even if internal coalescence applies, as in prithee and good-bye) and often gain in autonomy. Specialisation in the sense of one form becoming dominant for one function also does not generally occur with pragmatic markers. As to (ii), subjectification and pragmatic strengthening are often mentioned as common processes. (Inter)subjectivity is certainly a major and primary characteristic of pragmatic expressions, whereas it can only be an additional, not the main, feature of grammatical items. Rather, the latter have an abstract, structural/functional meaning (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 11). Subjectification as well as pragmatic strengthening may be seen as stages within grammaticalisation, but as major and lasting points in pragmaticalisation. Thus, one might argue that grammaticalisation shares characteristics with pragmaticalisation and not vice versa. What seems to be at issue here, beyond the question of shared processes, is the nature of the outputs of the change, together with the question of how basic terms such as grammar and pragmatics are viewed and defined. Researchers who argue against the grammaticalisation or for the pragmaticalisation of pragmatic markers have doubts that the outputs of the change are items that can really be called “grammatical” in formal and functional respects. Traugott, who views discourse markers as the results of grammaticalisation processes, bases her argumentation on the following characterisation of grammar: I see grammar as structuring communicative as well as cognitive aspects of language. Grammar encompasses phonology, morphosyntax, and truth-functional semantics, and is rich enough to license interaction with the general cognitive abilities such as are involved in the speaker-addressee negotiation that gives rise to grammaticalization. These include information processing, discourse management, and other abilities central to the linguistic pragmatics of focusing, topicalization, deixis, and discourse coherence. (Traugott 2003: 626)

This is an extremely broad understanding of grammar, which goes far beyond the linguistic system and includes performance matters. Such a terminological extension, while clearly allowing the evolution of pragmatic items to be classified as grammaticalisation, may not be overly helpful for the clarity of linguistic description. For heuristic purposes we would like to work with a narrower and more traditional notion of grammar and compare it to the state of affairs with pragmatic expressions. Grammar in the strict sense is a set of categories and rules for creating infinite combinations. Rules imply a degree of obligatoriness and a restricted set of choices (within paradigms as a rule) – neither of which is the case for pragmatic markers, as we have seen. Typical grammatical categories are morphological categories, such as case or number, usually realised by affixes, clitics or auxiliaries; syntactic categories such as noun phrases and clauses; and syntactic functions like subject and adverbial. None of these functions, nor their formal realisations, fit ex-

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tant pragmatic expressions. Some, like as it were, are positively ungrammatical in form. Furthermore, if one looks at clines of grammaticality showing the path items take within the process of grammaticalisation, one notices that none of these fit the paths described here. These clines are (i) content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix (> zero), (ii) relational noun > secondary adposition (i.e. pre- or post-position) > primary adposition > agglutinative affix > fusional affix and (iii) full verb (> vector verb, i.e. intermediate stage(s) between full and auxilary verb) > auxiliary > clitic > affix (Brinton 2006: 309, after Lehmann 1985 (ii); Hopper and Traugott 2003: 111 (iii)). No pragmatic expression goes even as far as the second position in any of these clines. The outputs of the change we are concerned with here can therefore not be called grammatical, which speaks for calling the change that produced them “pragmaticalisation”.

7.

Conclusion

Pragmaticalisation is a process that starts and ends in discourse: first, lexical and syntactic chunks are imbued with special discourse relevance by speakers and/or hearers and reused in similar discourse contexts to the original ones; secondly, illocutionary material is recruited for further illocutionary and discursive uses. The only linguistic system pragmaticalised items can be said to enter is the lexicon, as words or as idioms. These items can be seen as holistic, opaque and irregular in nature, which is more typical of the lexicon than of any other level of language. Givón’s scheme quoted above could thus be remodelled for pragmaticalisation in the following way: discourse > lexicon > zero. The zero stage here is not reached by ongoing phonetic attrition, however. When a form stops being useful or is replaced – for whatever reasons – by another pragmatic marker (e.g. pray > please), the pragmatic expression simply vanishes through lack of use (leaving behind its homonymous source form, as a rule). Finally, let us come back to the definition of pragmaticalisation and provide a variation of Frank-Job’s phrasing. Pragmaticalisation is the process by which a lexico-grammatical sequence or word form, in a given context, loses its propositional meaning in favour of an essentially metacommunicative, discourse interactional meaning and/or (an already pragmatic element) continues to develop further pragmatic functions or forms. The latter part, which is of course reminiscent of the grammaticalisation definition, takes account of the developmental facts observed in well, Jesus/gee, good-bye and bless you above. Subsequently we might also see discursisation as a subtype or a distinct second step of pragmaticalisation. These additions are important as many pragmatic items seem to be multifunctional, with close and overlapping functions.

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Notes 11 It is interesting to note that the published article of the conference talk referred to in the text (Fleischman and Yaguello 2004) does not contain any reference to pragmaticalisation. 12 Brinton (1996) lists 12 different characteristics. 13 The Old English discourse marker wella / wel la, an attention-getting device similar to OE hwæt, is not attested after the Old English period and cannot be linked to the newly appearing function in Middle English (Jucker 1997: 98). 14 All examples in sections 3.1 to 3.3, and in 3.5, are taken from the studies reported. Some new examples are added in section 3.6. 15 In the context of semantic change, pray is also treated by Traugott and Dasher (2005: 252–255) as an instance of the development of social deictics. The development they describe, from main clause performative expression via parenthetical expression to adverbial, is similar to Akimoto’s account. 16 This represents Gehweiler’s terminology. Secondary interjections have homonyms in other word classes, while this is not the case for primary interjections; cf. also Gehweiler’s contribution on interjections in this volume. 17 Incidentally, the greeting forms based on good, such as good morning, good night, etc., may also have their origin in a religiously inspired wish. According to the OED, the present forms are elliptical for either ‘God give you good night, morning, etc.’ or for ‘have good night, etc.’ – cf. My godsep god geue you good daye (Caxton, Fables of Æsop, OED, s.v. good day). 18 Thank you to Merja Kytö for making available the data from the Corpus of NineteenthCentury English (CONCE). 19 Incidentally, the OED does not even recognise and define the sneeze bless you (3rd ed., including additions up to June 2008). 10 Labelling practice in dictionaries for good-bye is indeterminate and confusing: as exclamation (Cambridge Advanced), as interjection (Longman), as “sentence substitute” (Collins) or, diplomatically, as nothing at all (OED). 11 It is difficult to say how native speakers would categorise this form. Formally, it has a predicate-object structure, like thank you, screw you, see you, but all of these might equally just be fixed formulae. 12 Variation between simple bless you and God/Heaven/Lord/Jesus bless you is present from at least Early Modern English onwards. 13 At this stage of the investigation more research is required to determine the relative contribution of different sociolinguistic processes to the change affecting God be with you and to broadening the diachronic context in which it is viewed. Until then, we can at least recognise complementary pragmatic motivations for the pragmatic strengthening. We may be witness to a kind of diachronic conspiracy through which a number of linguistic and cultural determinants propel the rise of good-bye (Arnovick 1999: 151). 14 It may be the case that originally ritual speech acts (in the sense of Austin) are most likely to be affected by this type of process, but other non-ritual acts might also have an institutional component that could be affected. 15 Cf. also Waltereit (2006) for a discussion refuting grammaticalisation for discourse markers. Note, however, that Waltereit does not conclude from this that we have a case of pragmaticalisation (he does not even mention the term). 16 Grammaticalised items may remain free forms as well.

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References Aijmer, Karin 1997 I think – an English modal particle. In: Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, 1–47. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Akimoto, Minoji 2000 The grammaticalization of the verb ‘pray’. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 67–84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999 Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brinton, Laurel 1996 Pragmatic Markers. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel 2001 From matrix clause to pragmatic marker: The history of look-forms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2: 177–199. Brinton, Laurel 2006 Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In: Ans Van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 307–334. Oxford: Blackwell. Brinton, Laurel 2008 The Comment Clause in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 2005 Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. British National Corpus, The 2001 Version 2 (BNC World). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. URL: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 2008 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chadwyck-Healey 1996 Literature online: English drama. Electronic database. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey Inc. Available from http://www.chadwyck.com (accessed January–March 1997). Claridge, Claudia Forthcoming The development of three pragmatic markers: as it were, so to speak, and if you like. (Paper read at ICEHL 2008, Munich). Collins English Dictionary 2006 8th ed. Glasgow: HarperCollins. Corpus of English Dialogues, A 2006 Compiled by Merja Kytö and Jonathan Culpeper, in collaboration with Terry Walker and Dawn Archer. Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English Compiled by Merja Kytö, Juhani Rudanko and Erik Smitterberg.

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Coulmas, Florian 1981 ‘Poison to your soul’: Thanks and apologies contrastively viewed. In: Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, 69–91. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Erman, Britt, and Ulla-Britt Kotsinas 1993 Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know. Studier i modern språkvetenskap 10: 76–93. Fischer, Andreas 1998 Marry: From religious invocation to discourse marker. In: Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Proceedings Anglistentag 1997 Giessen, 35–46. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Fleischman, Suzanne 1999 Pragmatic markers in comparative perspective: A contribution to cross-language pragmatics. 2–22. Available at: http://people.bu.edu/bfraser/Other%20 Specific%20DMs%20or%20DPs%20Papers/Fleishman%20-%20DM%20 like.doc (last accessed: 12 June 2009). Fleischman, Suzanne, and Marina Yaguello 2004 Discourse markers across languages. In: Carol Lynn Moder and Alda Martinovic-Zic (eds.), Discourse across Languages and Cultures, 129–148. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Frank-Job, Barbara 2006 A dynamic-interactional approach to discourse markers. In: Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to Discourse Particles, 359–374. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Fraser, Bruce 2006 Towards a theory of discourse markers. In: Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to Discourse Particles, 189–204. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gehweiler, Elke 2008 From proper name to primary interjection: The case of gee! Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9.1: 71–93. Givón, Talmy 1979 On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Heine, Bernd 2003 Grammaticalization. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 575–601. Oxford: Blackwell. Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, The 1991 Compiled by Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Helena RaumolinBrunberg. Department of English, University of Helsinki. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora. Hopper, Paul J. 1991 On some principles of grammaticization. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, vol. I, 17–35. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott [1993] 2003 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hughes, Geoffrey 1991 Swearing. Oxford: Blackwell. ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM) 1999 Second edition. Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.). The HIT Centre, University of Bergen, Norway. Jucker, Andreas H. 1997 The discourse marker well in the history of English. English Language and Linguistics 1: 91–110. Jucker, Andreas H. 2001 Discourse markers in Early Modern English. In: Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Alternative Histories of English, 210–230. London/New York: Routledge. Jucker, Andreas H. Forthcoming Pragmatics and discourse. In: Laurel Brinton and Alex Bergs (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English, vol. II (HSK). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lakoff, George 1973 Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2: 458–508. Lehmann, Christian 1985 Grammaticalization: Synchronic variation and diachronic change. Lingua e Stile 20: 303–318. Longman Dictionary of the English Language 1984 Harlow: Longman. Moore, Colette 2006 The use of videlicet in Early Modern slander despositions. A case of genre-specific grammaticalization. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 245–263. Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (3rd ed. online http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl). Palander-Collin, Minna 1999 Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 55.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Pomerantz, Anita M. 1984 Agreeing and disagreeing with assessment: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In: J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.), Structure of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah 1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spevack, Marvin 1969 Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Vol. IV. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1989 On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65.1: 31–55.

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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1995 Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1997 Subjectification and the development of epistemic meaning: The case of promise and threaten. In: Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), Modality in German Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, 185–210. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2003 Constructions in grammaticalization. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 624–647. Oxford: Blackwell. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher 2005 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltereit, Richard 2006 The rise of discourse markers in Italian: A specific type of language change. In: Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to Discourse Particles, 61–76. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Watts, Richard J. 2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wischer, Ilse 2000 Grammaticalization versus lexicalization: ‘Methinks’ there is some confusion. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 355–370. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

7.

Metaphor and metonymy Brigitte Nerlich

1.

Introduction

In 2008, Andreas Jucker defined historical pragmatics in the following way: In a broad, sociologically based view of pragmatics, historical pragmatics is a field of study that wants to understand the patterns of intentional human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments. […] The field of historical pragmatics can be split into subfields on the basis of the linguistic unit under investigation; from expressions to utterances, discourses, and discourse domains. (Jucker 2008b; see also Culpeper 2009)

In this wider societal view, historical pragmatics adds a historical dimension to pragmatics as the study of language use in context (see Jucker 1995). This is a perspective on historical pragmatics that will be adopted here, rather than the narrower one adopted by Elizabeth Traugott, for example (see Traugott 2002, 2008). In historical semantics, metaphor and metonymy have, for a long time, been recognised as major patterns of semantic change based on social and linguistic interaction in context (Geeraerts 1988; Nerlich 1992; Nerlich and Clarke 1996). Within cognitive linguistics, metaphor and metonymy have been studied as the basis for conceptualisation in thought and language. In both historical semantics and cognitive semantics, some attention has been paid to pragmatic aspects of metaphor and metonymy, mainly in work on polysemy starting with Sweetser (1990) (see also Vicente 1996; Asher and Lascarides 2001; Panther and Thornburg 2003), on regularities in semantic change by Traugott (see Traugott and Dasher 2002), Blank (1999) and Fritz (1998), for example; but most importantly, in the field of grammaticalisation (see Traugott 2002; Heine and Kuteva 2007). Historical pragmatics itself, as a relatively new linguistic discipline, has examined some aspects of metaphor and metonymy (see, for example, Koch 2001, 2004; Nerlich and Clarke 2001a; Waltereit 2004; Beeching 2007; Hilpert 2007; Sadler 2008), but more research is needed and some research carried out in the past has been forgotten and needs to be remembered. In the following, I will attempt to look more deeply at the historical, philosophical and epistemological roots of historical pragmatics in the history of philosophy and linguistics, with a focus on metaphor and metonymy, from a time of philosophical speculations around the nineteenth century up to reflections on the pragmatics of metaphor just after the advent of pragmatics as a linguistic discipline in the 1960s. This will be followed by an overview of some studies that have tried

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to examine metaphor and metonymy from a diachronic, historical and, at the same time, pragmatic perspective, mainly in the context of semantic rather than grammatical change (as studied in work starting with Claudi and Heine 1986, for example). In so doing I will try to promote not only historical and philosophical awareness amongst researchers engaged in historical pragmatics, I will also try to demonstrate the value of doing research into metaphor and metonymy from the point of view of historical pragmatics for those interested in historical and cognitive semantics/linguistics.

2.

The philosophy of metaphor/metonymy: Meaning as use and meaning as metaphor/metonymy

The history of exploring connections between figures of speech, such as metaphor and metonymy, cognition and human action began in Antiquity and reached a peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will focus on philosophical and epistemological reflections on metaphor and metonymy as societal and contextual phenomena. Obviously, historical and general linguists, such as Michel Bréal, Hermann Paul, Philip Wegener or Alan Gardiner, also engaged in studying metaphor and metonymy from a historical pragmatic point of view, but this has been summarised extensively elsewhere (see Nerlich 2009, and in press for overviews). At a time when boundaries between disciplines were still fluid, many linguists were also philosophers or social scientists and vice versa. What united many boundarycrossing nineteenth-century thinkers in their reflections on metaphor and metonymy was the belief that semantic and grammatical change is the result of what Traugott later called “strategic interaction, specifically of choice-making on the part of speakers/writers in interactional negotiation with addressees/readers” (Traugott 2002: 21). Metaphor and metonymy are central here in terms of what I shall later in this chapter discuss as “pragmatic strategies”. As shown in Nerlich and Clarke (see also Burkhardt and Nerlich 2010), various scholars attempted to craft an overarching “philosophy of metaphor” from the end of the seventeenth century onwards and also engaged in reflections on metaphor and truth (Nerlich and Clarke 2001c). According to these thinkers, metaphor was neither just a “figure of speech”, nor just a poetic fiction or decoration, but was seen as underlying the structure and evolution of human thought and language, and as embedded in human action and interaction. Whereas the philosophy of metaphor became a thriving enterprise, metonymy was mainly studied in a less spectacular fashion as one of the main mechanisms of semantic change by philologists and linguists from Christian Karl Reisig to Arsène Darmesteter and beyond (Nerlich 1992). But philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, to name just one, also included metonymy in their thinking about lan-

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guage, thought, truth and knowledge. Others might have used “metaphor” in a rather broad sense as an overarching concept embracing metonymy. The whole movement of analysing metaphor (and metonymy) in the context of ordinary life, language and thought began in earnest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular with the work of Giambattista Vico in the seventeenth century, and reached a first pan-European peak in the 1830s when linguists, philosophers, literary theorists and some rhetoricians alike proclaimed that figures of speech are, as Ortony (1975) was to say some 150 years later, not only nice, but necessary. What fascinated philosophers of metaphor was the way they drive the evolution both of thought and of language in ways that are not always easy to understand. What was important, however, for all of them was the social dimension of language use. As the French philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac said in 1746: “As men cannot make signs for themselves, except when they live together, it is a consequence that the basis of their ideas […] is uniquely in their reciprocal commerce” (quoted in Riskin 1998: 203). At the end of the eighteenth century, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a French economist and statesman, wrote an article on “Etymology” for the Encyclopédie Méthodique in which he speculated about the way metaphors emerge, get used and fade away in the “commerce” between people and also in the “commerce” between thoughts. Here he was probably influenced, like Reisig, by early speculations in the philosophy of mind about the association of ideas (which were present in Aristotle’s work but only flourished around the time of John Locke, David Hume, James Mill and John Stuart Mill; see Warren 1921): All sorts of tropes and metaphors divert the meaning of words; the figurative meaning makes us gradually forget the literal meaning and sometimes becomes, in turn, the basis for a new figure of speech; in such a way that, in the long run, the words retain no link whatsoever with their first meaning. If we want to find the traces of these accumulated changes we have to know the most ordinary foundations of the figures of speech and of metaphors; we have to study the different points of view, which we adopt to look at different things, the relationships and the analogies between the ideas, and which make the figures more natural and more appropriate. (Turgot 1784: 22; all translations by BN)

Here the focus is, as it should be in an article on etymology (see also Sweetser 1990; Traugott 2002), on diachronic change and on semantic change, rather than synchronic, pragmatic metaphor use. However, as Turgot points out, in order to understand the accumulated changes in meaning we have to study how these changes come about in language use by speakers adopting “different points of view”, establishing analogies and so on. Some of these points of view or analogies seem to be adopted more frequently or are perhaps more natural than others, especially in the case of metonymy, as we shall see in the following section. A few years after Turgot, a German philosopher and astronomer of encyclopaedic knowledge, Johann Heinrich Lambert, pointed out:

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It has, however, been known for a long time that we compare the visible with the invisible, the world of the body with the world of the spirit, sensations with thoughts, and that we use the same words for either. Hence words necessarily acquire a double and sometimes a multiple meaning. Having light in the room and a light in one’s thoughts are examples for this way of speaking. (Lambert [1764] 1965–1969: Aleth. I., § 45)

This shows that, in Lambert’s view, metaphorisation and polysemisation are intimately linked, as are synchronic language use and diachronic language change, a topic that I shall return to later. Following in the footsteps of Vico, for whom metaphors were the driving force behind the emergence of language and thought, the German philosopher Jean Paul wrote in 1804 in his Vorschule der Ästhetik: The figurative witticism can either give a spiritual dimension to the body or a bodily one to the spirit. Originally, when humans were still at one with the world, this double trope did not yet exist; at that time humans did not compare dissimilar things but proclaimed similarities. As writing in hieroglyphs preceded alphabetical writing, so metaphor came first in speaking, insofar as it designated relations and not objects; and only gradually did metaphor lose its colour and became a ‘proper’ expression. (quoted in Biese 1893: 12)

Here metaphor is situated not only within the commerce between people and minds, that is, in social context, but also within the reciprocal commerce between body and mind, that is, in a corporal context. Metaphors are not just flights of fancy; in this Jean Paul and others “agree” with modern cognitive linguists. But neither are they solely based on a one-directional “embodiment” that leads from body and brain to linguistic expression, as claimed by some cognitive linguists. The body is instead seen as one amongst other physical entities, rather than the sole font of conceptual metaphorical and metonymical activity. It is part of the pragmatic context of language use rather than its neural basis. Such insights seem to have been the spark that ignited a whole bonfire of metaphor analyses in Germany and abroad. One can find allusions to the claim that the literal is but the pallid remnant of the figurative in Germany in the writings of Gustav Gerber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred Biese, Hans Vaihinger and many more (Nerlich and Clarke 2001c). But one can also find echoes in the writings of British thinkers (and many others of various nationalities), such as, for example, the English rhetorician and philosopher Benjamin Humphrey Smart, who pointed out that figures of speech are (pace Locke) essential parts of the original structure of language; and however they may sometimes serve the purpose of falsehood, they are on most occasions, indispensable to the effective communication of truth. It is only by [these] expedients that mind can unfold itself to mind; – language is made up of them; there is no such thing as an express and direct image of thought. (Smart 1831: 210)

For Smart, as for many after him, tropes and figures of speech “are the original texture of language, and that from which whatever is now plain at first arose. All

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words are originally tropes; that is expressions turned […] from their first purpose, and extended to others” (1831: 214). And they are also the basis of truth, that is, they are central to any reflection on epistemology. Another of Jean Paul’s aphorisms became even more widely known and has to be quoted yet again in this context: “That is why every language is with relation to the designation of mental phenomena a dictionary of faded metaphors” (Jean Paul [1804] 1962–1977: 184). Johannes Bauer echoed Jean Paul’s view when he, like many others, pointed out: The original language is still one of not yet discoloured images. At that time there is no prose, as each word through its root and its composition stimulates a poetic impression, as each perception is already thought and each designation an attempt at writing poetry. (Bauer 1878, I: 9)

This was written in 1878 at the beginning of two decades of furious metaphorical research activity, another peak in a meta-metaphorical wave of activity that continued well into the beginning of the twentieth century. Two of the most important thinkers of that era were Gustav Gerber and Friedrich Nietzsche. Whereas Nietzsche is well-known for his views on truth and metaphor, as well as metonymy (see Eco 1984, 1999), Gerber is less well known, but should be more so. According to Gerber, words are not just labels for concepts; neither is it correct to say that words that have become conventional through use have a “literal” meaning and that new meanings are “figurative”. In his view, conventional meanings only appear to be literal through habituation. They once were as figurative (bildlich) as the new figurative meanings. As in the case of the first use of a root word, new word meanings are only understood by reference to the context in which they are used, but also, in this case, by reference to our accumulated knowledge of the meaning relations they entertain with other words in the language (Gerber 1871–1874, II: 21, also see Gerber 1884: 104). Here the linguistic or symbolic frame or field supplements the situational one. “Meaning” is always adjusted or adapted by reference to both. For Gerber, “the relativity of concepts and the pliability of meanings are tied to the living use of language” (see Cloeren 1988: 155, italics added). Cloeren compares this approach to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [1953] (1963) “theory of family resemblances and the overlapping of meanings, as well as his view of language as a form of life” (Cloeren 1988: 155). Metaphors as parts of “forms of life” are inextricably linked to language use on the one hand and human knowledge on the other. To give one example: only when I know what a pop tart is (that is, a rather synthetic piece of pastry filled with some sugary goo that you pop into your toaster and eat for breakfast) will I be able to use this concept to create a metaphor based on it and will I be able to understand a metaphor based on it, namely, “this is just pop tart philosophy”. Those who don’t share this form of life can neither produce nor understand the metaphor. This also means (and this is all too often forgotten by

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cognitive linguists) that metaphors are historically and culturally situated. They may be conceptually and even neurally grounded but without sociopolitical and historical knowledge metaphors would not be created and understood, or change over time (see Zinken, Hellsten and Nerlich 2008). Another big name that cannot be left unmentioned in this context is Fritz Mauthner (whose name is among the few that appear in Wittgenstein’s [1923] 1961 Tractatus). In his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Mauthner not only insists that “language is language use” (Sprache ist Sprachgebrauch, [1901] 1923, I: 24), but also holds that, as for Nietzsche and Jean Paul, whom he explicitly quotes in this context (1923, II: 456), metaphor is the principle of language, and the process of metaphor creation and semantic fading has always been the principle of its lexical growth and change: The two or the hundred ‘meanings’ of a word or a concept are just as many metaphors or images, and as we never really know the original meaning of a word nowadays because its etymology is forever shrouded in the mists of time and therefore not knowable, so every word can never have anything but metaphorical meanings. (1923, II: 451)

As a consequence, human reason, thinking and language are “metaphorical through and through” (durch und durch metaphorisch, 1923, II: 463). Therefore “language is metaphor” (Sprache ist Metapher, 1923, II: 453). And, as Mauthner takes metaphor in a very broad Aristotelian sense, according to which the term also covers metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and even irony (1923, II: 459–460), the same seems to apply to all other linguistic phenomena that are called tropes according to traditional rhetoric. Mauthner’s view of metaphor as essential to thinking and talking seems to overlap with the concept of metaphor advocated by cognitive linguists in the twentieth century. However, unlike Mauthner, some cognitive linguists went on to (try to) reduce metaphor and metonymy to neural processes rather than situating it, first and foremost, in social commerce and historical knowledge and understanding. By contrast, nineteenth-century thinkers saw that language and metaphor/metonymy use (creation and understanding) are based on being able to make inferences in context. To do so requires shared physical, social, historical, cultural, political, culinary, etc. knowledge. How, and in what way, neurons fire while using metaphors/metonymies in context is, to my mind at least, much less interesting than studying this process of inference-provoking and inference-making (of which metaphorisation and metonymisation are an integral part) and its consequences for language change over time. The processes of metaphor creation and fading, which fascinated nineteenthand early twentieth-century philosophers, are both linked to pragmatic processes: the first to the invention of a metaphor in the process of communication, the second to its conventionalisation in the process of use. This was also regarded as fundamental by linguists of a more philosophical persuasion, such as Wegener ([1885]

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1991) in particular, who saw metaphorisation as a fundamental process in language change linked to mechanisation and grammaticalisation and based on what one would now call the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures. Wegener saw it as part of the dialogic and dialectic give and take between the given and the new. The given is either the pragmatic situation or the “exposition”, which is “the functional equivalent of pragmatic situation [sic] conveyed by verbal means within the utterance” (Knobloch 1991: xvi, italics by the author; see Nerlich 1990). Wegener calls the new the “logical predicate”. Cultural knowledge is part of the pragmatic situation or the linguistic exposition qua pragmatic situation exploited in the use and understanding of metaphors in terms of logical predicates, which, once their novelty has faded, become part of language as conveyer of cultural knowledge and can then be used for expositional purposes. Before this automatisation has happened, either the pragmatic situation or linguistic exposition has to be tapped into to make metaphors comprehensible. More recently, Guy Deutscher (2005) spoke metaphorically of language as a reef of dead metaphors, and he writes about metaphor as a means of achieving expressiveness and as an engine of language change. In chapter 6 of his book The Unfolding of Language, he particularly discusses, like his historical predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chain of metaphor and grammaticalisation that leads from expressions for body parts to spatial terms to prepositions. The metaphor of the reef is taken from another philosopher of a pragmatic persuasion, namely Richard Rorty, who used the analogy of the coral reef to explain how language keeps itself alive: “Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors” (Rorty 1989: 10). Two more contributors to this tradition of studying metaphor and metonymy in use and context should be mentioned here, as their work prefigured some basic tenets of ordinary language philosophy. The first is the Cambridge philosopher John Grote who stands in the tradition of Scottish common sense philosophers. In the 1860s, he developed a theory of meaning as use and of thinking as a social activity based on communication (see Gibbins 2007). His focus on “living meaning” as opposed to “fossilised” or historical meaning can be regarded as a direct precursor of ordinary language philosophy. Another thinker who should be mentioned is the philosopher and psychologist James Sully, Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, from 1892 to 1903, who wrote his magnum opus on the human mind, in 1891. This includes reflections on the profoundly social character of speech and language use which echo Condillac, with whom we started this section of the chapter: […] we see that speech is the medium by which a double process is continually going on. On the one side by the use of a common speech the social mind is working on the individual mind […]. On the other side, by falling in with the common speech the individual is continually adjusting (consciously or unconsciously) his intellectual habits to these common forms. Every time he uses general speech he is virtually stepping away

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from the isolated individual point of view, and adopting the central social point of view. To employ the common speech is thus a social act, a recognition of an authority above the individual. Not only so, this use of the organised speech-structure by the individual implies social co-operation. (Sully [1891] 2000: 248)

The link between (social) meaning and (social) mind was further explored in ordinary language philosophy itself, especially in the works of Wittgenstein on the one hand and John L. Austin on the other, which led to the emergence of “pragmatics” as a linguistic discipline in the 1960s and 1970s. The philosopher of metaphor with close links to analytic philosophy, Max Black, was perhaps the first of that generation to link metaphor directly to linguistic pragmatics in its proper disciplinary sense, when he wrote in 1962: To take a philosophical example: Whether the expression ‘logical form’ should be treated in a particular frame as having a metaphorical sense will depend upon the extent to which its user is taken to be conscious of some supposed analogy between arguments and other things (vases, clouds, bottles, jokes) that are also said to have ‘form’. Still more will it depend upon whether the writer wishes the analogy to be active in the minds of his readers; and how much his own thought depends upon and is nourished by the supposed analogy. We must not expect the ‘rules of language’ to be of much help in such inquiries. (There is accordingly a sense of ‘metaphor’ that belongs to ‘pragmatics’ rather than to ‘semantics’ – and this sense may be the one most deserving of attention. (Black 1962: 30)

Metaphor creation and understanding depend on language use, which again depends on social and historical knowledge as much as on individual creativity. “Logical form” may have a metaphorical meaning, but only if the speaker wants to invite this metaphorical inference and only if the hearer or reader collaborates with the speaker and takes up this invitation. Mutual understanding in this situation is based in this and many other instances on more than just “the rules of language”. As Traugott has pointed out: “There is no doubt that language change occurs because of forces outside of language, most particularly processes of production and interpretation” (Traugott 2002: 20). We have to know the rules of language but we also have to know the rules of the forms of life we share with others in order to use language effectively, especially metaphorically or metonymically. As we have seen, metaphors (and metonymies) have, in the past, been discussed as “pragmatic” phenomena insofar as they are seen as social, contextual, historical and communicative. Of course, metaphor and metonymy have also, in the past, been discussed as forces of semantic or diachronic change alongside generalisation and specialisation and so on; changes that are rooted in the pragmatic use of metaphor and metonymy (see Nerlich and Clarke 1996). Another pragmatic aspect of metaphor and metonymy was not, however, discussed by these philosophers of metaphor: namely, what one might call, after Austin, the performative aspect of metaphor and metonymy, or “how to do things with metaphor and metonymy”. This aspect of metaphor and metonymy is nowadays studied in historical

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pragmatics in the context of politeness studies, for example (for a collection of chapters by the most important writers on this topic, see Culpeper and Kádár 2010; see also Jucker 2008a; Koch 2008; Beeching in press). Outside historical pragmatics, such pragmatic aspects of metaphor use are, to some extent, studied by those interested in metaphor from a critical discourse perspective on the one hand and from a science/policy perspective on the other (see Schön [1963] 2003 in particular, whose work on the “displacement of concepts” is rooted in the tradition of pragmatic linguistics avant la lettre, epitomised by Wegener and others). Here the use of metaphor (and metonymy) is analysed as an intentional and strategic move in discourses that try to persuade, provoke and stimulate action or even financial investment through the creation of visions and expectations (see Nerlich and Halliday 2005). In the following, I shall not engage with this pragmatic/performative aspect of metaphor use and its influence on history and current affairs, but concentrate on metaphor and metonymy as pragmatic strategies used to convey novel meaning in ordinary discourse. As Black pointed out, the “rules of the language” might not be much help here. We need to focus on social context, social knowledge and social interaction, or as Turgot pointed out (quoted above), “we have to study the different points of view which we adopt to look at different things, the relationships and the analogies between the ideas, and which make the figures more natural and more appropriate”. Once we have found out more about this type of meaning creation in situation we can go on to examine the diachronic processes that follow from it, or, as Turgot said, the traces of the accumulated changes. In the following two sections, I shall first explore metaphor and metonymy as pragmatic strategies of ordinary language use, then their diachronic traces, focusing, in particular, on serial metonymy.

3.

Metaphor and metonymy as pragmatic strategies

Underlying most of the past thinking on metaphor and metonymy summarised above, seems to be the assumption that metaphor and metonymy are not just “universal” cognitive mechanisms but that they have emerged, if not evolved, in situated pragmatic language use as the most successful strategies for conveying novel meaning, creating knowledge and keeping language in step with intellectual and historical developments. The trick, it seems, in being innovative and at the same time understandable (what Wegener 1991 called the balance between exposition and predicate) is to use words in a novel way, with their meaning contextually selfevident. But there are only two main ways of going about that: using words for the near neighbours of things you mean (metonymy) or using words for the look-alikes (resemblars) of what you mean (metaphor) (Nerlich and Clarke 1992a). The first strategy is based on exploiting a shared world, the second on exploiting shared knowledge. The first strategy seems to be the most basic in terms of bootstrapping

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the process of language development; the second seems to be the most important in terms of linguistic and cultural evolution. When using metonyms, the challenge for speakers and hearers is to focus on the same referent and then shift attention slightly within broadly speaking referential space to construe (novel) meaning. When using metaphors, the challenge for speaker and hearer is to focus on the concept behind the word used and make imaginative leaps across conceptual space to construe (novel) meaning. For Warren, for example, “the actual meaning-construction of metonyms depends on successful referent-identification. We cannot be certain that we have worked out the correct metonymic extension, unless we believe we know what the referent is” (Warren 1992: 68). In the case of metaphor we mostly go in the other direction and try not to identify a common referent, but to identify instead shared knowledge that can be associated with the word or phrase used. An example of a metaphor as a pragmatic strategy used to invite this sort of conceptual action would be the child who points to an oil spill on the road and says: “Look: A dead rainbow!” (Todd and Clarke 1999). An example of the use of a metonymic strategy would be the German passenger whom I observed, in 1997, looking down from a plane approaching Heathrow and saying to his wife, while pointing to a cow: “Look: BSE!” In the first case, the mother is invited to “create a relation” between the oil spill shimmering in many colours and a rainbow, a rainbow that seems to have been reduced to a sad puddle, as well as attribute life/death to a lifeless object. In the second case, the wife is invited to “exploit a given relation” between cows and the potentially deadly disease they might carry. Here the relation is not created but presupposed (see Bredin 1984: 57). In the case of metonymy, the hearer has to find the target item and interpret it by retrieving a relation between it and the trigger. As conceptual metonymic relations (such as cause-effect, part-whole, container-content) seem to be cognitively wellentrenched, the interpretation of metonymy is less demanding than the interpretation of a metaphor, where the possible links between what is said and what is meant are relatively open-ended (Warren 1992: 99) and might emerge and fade quite quickly; think of pop tarts, for example, which have now become quite difficult to buy. Whereas our ability to leap through mental spaces and establish unexpected but enlightening links between features of these spaces is exploited when using metaphors, our ability to access an entire state, situation or object from the mention of some part is the hallmark of metonymic thinking and talking (Warren 1999: 122). Both metaphorisation and metonymisation can lead to semantic change and polysemy. Whereas metaphor might create new meanings and possibly new conceptual structures (the “selfish gene” metaphor created by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s made us see evolution in a completely new way, for example), metonymy might strengthen traditional or emerging conceptual structures, say between cows and BSE, water and kettles (“the kettle is boiling”), and so on. However, as recently stressed by Barnden (2010), such distinctions are obviously fluid.

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Our ability to invite inferences through the use of metaphor and metonymy as pragmatic strategies, as well as to juggle multiple meanings should be regarded as being part of what Helmuth Feilke has called common sense-competence or contextualising competence (Feilke 1994); one could also call it pragmatic competence. From this perspective, language is used to top up the context, not the other way round. This might sound radical, but it is not. This view of language as situated contextual action goes back, at least, to the Scottish common sense philosophers, in particular Dugald Stewart, who wrote as early as 1810: And here I cannot help pausing a little, to remark how much more imperfect language is, than is commonly supposed, when considered as an organ of mental intercourse. We speak of communicating, by means of words, our ideas and our feelings to others; and we seldom reflect sufficiently on the latitude with which this metaphorical phrase ought to be understood. Even in conversing on the plainest and most familiar subject, however full and circumstantial our statement may be, the words which we employ, if examined with accuracy, will be found to do nothing more than to suggest hints to our hearers, leaving by far the principle part of the process of interpretation to be performed by the Mind itself. […] The function of language is not so much to convey knowledge (according to the common phrase) from one mind to another, as to bring two minds into the same train of thinking; and to confine them as nearly as possible to the same track. (Stewart 1810: 208)

Faced with the challenge of trying to communicate new knowledge or of conveying knowledge most efficiently, metaphor and metonymy are two of the best pragmatic strategies to “bring two minds into the same train of thinking”. Metaphorisation and metonymisation as pragmatic strategies not only work as one-off synchronic linguistic strategies to get a new meaning across. They also feed on each other and can lead, over time, to polysemisation and semantic change. This dynamic aspect of what one can call the sedimentation or conventionalisation of pragmatic shifts in language has been explored, especially in the case of metonymy, first by Nerlich and Clarke (2001a) in an article on serial metonymy, then by others, especially Hilpert. He summarises work on chained metonymies in idioms, figurative expressions and in grammar, but focuses on a cross-linguistic study of body-part terms (Hilpert 2006, 2007). In the following, I shall summarise briefly my own research into finding patterns of metonymic semantic spread of meanings over time and over referents and what this means for historical pragmatics. The research summarised below complements, to some extent, other research into diachronic aspects of metonymy carried out by Koch, for example (see Koch 2001, 2004). Koch regards metonymy as a frame-based figure/ground effect with respect to an invariant linguistic form. As we shall see, some metonymic chains seem to break frames, so more research is needed here. The metonymic chains studied below seem to be based on a small group of entrenched referential relations and I will explain why this might be the case. Again, my findings overlap to some extent with Koch’s, who distinguishes

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the following three stages in diachronic metonymic change: (i) ad hoc metonymies relying on (universal) speech rules (an example would be “the ham sandwich wants the bill”), (ii) conventional metonymies relying on (historical) discourse rules (“the kettle is boiling”), and (iii) metonymic polysemies relying on (historical) language rules. Koch also distinguishes between speaker- and hearer-induced metonymies, and among the speaker-induced ones between referent-oriented (Engl. The ham sandwich has asked for the bill) and concept-oriented (Engl. boor ‘peasant’ A ‘awkward person’) metonymies. Concept-oriented metonymies may involve disjunct classes of referents (It. bustarella ‘little envelope’ A ‘bribe’ = referent-sensitive) or overlapping classes of referents (Engl. boor = non-referent-sensitive). On the other hand, concept-orientation may be pragmatically ‘soft’ (e.g. Fr. garage ‘garage’ A ‘service station’) or pragmatically ‘intense’ (euphemisms as It. bustarella and other types of expressive metonymies). (Koch 2004)

These distinctions are useful and some of them will be used below. However, I would stress that we are not dealing with “rules” of speech, discourse or language here, but rather with regularities: regularities that emerge, become entrenched, but can also change over time and space.

4.

Serial metonymy

Until about 2001, cognitive linguistic researchers had mainly looked at one-to-one relations between, say, the “literal” meaning of bottle, as in: “When washing up she broke the bottle” and the metonymic meaning of bottle, as in: “She said she only drank one bottle”. In focusing on these one-to-one relations, another aspect of metonymy had been sidelined, namely the fact that metonymies often come in chains, synchronically as well as diachronically (for an early study of synchronic chains see, however, Reddy 1979). Examples of metonymic chains exhibiting synchronic polysemy are: Paper: a substance made from pulp of wood or other fibrous material – something used for writing or drawing on – an essay or dissertation, a document – the contents of the essay; Brief: condensed statement or written synopsis – set of instructions – action of giving information and instruction (to brief somebody) – the person who gives it, i.e. a lawyer; or to hit somebody with a belt – to belt somebody – to leather somebody.

In the last example, the speaker can choose to describe the action involved by focusing on the action itself, the instrument of the action, or the material the instrument is made of, which are all metonymically related via the relations between the action and the instrument used for the execution of the action, and between the instrument used and the material it is made of. The motivation behind this and other synchronic metonymic chains is still transparent.

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An example of a diachronic metonymic chain, combined with synecdoche (particularisation and generalisation) and hyperbole, is the semantic change undergone by the word shambles (with some phonetic alterations on the way), which can be summarised in the following way: Shambles: stools for sitting on – to display wares on – to display meat on – meat market – slaughterhouse – bloodshed, scene of carnage – mess. (There is still a street called “The Shambles” in Nottingham, see Room 1986: 241)

In this case, only the last member of the chain is linguistically available to presentday speakers when they say “What a shambles!”. The motivation behind the metonymic chain, whose initial links at least were metonymically motivated (the relation between a piece of furniture, its function, and the objects on it), has become obscured. In the case of another metonymic chain, that started with board, meaning ‘a flat, thin piece of sawn timber’, and ended with board meaning ‘the directors of a company or other official group meeting together’ (i.e. the people sitting around a table) or (sometimes) the event itself (as in exam-board), some intermediate links, such as board, meaning ‘table’ (made of boards) and board meaning ‘meal’ (eaten on the table), have been either lost or almost completely integrated into a fossilised expression (bed and board). This means that only the first and last members of the chain are synchronically available. In the following, I will focus on diachronic chains. The diachronic dimension of serial metonymy has, of course, been studied to some extent by historical semanticists, such as Darmesteter (1887), who spoke of “concatenation”, and is still recognised by some cognitive semanticists, such as Blank (1999), Koch (1999, 2001, 2004) and Hilpert (2006, 2007). In general, cognitive linguists have, however, been more interested in discourse-based metonymies or what Koch (2004) calls ad-hoc speaker-induced metonymies, such as “The ham sandwich hasn’t paid up yet” rather than diachronic metonymic chains. As recent studies have shown, diachronic metonymic chains deserve more attention, as they are the sedimentational residue of discursive or pragmatic metonymy and of synchronic metonymic polysemisation. In one attempt to study this process (see Nerlich and Clarke 2001a), examples of chains of metonymies, such as those listed above, were collected from Room’s Dictionary of Semantic Changes (1986), others were taken from The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991) and some more were found by chance (and checked in the Oxford English Dictionary, online). All examples were studied as if one was dealing with straightforward metonymic chains. However, it should be stressed that these chains are idealised abstractions, which leave aside many complex semantic and phonetic shifts and changes (see Nerlich and Clarke 1992b). In his article devoted to the French word bureau, a classic example of serial metonymy, Rothwell pointed out that: “The term ‘extension of meaning’ must be understood here not as a neat and tidy recti-

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linear development, but rather as the accumulation of a network of new senses around the original meaning” (Rothwell 1960: 106). As early as the fifteenth century, bureau displayed an extensive network of polysemous senses, stretching out from the central (or prototypical) meaning of ‘cloth’. Such synchronic chains and radial structures (of discursive and lexicalised metonymies) underlie the growth of serial metonymies. One should also keep in mind that the meanings of the different extensions of the word bureau (all based on metonymy) had to compete at every stage with various synonyms as contenders for the same semantic space. Finally, it should be noted that bureau is quite exceptional in that all the links of the chain were woven by metonymy, whereas in most other cases metonymic chains seem to kick-start semantic changes, which are then followed up by other processes of semantic change, such as metaphorisation, generalisation, etc. Some linguists even think that some changes masquerading as metaphor-induced ones, are in fact based initially on metonymy-based invited inferences (see Brinton and Traugott 2005). It might even be that, as metonymy is mostly reference-based rather than concept-based, all linguistic change must initially be metonymic in nature. This might not contradict completely what earlier philosophers said about metaphor as being at the root of all language development if we concede that metaphor might have been taken in a rather wider sense that also includes metonymy. My study of a small corpus of such metonymic chains revealed that diachronic metonymic chains were based on “three general determinants of conceptual organisation: human experience, perceptional selectivity, and cultural preference” (Kövesces and Radden 1998: 63). Let me briefly summarise what they contribute to metonymisation. Cultural preference: the metonymic chains studied exhibited typical western European cultural preferences, as they were produced mostly in the spheres of commerce, government, food, clothing, bodily functions and the production of containers. It should be stressed that, of course, this is largely the result of the data collection. Human experience: the diachronic chains of metonyms studied above seem to be based on very primitive image schemata, on very basic ways in which humans interact with and have experience of objects. As Johnson has pointed out, an “image schema is a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience” (Johnson 1987: xiv). He lists 27 such schemata of which the following seem to underlie serial metonymy: container part-whole, surface, link, contact, object, superimposition and collection. This is directly linked to my findings about perceptual salience. Perceptual salience: the metonyms were based on relations of surface proximity between objects, of proximity of objects in space, on the relation between the objects and their functions in various activities and events, and the relation between objects and the material they are made of. In short: objects had to be part of a state, a situation or an entity.

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This use of well-established conceptual pathways makes metonymy quite different from metaphor. Whereas metaphorisation depends mainly on being able to see something as something else, on making (or understanding somebody else’s) imaginative leaps, metonymisation seems to depend on a discursive co-construction of the same referent along what one could call well-established “lines of sight”. Yet, which lines of sight are used most frequently by speakers in trying to convey meaning or by hearers in trying to extract meaning from utterances? Are there any that are more “natural” than others? Do some of them become historically or culturally entrenched over time and if so why? And which metonymical links amongst the many listed by authors such as in Esnault (1925), Norrick (1981) and Kövesces and Radden (1998) are the most productive? Does metonymic change have a directionality, and, if so, which one? What cognitive significance does this have? Why is it easier to find chains of metonyms than metaphors? All these questions need further research in the future.

5.

Serial metaphor?

If, as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers claimed, language use is metaphorical through and through, then it should be easy to find chains of metaphors, just as it was relatively easy to find chains of metonyms, both synchronically as well as diachronically. However, this is surprisingly difficult. Whereas it is quite easy to observe something like metonymic “creep” over referential space, from a little piece of cloth to a whole organisation, for example; it is not so easy to observe more arbitrary metaphorical leaps across conceptual space. Why should this be? It seems that our ability to create and understand metonyms is grounded in our ability to infer the referential intentions of others (see Burling 1999), which is clearly a pragmatic undertaking and fundamental to any type of human and linguistic interaction. This co-construction of referents and referential relations based on shared lines of sight might be not only fundamental to language change but also to language acquisition, as it is largely based on shared attention and shared gaze, and perhaps contributes to an emerging communicative competence (see Carpenter, Nagell and Tomasello 1998). Whereas metonymy might be linked to co-ordinating referential communication, metaphor seems to be a tool for ordering and classifying referentially acquired knowledge and for building conceptual systems of ever greater complexity. Here networks seem to dominate in terms of patterns rather than chains. The historical aspects of metaphor may, therefore, also be more complex than those observed in the case of metonymy. With reference to the cliché “crossing the Rubicon”, this is a metaphor that can be creatively varied, extended, rejected and contested if the right historical, cultural and sociopolitical triggers are in place (see

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Nerlich 2005). Using metonymy in such an argumentative way might be much rarer. Given the right historical and cultural conditions, or what one might call the right “environment” (see Frank 2008), a metaphor can also flip its conceptual directionality. For example, in the nineteenth century a widespread metaphorical mapping enabled linguists to explore language and language change in terms of insights from biology, whereas in the twentieth century a widespread metaphorical mapping allowed biologists, especially geneticists, to explore aspects of biology, genes, etc. in terms of language. Recent research into the historicity of metaphor has shown that a conceptual metaphor such as “states are organisms” can vary enormously in meaning and use between Antiquity and modernity, variations that are not promoted by the intrinsic cognitive or embodied characteristics of this metaphor but that are, again, triggered by historical and cultural changes, especially by changing knowledge about what organisms and bodies actually are (Musolff 2008; Mouton 2009). This means not only that the meaning of a phrase like “the body politic” has changed over time, but that new “state as body/organism” metaphors have been created throughout political and social history, especially after the advent of modern biology, the emergence of the theory of evolution, the discovery of DNA and so on. New knowledge begets new metaphors and new metaphors beget new knowledge, some of which is/are more ephemeral than other(s); take the recent pandemic of swine flu, which generated metaphors such as “whine flu (formerly known as man flu), wine flu (commonly known as a hangover), line flu (developing a cough while queuing for something) and mine flu (I had it before you)” (Ahuja 2009). Again, cultural knowledge is essential to create and understand such metaphors.

6.

Conclusion

This chapter has tried to show that metaphor and metonymy are important to the study of historical pragmatics in various respects. First of all, the pragmatic study of metaphor and metonymy has a long history in philosophy and linguistics, and some of the insights gained into the social use of metaphor and metonymy might still be useful today. Second, while metaphor has hogged the limelight of philosophical and linguistic thinking for a long time, metonymy might actually be more basic in terms of getting language change going, as metonymy is an intrinsically pragmatic aspect of communication and social interaction rooted in the co-construction of referents and referential relations. Metaphor then goes on to exploit this process of meaning construction and leads to ever more complex systems of knowledge and language. However, the pragmatic use of metaphor and metonymy in situated action not only has consequences for the historical development of language, it has also so-

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cial and cognitive consequences. From a social and interactional point of view, there are consequences for ongoing conversations: by using metaphors in particular, there is an increased risk of being misunderstood or of looking stupid, but there is also an increased social benefit, as one can appear witty or linguistically elegant (Nerlich and Clarke 2001b). There are cognitive consequences, too: metonymy spreads meaning over closely related conceptual spheres, and metaphor binds more distant conceptual spheres together, at least for a time, until, in a dead metaphor, the link is severed, but can always be restored for rhetorical and conversational purposes. And, of course, there are consequences for the development of language over time in terms of semantic innovation and change, linked closely to the conventionalisation of invited or accidental inferences. As Traugott has pointed out with relation to metaphor and metonymy: “The hypothesis is that as speakers strategise discourse, these two mechanisms guide and constrain the conventionalising of conversational implicatures” (Traugott 2002: 32). They are fundamental for the life of language and for social and intellectual life. I want to give the last word to another historical figure, namely Suzanne K. Langer, an early proponent of a pragmatic approach to language and language change. In her seminal book, Philosophy in a New Key ([1942] 1951), based in part on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy and Wegener’s linguistics, she wrote about metaphor: One might say that, if ritual is the cradle of language, metaphor is the law of its life. It is the force that makes it essentially relational, intellectual, forever showing up new, abstractable forms in reality, forever laying down a deposit of old, abstracted concepts in an increasing treasure of general words. (Langer 1951: 125, italics original)

Using metonymy, humans seem to lay out the referential blueprint for language, by using metaphor they build a whole intellectual edifice on top of it.

References Ahuja, Anjana 2009 Who is making a profit from swine flu? The Times. 9 August 2009, online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/Swine_flu/article6737507.ece. Asher, Nicholas, and Alex Lascarides 2001 The semantics and pragmatics of metaphor. In: Pierrette Bouillon and Federica Busa (eds.), The Language of Word Meaning, 262–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnden, John 2010 Metaphor and metonymy: Making their connections more slippery. Cognitive Lingusistics 21.1: 1–34. Bauer, Johannes [1878] 1889 Das Bild in der Sprache. [The Image in Language.] 2 vols. Ansbach.

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Beeching, Kate 2007 A politeness-theoretic approach to pragmatico-semantic change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.1: 69–108. Beeching, Kate in press Procatalepsis, politeness and pragmaticalisation. In: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti (eds.), Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics. Bingley: Emerald. Biese, Alfred 1893 Die Philosophie des Metaphorischen. [The Philosophy of the Metaphoric.] Hamburg/Leipzig: Leopold Voss. Black, Max 1962 Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blank, Andreas 1999 Co-presence and succession. A cognitive typology of metonymy. In: KlausUwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds.), 169–192. Bredin, Hugh 1984 Metonymy. Poetics Today 5: 45–58. Brinton, Laurel, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 2005 Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burkhardt, Armin, and Brigitte Nerlich (eds.) 2010 Tropical Truth: The Epistemology of Metaphor and Other Tropes. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Burling, Robbins 1999 The cognitive prerequisites for language. Target article. PSYCOLOQUY 1032. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc-bin/newspy?10.032. Carpenter, Malinda, Katherine Nagell and Michael Tomasello 1998 Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63.4). Claudi, Ulrike, and Bernd Heine 1986 On the metaphorical base of grammar. Studies in Language 10: 297–335. Cloeren, Hermann J. 1988 Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytic Philosophy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Culpeper, Jonathan 2009 Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.2: 179–186. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Dániel Kádár (eds.) 2010 Historical (Im)politeness. Bern: Peter Lang. Darmesteter, Arsène 1887 La Vie des Mots étudiée d’après leurs Significations. Paris: Delagrave. Deutscher, Guy 2005 The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. New York: Metropolitan.

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Eco, Umberto 1984 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto 1999 Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. London: Secker & Warburg. Esnault, Gaston 1925 L’Imagination Populaire: Métaphores occidentales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Feilke, Helmuth 1994 Common sense-Kompetenz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frank, Roslyn M. 2008 The language-organism-species analogy: A complex adaptive systems approach to shifting perspectives on language. In: Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez (eds.), 215–264. Frank, Roslyn M., René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez (eds.) 2008 Body, Language and Mind. Vol. II: Sociocultural Situatedness. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fritz, Gerd 1998 Historische Semantik. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Geeraerts, Dirk 1988 Cognitive grammar and the history of lexical semantics. In: Brygida RudzkaOstyn (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, 647–678. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 50.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gerber, Gustav 1871–1874 Die Sprache als Kunst. [Language as Art.] 2 vols. Bromberg: Mittler’sche Buchhandlung. Gerber, Gustav 1884 Die Sprache und das Erkennen. [Language and Cognition.] Berlin: Gaertner. Gibbins, John R. 2007 John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva 2007 The Genesis of Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilpert, Martin 2006 Keeping an eye on the data: Metonymies and their patterns. In: Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Thomas Gries (eds.), Corpus-based Approches to Metaphor and Metonymy, 123–152. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hilpert, Martin 2007 Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar. A cross-linguistic perspective on body part terms. In: Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund (eds.), Aspects of Meaning Construction, 77–98. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jean Paul, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter [1804] 1962–1977 Vorschule der Ästhetik. [Introduction to Aesthetics.] In: Norbert Miller (ed.), Werke [Works], Part 1, Vol. V, 7–330. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft.

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Johnson, Mark 1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jucker, Andreas H. 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008a Politeness in the history of English. In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossena (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006. Volume II: Lexical and Semantic Change. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (14 ICEHL), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006, 3–29. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008b Historical pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 2.5: 894–906. Knobloch, Clemens 1991 Introduction. In: Philip Wegener (ed.), xi–li. Koch, Peter 1999 Frame and contiguity: On the cognitive bases of metonymy and certain types of word formation. In: Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds.), 139–167. Koch, Peter 2001 Metonymy: Unity in diversity. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2: 201–244. Koch, Peter 2004 Metonymy between pragmatics, reference, and diachrony. Metaphorik.de 7. http://www.metaphorik.de/07/koch.pdf. Koch, Peter 2008 Höflichkeit und Metonymie. In: Dorothe Kimmich and Wolfgang Matzat (eds.), Der gepflegte Umgang. Interkulturelle Aspekte der Höflichkeit in Literatur und Sprache, 143–184. Bielefeld: transcript. Kövesces, Zoltán, and Günter Radden 1998 Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9: 37–77. Lambert, Johann Heinrich [1764] 1965–1969 Neues Organon, oder Gedanken über die Erforschung und Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrthum und Schein. [New Organon, or Thoughts about Research into Truth and its Distinction from Error and Illusion.] 2 vols. Leipzig: Wendler. [Repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965–1969.] Langer, Suzanne K. [1942] 1951 Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: Mentor. Mauthner, Fritz [1901/1902] 1923 Beiträge zur einer Kritik der Sprache. [Contributions to a Critique of Language.] 3 vols. 3rd ed. Leipzig: Felix Meiner. Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, The 1991 Springfield, MA.: Merriam-Webster Inc. Publishers. Mouton, Nicolaas Tobias O. 2009 On the evolution of social scientific metaphors: A cognitive-historical enquiry into the divergent trajectories of the idea that collective entities – states and so-

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cieties, cities and corporations – are biological organisms. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Musolff, Andreas 2008. The embodiment of Europe: How do metaphors evolve? In: Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez (eds.), 301–326. Nerlich, Brigitte 1990 Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal and Wegener. London: Routledge. Nerlich, Brigitte 1992 Semantic Theories in Europe, 1830–1930: From Etymology to Contextuality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nerlich, Brigitte 2005 ‘Crossing the Rubicon’: How the discourse metaphor crossing the Rubicon structured the debate about human embryonic stem cells in Germany and (not) the UK. Metaphorik.de, 8. http://www.metaphorik.de/08/nerlich.htm. Nerlich, Brigitte 2009 History of pragmatics. In: Louise Cummings (ed.), Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. London: Routledge. Nerlich, Brigitte In press The history of semantics as a discipline. In: Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner and Klaus von Heusigner (eds.), Handbook of Semantics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 1992a Outline of a model for semantic change. In: Günter Kellermann and Michael D. Morrissey (eds.), Diachrony within Synchrony. Language History and Cognition, 125–144. Bern: Peter Lang. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 1992b Semantic change: Case studies based on traditional and cognitive semantics. Journal of Literary Semantics 213: 204–225. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 1996 Language, Action, and Context: The Early History of Pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780–1930. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 2001a Serial metonymy: A study of reference-based polysemisation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2.2: 245–272. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 2001b Ambiguities we live by. Journal of Pragmatics 331: 1–20. Nerlich, Brigitte, and David D. Clarke 2001c Mind, meaning, and metaphor: The philosophy and psychology of metaphor in nineteenth-century Germany. History of the Human Sciences 14.2: 39–61. Nerlich, Brigitte, and Christopher Halliday 2005 Avian flu: The creation of expectations in the interplay between science and the media. Sociology of Health and Illness 29.1: 46–65. Norrick, Neal R. 1981 Semiotic Principles in Semantic Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ortony, Anthony 1975 Why metaphors are necessary and not just nice. Educational Theory 25.1: 45–53.

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Oxford English Dictionary online http://www.oed.com. Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Günter Radden (eds.) 1999 Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda L. Thornburg (eds.) 2003 Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Reddy, Michael 1979 The conduit metaphor – a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In: Anthony Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riskin, Jessica 1998 Rival idioms for a revolutionized science and a republican citizenry. Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 89: 203–232. Room, Room 1986 Dictionary of Changes in Meaning. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rorty, Richard 1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothwell, William 1960 Mediaeval French bureau. Medium Aevum 29: 102–114. Sadler, Misumi 2008 From a spatial to a subjective framework: The semantic and pragmatic change of ni-marked NPs in Japanese discourse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9.1: 94–139. Schön, Donald [1963] 2003 Displacement of Concepts. London: Routledge. Smart, Benjamin Humphrey 1831 An Outline of Sematology: Or an Essay towards Establishing a New Theory of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. London: Richardson. Published anonymously. Stewart, Dugald 1810 Philosophical Essays. Edinburgh: Creech. Sully, James [1891] 2000 The Human Mind: A Textbook of Psychology. Volume I. London: Adamant Media Corporation. Sweetser, Eve 1990 From Etymology to Contextuality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Todd, Zazie, and David D. Clarke 1999 When is a dead rainbow not like a dead rainbow? A context-sensitive method for investigating differences between metaphor and simile. In: Lynne Cameron and Graham Low (eds.), Researching and Applying Metaphor, 249–268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2002 From etymology to historical pragmatics. In: Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studying the History of the English Language: Millennial Perspectives, 19–49. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2008 Historical pragmatics. In: Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 538–561. Oxford: Blackwell. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard Dasher 2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, Baron de l’Auln 1784 Etymologie. Encyclopédie Méthodique: Grammaire et Littérature, éditée par Beauzée et Marmontel. Vol. II. Paris-Liège: Panckoucke et Plomteux. [Reprint of the article which appeared in volume VI of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, 1756: 98a–111.] Vicente, Begona 1996 The semantics and pragmatics of metaphor: Coming full circle. Language and Literature 5.3: 195–208. Waltereit, Richard 2004 Metonymischer Bedeutungswandel und pragmatische Strategien: Zur Geschichte von frz. quand même. Metaphorik.de 6, 117–133. Warren, Beatrice 1992 Sense Developments. A Contrastive Study of the Development of Slang Senses and Novel Standard Senses in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Warren, Beatrice 1999 Aspects of referential metonymy. In: Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden (eds.), 121–138. Warren, Howard C. 1921 A History of Association Psychology. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Wegener, Philip [1885] 1991 Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens. [Newly edited by Konrad Koerner with an introduction by Clemens Knobloch.] Amsterdam/ Philadelpha: John Benjamins. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1923] 1961 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness.] London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1953] 1963 Philosophical Investigations. [Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe] Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zinken, Jörg, Iina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich 2008 Discourse metaphors. In: Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez (eds.), 363–386.

IV. Pragmaphilology

8.

Chaucer Mari Pakkala-Weckström

1.

Introduction

1.1.

Pragmaphilology as a field of study: Scope and sources

Pragmaphilology is one of the two main branches of historical pragmatics, along with diachronic pragmatics. Pragmaphilological studies are mainly synchronic, and their aim is to take into account the various contextual aspects of historical texts, for example the relationships between addressers and addressees, and the social setting of each text’s production and/or reception (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 11). Unlike literary studies, the focus of study in the field of historical pragmatics need not be on the works of a specific author, his or her style, accomplishments, or place in the literary canon. Unlike historical linguistics, in pragmaphilology the amount of data analysed need not be particularly large. It is feasible to research a single text by a single author, bearing in mind that the focus of research is on the meaning of the text itself rather than the author. In a pragmaphilological approach, both literary and non-literary texts are seen as “communicative events in their own right” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 14). The sociocultural context and function of the text are regarded as being of primary importance. When literary works from the past are used as data for linguistic analysis, questions of validity and relevance must be addressed. Can researchers in the present rely on the evidence given by fictional accounts of language in the past, when it is well-known that fiction’s primary purpose is to entertain audiences with imaginary matters? Furthermore, in literature, stylistic concerns are central. When Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Christopher Marlowe or William Shakespeare wrote dialogue in rhyme, their primary aim was not to reproduce the spoken language of their contemporary world; they were creative artists striving to express themselves in a fluent and artistic manner. However, even artistic endeavours have their limitations, and while, for example, literary dialogue may well be first and foremost a creative tool for the author, it must, nonetheless, be understandable and credible to the intended audience. Tim Machan argues that “when utterances, speech acts, or the representation of varieties serve the mimetic aspirations of a work’s fictional world, they succeed or fail in accordance with how well they reproduce the linguistic semiotics of the reader’s social world” (2003: 17). Furthermore, the social world is a source of material and inspiration for authors. Vimala Herman notes of dramatic dialogue that “[t]he principles, norms and conventions of use which underlie spontaneous communication in everyday life are precisely those which are exploited and manipu-

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lated by dramatists in their constructions of speech types and forms in plays” (1995: 6). Additionally, literary dialogue should not be considered a mere condensed or manipulated extension of contemporary speech; it ought to be regarded as valid material for research in its own right. As Andreas Jucker points out: “fictional accounts of spoken language are of sufficient interest in themselves to warrant pragmatic analyses” (2004: 201). So, in studying literary sources, pragmaphilologists are not expecting to draw conclusions about the everyday language of the period in question, but rather about the way in which the authors chose to represent it (cf. Jucker 2000a: 370). 1.2.

Chaucer’s works as data for linguistic analyses

An example of an author whose works have inspired various scholarly activities, both literary and linguistic, for decades – even centuries – is Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400). Born into a middle-class family, Chaucer began a career in court and as a civil servant at an early age, and during his lifetime travelled extensively on the Continent in various capacities. Chaucer was a recognised author and translator in his lifetime, and, indeed, was extremely versatile and productive: along with creating his original pieces, he translated, adapted, retold, and recycled material from a vast selection of mainly foreign sources. As such, Chaucer’s work represents an especially important resource for scholars in the field of historical pragmatics. Chaucer’s various works, first and foremost the Canterbury Tales, form a patchwork of various genres, styles, and registers. They are often either directly or indirectly influenced by various Continental traditions. They may contain several different layers of discourse, and extensive amounts of dialogue. All levels of the social hierarchy are encountered in his casts of characters, and the settings of the stories vary in time and place from antiquity to Chaucer’s contemporary world. In this chapter I will concentrate on three main areas. First, I will introduce Chaucer’s career and his most important works, highlighting the reasons they provide such ample material for pragmatic analysis. Second, I will chart out what has already been done in the field, organising the data according to the approach taken. I will start with an overview of studies published before the emergence of the field of historical pragmatics, but clearly belonging there, and continue with Chaucer studies published under that label. Third, I will discuss what less explored areas perhaps still remain, and how they could contribute to the field in the future. Twenty-six contributions are referred to here; however, not all of these concentrate exclusively on the works of Chaucer: there are diachronic studies that trace the development of certain linguistic features (Jucker 2000b; Jucker 2008; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000), and studies where other material is used as well (Honegger 1999; Maggioni 2000; Pakkala-Weckström 2008). While some of the studies draw their material from a more or less wide array of Chaucer’s poems, some focus on a

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few pieces, a single story, or even on a short passage in a story (Honegger 1999). Also, in the case of two of the studies (Blake 1992; Burnley 1989), categorising them strictly under the label of historical pragmatics would perhaps be undermining their scope; they are introduced here mainly for their insightful treatment of Chaucer’s second-person pronouns. Table 1 lists these twenty-six contributions in chronological order (alphabetically within a given year), and also includes the major work(s) addressed. The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and the Parliament of Fowls each have their own column; in the case of the Canterbury Tales, if the study in question focuses on a selection of the tales, they are specified in the table; if the study comprises the entire poem, this is indicated by an “x”. Since none of the studies specifically deals with any of Chaucer’s other works, all others are included in the column titled “other works”, which is only used when the study can be considered to cover all of Chaucer’s works. Table 1.

Studies on Chaucer and their scope within the Chaucer canon

Author/year

The Canterbury Tales

Troilus and Parliament Other Criseyde of Fowls works

Sell 1985a

MilT

Sell 1985b

KnT, MilT, RvT

Burnley 1989

x

x

x

x

Burnley 1990

x

x

x

x

Blake 1992

x

x

x

x

Arnovick 1994

FranT

Taavitsainen 1995

KnT, MerT, MilT, PardT, ParsT, PrT, RvT, SNT, SqT

Honegger 1999

x

Taavitsainen 1999

Frame, GP, KnT, MilT, PrT, WBT

Jucker 2000a

Frame, FrT, KnT, PardT, ShipT

Jucker 2000b

x

Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000

Frame

Maggioni 2000

WBT

Mazzon 2000

x

Pakkala-Weckström 2001

Mel

Pakkala-Weckström 2002a

MilT, MerT, ShipT

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Table 1.(continued) Author/year

The Canterbury Tales

Pakkala-Weckström 2002b

FranT

Burnley 2003

x

Honegger 2003

KnT

Pakkala-Weckström 2003

MilT, MerT, ShipT, ClT, Mel, WBT, FranT

Pakkala-Weckström 2004

MilT, MerT, ShipT, ClT, Mel, WBT, FranT

Rudanko 2004

KnT, FranT, FrT, MilT, PardT, RvT

Pakkala-Weckström 2005 (Ch. 2)

WBT

Jucker 2006

FrT, NPT, SNT, WBT

Jucker 2008

ClT

Pakkala-Weckström 2008

WBT, ClT, FrT, FranT

Troilus and Parliament Other Criseyde of Fowls works

x

x

x

x

Abbreviations of the Canterbury Tales: The Clerk’s Tale = ClT; The Franklin’s Tale = FranT; The Friar’s Tale = FrT; General Prologue = GP; The Knight’s Tale = KnT; The Tale of Melibee = Mel; The Merchant’s Tale = MerT; The Miller’s Tale = MilT; The Nun’s Priest’s Tale = NPT; The Pardoner’s Tale = PardT; The Parson’s Tale = ParsT; The Prioress’s Tale = PrT; The Reeve’s Tale = RvT; The Shipman’s Tale = ShipT; The Second Nun’s Tale = SNT; The Squire’s Tale = SqT; The Wife of Bath’s Tale = WBT. (Following Benson 1987: 799.) ‘Frame’ refers to the pilgrims’ interaction with one another, i.e. level 3 in Figure 2.

Of the studies listed in Table 1 above, three are more general accounts of Chaucer’s language (Burnley 1989 and 1990; Blake 1992) and three concentrate on the entire Canterbury Tales (Jucker 2000b; Mazzon 2000; Burnley 2003), one of which also discusses Troilus and Criseyde (Burnley 2003). One article focuses on a specific passage in Troilus and Criseyde (Honegger 1999); one draws material primarily from the Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde, although examples from the Pardoner’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale are also given (Rudanko 2004). This leaves eighteen studies which all focus on a selection of the Canterbury Tales (Pakkala-Weckström 2008 also discusses Troilus and Criseyde). Of the individual tales, the Miller’s Tale seems to be the favourite; it is discussed in eight studies, while the Knight’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale follow closely as the material for six studies each, and the Clerk’s Tale as material for four.

Chaucer

2.

Background: Chaucer and his works

2.1.

Career and travels

223

Late medieval England was a society undergoing change on many levels. The first half of the fourteenth century saw one disaster after another: repeated famine, war with France, and finally the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. A good portion of the population was wiped out, causing fundamental changes in the structure of the society in the second half of the century; a new demand for labour increased the mobility of the lower classes and contributed to the birth of the new middle classes, both in towns and in the countryside. Geoffrey Chaucer himself was an example of this social mobility. His father was a prosperous and influential wine merchant, who was able to provide his son with an education and an opportunity to associate with gentility (Pearsall 1992: 16). At a young age, Chaucer joined the household of the Countess of Ulster, probably as a page, a position that, according to Pearsall, “was the only secure avenue to a career in the public service in the Middle Ages” (1992: 38). And indeed, Chaucer’s career in the public service continued, first as a valettus to the Earl of Ulster, then evidently in some capacity in the royal household (1992: 47). In 1374, he became a controller of customs for a period of twelve years, which meant frequent contact with people of wealth and influence. David Wallace notes that Chaucer’s appointment “placed him at a vital intersection of the economic and political powers of city and Crown” (1997: 12). After this appointment, Chaucer apparently retired to Kent for some time, but, in 1389, he was appointed clerk of the king’s works, a position from which he resigned in 1391 (Pearsall 1992: appendix II). The frequent trips abroad that Chaucer undertook during his career no doubt had a profound effect on him. The first records of Chaucer’s travels are from 1366, when he probably travelled to Spain; the purpose of the trip is unknown (Pearsall 1992: 51). In 1368, he was abroad again, and again the following year, when he accompanied John of Gaunt on a military campaign to France (Pearsall 1992: 53–54). Between 1377 and 1381, Chaucer travelled to France on several occasions on royal business, for example to negotiate a peace treaty and a royal marriage (1992: 105). However, perhaps the most important experiences abroad, at least where Chaucer’s writing career is concerned, took place in the 1370s: in 1373, Chaucer visited Florence, and, in 1378, he travelled to Lombardy. These trips exposed him “to the most crucial material and ideological conflict of the Italian Trecento: the conflict between republican libertas and dynastic despotism” (Wallace 1997: 1). All of his experiences on the various missions abroad must have affected Chaucer’s way of thinking and his views on not only poetry and other literature, but also society, politics, and the world in general. He absorbed different influences from different continental writers; this much is easy to deduce from his own works. However, there is little certainty as to what exactly Chaucer read first-hand, and

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how much of his knowledge of, for example, the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch actually came filtered through other sources.1 There is no evidence that Chaucer actually read, for example, the Decameron, though its influence on the fashioning of the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales is clear; yet the obvious differences between the works suggest that Chaucer may have only heard about Boccaccio’s collection of stories (see e.g. Cooper 1989: 9). 2.2.

Chaucer’s works

Chaucer’s England was – at least in literary circles – a multilingual and heterogeneous society: in the second half of the fourteenth century, Latin was still the language of theological discourse while civil record-keeping and, to a certain degree, also literature were in French; however, English was gradually gaining ground in all areas (Strohm 1986: 5–6). Chaucer’s mother tongue was the London dialect of English, but he was also fluent in French and could read Latin. That he chose to write only in English, while e.g. John Gower, his contemporary, wrote also in French and Latin, was in fact “an extraordinary decision for a writer attached to the English court of the 1360s” (Pearsall 1992: 73). Chaucer undertook the task of shaping his mother tongue into a literary language, initially by translating French works into English, beginning with the Romaunt of the Rose, but well before his thirtieth birthday he also produced his first original piece, the Book of the Duchess (Wallace 1986: 20). His ambition to follow in the footsteps of the “great poets” and, specifically, to do it in his mother tongue, becomes very clear in the closing of Troilus and Criseyde: Go, litel bok, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesie; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre fot defaute of tonge, And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (V 1786–1798)2 ‘Go little book: go, my little tragedy: let God, to your maker yet, before he die, send the power to make a comedy!

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But, little book, do not go in envy, but be subject to all poesy: and kiss the steps where you see pace Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Stace. And because there is such great diversity in English and in writing of our tongue, so I pray God that none mis-write thee, nor mis-scan you through default of tongue. And read, wherever you be, or else sung, that you are understood I God beseech.‘3 The dating of Chaucer’s works is by no means unproblematic, since there are no records of publication, and almost no contemporary references to his works. In addition, the works themselves contain very little to link them with the time they were written (Benson 1987: xxiv). It is more or less certain that Chaucer wrote the Book of the Duchess after the death of Blanche of Lancaster in September 1368 to commemorate the event, but exactly when it was written remains unknown. There are certain clues within the works as to their order; for example some earlier poems are mentioned in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and there are references to the character of the Wife of Bath elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. Also, the works reflect the current interests of their author; Chaucer’s early works attest to his admiration of French courtly verse; his discovery of the Italian masters becomes obvious a little later; and finally, the last period is “characterised by a profound shift in his ideas about poetry and the representation of English life” (Benson 1987: xxv). However, despite the lack of watertight evidence as to the dates of composition, a tentative time-line of Chaucer’s works, which most scholars would agree on, can be presented (Benson 1987: xxv). Before 1372: Fragment “A” of the Romaunt of the Rose; the ABC; the Book of the Duchess. 1372–1380: The Complaint unto Pity; Complaint to His Lady; Saint Cecelia; The House of Fame; Anelida and Arcite. 1380–1387: Parliament of Fowls; Boece; Troilus and Criseyde; Adam Scriveyn; The Complaint of Mars; The Complaint of Venus; Palamon and Arcite; the “Boethian ballades”, i.e. The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse, and Lak of Stedfastnesse; The Legend of Good Women. 1388–1392 The General Prologue; the earlier Canterbury Tales; A Treatise on the Astrolabe. 1392–1395 Most of the Canterbury Tales. 1396–1400: The last of the Canterbury Tales; several short poems. Figure 1. A chronology of Chaucer’s works (from Benson 1987: xxv)

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Genre in Chaucer

Genre is a key factor in interpreting meaning in literary works, and also in the interaction between characters; generic conventions and expectations provide a framework for analysis. Taavitsainen defines genre as “a mental frame in people’s minds which gets realised in texts for a certain purpose in a certain cultural context” (2001: 140). The genre of a story will act as a guideline or a guarantee for the audience: readers will, for example, expect comedies to be amusing, and religious tales to be morally edifying. Importantly, Derek Pearsall argues that the same readership will seek different experiences in different genres: In romance […] the audience enjoys participating in the fantasy of the superhuman, the idea that men may act in ways that surpass their nature and that raise them to higher level of moral and social and emotional being. In fabliau the same audience enjoys equally the fantasy of the subhuman, the idea that men will always act in accordance with their basest appetites, untouched, or only amusingly sullied, by morality or any form of idealism. (1985: 168)

Chaucer’s works represent a wide repertoire of medieval literary genres, but he is also notorious for being quite creative with them. Caroline Eckhart argues that Chaucer’s “extraordinary tendency to frame, modulate, combine, resist and otherwise reinterpret his models produces what may be called the creative derangement of genres” (2000: 184). Some genres are almost or completely unique to Chaucer in English (see e.g. Honegger 1999, summarised in 3.4 below; see also Hussey 1971: 141–142 about fabliaux). The medieval genre system tends to observe certain guidelines: for example, fabliaux tend to have a contemporary setting, and the central characters represent the lower social classes; also the language of the narrative and the characters are less elaborate than, for instance, in romances. The social status of the characters in any genre affects the style, however; for example, the Clerk’s Tale is written in a relatively plain style, as Griselda, the heroine, is originally a poor peasant girl who, to her misfortune, marries a rich marquis (cf. Benson 1987: 12–13). 2.2.2.

The early works: Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women

Chaucer’s first major poem, the Book of the Duchess, was influenced by the French tradition of dits amoreux, originating from the Romaunt of the Rose, and culminating in the poetry of Machaut and Froissart (Wallace 1986: 20). When Chaucer wrote the House of Fame, he was clearly replacing the French poets as his main source of influence with Dante; nevertheless, the French tradition remained in the background throughout Chaucer’s career as a poet (Wallace 1986: 21). Both works are so-called “dream poems”, i.e. in the narrative frame of the actual story, the narrator falls asleep and dreams the events that unfold.

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Chaucer’s third dream poem is the Parliament of Fowls, a Valentine’s Day poem where a gathering of birds comes together to choose partners. The poem provides an excellent cross-section of medieval society in the highly allegorical selection of birds. Also, the unfinished Legend of Good Women opens with a dream sequence in which, interestingly, Chaucer is being scolded by Queen Alceste for his cruel treatment of women, in particular of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde. Unlike the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s arguably second most important, and certainly second longest poem, Troilus and Criseyde, is a finished and polished product.4 There is contemporary evidence to indicate that the poem must have been finished by early 1387 (Windeatt 1992: 3). The main source of the poem is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, but, characteristically, Chaucer took liberties with the work by profoundly transforming the text and adapting it to other sources, as well as inventing his own plots, characters, etc. (Windeatt 1992: 37). The poem is written in seven-line stanzas, and is divided into five books. Set in ancient Troy during the siege by the Greeks, Troilus and Criseyde is a story of love and betrayal. It contains much rich and skilfully crafted dialogue, especially between the three main characters, Pandarus, Troilus, and Criseyde. Mark Lambert characterises Chaucer’s mastery at dialogue in the following way: “Tempo and speech-size are worked with adroitly. A sunny, comic scene may make use of rapidly exchanged short speeches, while a sombre interview is built primarily of large blocks of speech” (1986: 63). 2.2.3.

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales, which survives in eighty-two manuscripts, is Chaucer’s greatest contribution to English literature. There are fifty-five manuscripts which probably contain the entire work, and twenty-eight containing one or more tales.5 The two best-known manuscripts of the poem are the Hengwrt, which is likely to be the earliest extant manuscript, and the Ellesmere. The arrangement of the tales is different in the two manuscripts, and it is likely that the work existed only in fragments at the time of Chaucer’s death (Blake 1980: 4). The Ellesmere shows some heavy editing, although in what Pearsall calls “a highly intelligent and responsible manner” (1985: 10). Thus the Ellesmere is perhaps more a text which Chaucer’s editors felt he ought to have written, instead of what he actually wrote (Pearsall 1985: 11). The fact that Ellesmere has been an important source for future editions of the Canterbury Tales obviously presents some problems for modern scholarship. Despite many impressive efforts to edit the manuscripts throughout the centuries, the “real” Chaucerian text remains elusive. Helen Cooper argues that it is possible that “there never was an authoritative Chaucerian text of the Tales […] the work is unfinished, not just in that its continuity is fragmentary and its announced plan of storytelling unfinished, but in that the text itself was left in various provi-

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sional states of possible correction and alteration” (1998: 83). The lack of an original, authoritative text, the multitude of manuscripts and early printed editions (see e.g. Blake 1985: 1–23) and the text’s somewhat chaotic editorial history (see Cooper 1998: 81) mean that a modern scholar of Chaucer cannot be sure that the text under study is in the state which Chaucer intended. For a historical linguist trying to capture Chaucer’s own voice, the task is perhaps impossible, thanks to all the editorial improvements. In the field of historical pragmatics, problems may arise with, for example, punctuation in speeches, since different editors may have interpreted certain passages in different ways (see Cooper 1998: 86–87 for an example in the Parliament of Fowls). However, if the scholar is prepared to accept the possibility of editorial interference over a period of more than six centuries, and submit to the fact that it is unlikely that Chaucer’s original text will ever be uncovered, there is no reason not to continue with research efforts. Still, one should always be aware of the processes involved and the mediated nature of the material. The edition perhaps most widely used today is Larry D. Benson’s The Riverside Chaucer (1987). The edition contains Chaucer’s other works as well as comprehensive notes. The Canterbury Tales is a multi-layered road trip poem where a group of pilgrims entertain one another on the way to their destination – Canterbury – by telling stories. Chaucer’s grand plan for the poem is outlined by the Host in the General Prologue: “Lordynges,” quod he, “now herkneth for the beste; But taak it nought, I prey yow, in desdeyn. This is the point, to speken short and pleyn, That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye, In this viage shal tellen tales tweye To Caunterbury-ward, I mene it so, And homward he shal tellen othere two, Of aventures that whilom han bifalle. (I (A) 788–795) ‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘Now listen for your good, And please don’t treat my notion with disdain. This is the point. I’ll make it short and plain. Each of you shall help to make things slip By telling two stories on the outward trip To Canterbury, that’s what I intend, And, on the homeward way to journey’s end Another two, tales from the days of old.‘6 There are twenty-six pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, and Chaucer’s narrator persona is the twenty-seventh; so, had the original plan been realised, there would have been well over a hundred tales altogether. In the version of the Canterbury Tales we read

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today, however, there are only twenty-four tales, two of which are interrupted (the Squire’s Tale and Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas), and one is unfinished (the Cook’s Tale). There are also story-tellers who are not described in the General Prologue: the Canon’s Yeoman, the Second Nun and the Nun’s Priest. All this clearly testifies that the Canterbury Tales remains, for reasons unknown, unfinished.7 However, as it stands, the work is still extremely versatile. The pilgrims represent several social classes8 and, accordingly, their tales show rich generic and stylistic variation. David Wallace argues that “no other framed collection contrives to enable so many genres to follow their own laws of operation and hence achieve such a plurality of imaginative worlds” (1997: 64). In a similar vein, Helen Cooper notes that this unforeseen range of generic and poetic stories “comes close to offering a distinctio, a normative array, of all the literary forms current in the Late Middle Ages” (1989: 8). One of the distinctive features of the Canterbury Tales is that it contains several narrative levels (cf. Leech and Short 1981: 246). On the first level, the author Chaucer addresses his readership; on the second, the pilgrim Chaucer recounts the story of the pilgrimage to an imagined audience: So hadde I spoken with hem everichon That I was of felaweshipe anon, And made forward erly for to ryse, To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse. (I (A) 31–34) ‘By speaking to them all upon the trip I was admitted to their fellowship And promised to rise early and take the way To Canterbury, as you heard me say.‘ The third narrative level – the frame narrative of the pilgrimage – consists of the pilgrims’ interaction with one another; this is realised as dialogue between the characters in between the tales, but, importantly, also in the form of the tales they each tell on the road to Canterbury. Finally, the fourth narrative level is found within the tales told by the pilgrims, where the characters within the tales interact with each other. The pilgrims’ twenty-four tales represent various literary genres, and they often also represent, albeit to a varying extent, the narrators’ personalities: for example, the Miller and the Reeve insult one another by telling a fabliau – in the Miller’s story, a stupid carpenter is cuckolded, so the Reeve, who is a carpenter, retaliates by telling a story of a greedy miller who gets his comeuppance. A similar friction forms between the Friar and the Summoner: in the Friar’s tale a thieving summoner makes a pact with the devil; in the Summoner’s response, a hypocritical friar is humiliated. The Knight’s tale is a romance set in antiquity; his son, the Squire, also sets out to tell a romance but is interrupted. The Prioress’s and the Sec-

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Figure 2. The discourse levels of the Canterbury Tales (from Pakkala-Weckström 2005: 47)9

ond Nun’s tales are religious legends, and the Wife of Bath’s Arthurian romance continues the theme of her lengthy prologue, that of maistrie in marriage – the Wife, five times widowed, is undoubtedly an expert on the subject. The Clerk of Oxford, who is a great friend of books and learning, recycles a story originally told by Boccaccio, and retold by Petrarch. The Merchant’s account of a seriously mismatched couple reflects his own unhappy marriage. The Franklin, who desires to be considered a member of the gentility, narrates a romance in which gentilesse is the key issue. The Pardoner also narrates a bleak story of betrayal very much in accordance with his character. The rest of the tales seem to be more or less loosely assigned to their tellers. Moreover, the order in which Chaucer composed the tales, and at which point he designed the frame narrative, are not known. The prologue to the Legend of Good Women lists his earlier works, among them “Palamon and Arcite” and “Seynt Cecile” – i.e. the Knight’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale, so they must have existed in some form already before the Canterbury Tales (Pearsall 1985: 2; see also Figure 1 above).

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Chaucer studies

3.1.

Earlier studies

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Even though historical pragmatics as an acknowledged field of study has only existed for slightly over a decade, there are a number of earlier Chaucer studies that can be classified as using an approach similar to that of historical pragmatics. As Jacobs and Jucker (1995: 4) point out, the label of historical pragmatics has given a focus to such research efforts. Studies which can be classified in this category include Roger Sell’s articles on the Miller’s Tale (1985a) and on Chaucer more generally, with special reference to the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, and the Reeve’s Tale (1985b). In his two studies,10 Sell introduces the approach of literary pragmatics, i.e. a pragmatic approach to literary texts, the first aim of which is “to demythologise the concept of literature” (1985a: 498). Importantly, he notes that “all texts address real-life meanings from their creators to their recipients, and a creator’s estimate of the text’s reception by its likely recipient can affect its formation” (1985a: 498). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of politeness features in the Miller’s Tale. Examining the relationship between the different narrative levels, i.e. the tale, the frame narrative, and Chaucer as the author of both, Sell notes that by warning the reader that a rude tale will follow, and that more sensitive readers might want to skip a few pages, Chaucer gives the impression that he “is being much more polite towards us than either Nicholas towards the carpenter or the miller towards the other pilgrims […] Chaucer has saved his own face: we cannot blame him. And he has saved our face: he neither impugns our fine sensibilities nor prevents us from enjoying the ‘low’ tale” (1985a: 507). Sell’s study of pragmatic stylistics in Chaucer continues in his second article (1985b), which stresses the importance of the “context of the extradiegetic relationship between Chaucer and the reader” (1985b: 182). The article compares features such as paragraph length, the use of “this + noun”, and the number of metatextual comments from the Knight’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale (1985b: 179), and notes that the personality and social status of the pilgrim narrators “makes certain sorts of politeness more likely than others” (1985b: 182). David Burnley’s The Language of Chaucer (1989)11 is relevant to the field of historical pragmatics particularly in its discussion of personal pronouns (1989: 17–22). Similarly, Burnley’s (1990) article continues to explore the use of personal pronouns in the works of both Langland and Chaucer; also Blake (1992) deals with second-person pronouns in Middle English literature, Chaucer included (see section 3.3 below for more studies on second-person pronouns). Irma Taavitsainen’s (1995) article deals with stylistic and generic issues in the Canterbury Tales, comparing the use of affect through statistical analyses of oaths and interjections in four genres: sermons, saints’ lives, romances, and fabliaux. In

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her conclusion, Taavitsainen argues that “an assessment of inherent linguistic patterns may open up new ways of seeing how the audience is manipulated, how their emotions are provoked and narrative suspense created” (1995: 206). Leslie Arnovick’s (1994) article examines the oral nature of the speech act of promising in the Franklin’s Tale (see section 3.2.3 below for more material on promises). Her focus is on the so-called “rash promise” made by the heroine, Dorigen, to an admirer in her husband’s absence. Arnovick argues that Dorigen’s promise is, in fact, a rejection, not a promise at all (1994: 133). Since historical pragmatics has become a well-established field of study, several studies in the field drawing their material solely or partially from the works of Chaucer have been published. Below I review the bulk of this literature. 3.2.

Speech acts in Chaucer’s poetry

For in-depth discussions on the study of speech acts in historical contexts, see the relevant chapter in this volume, also Bertuccelli Papi (2000), Taavitsainen and Jucker (2007), and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008). Studies of various speech acts in Chaucer’s poetry will be summarised below. 3.2.1.

Insults

Insults and forms of verbal aggression in the Canterbury Tales are the focus of Jucker (2000a). The same phenomena are also discussed in Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000). The latter is a diachronic study that traces the development of forms of verbal aggression from the Old English period to the present; the Middle English data are drawn from the Canterbury Tales. Insults and other forms of verbal aggression, when considered in terms of speech acts, are something of a versatile group. A person can insult another person either intentionally or unintentionally and the insult can take almost any form; thus the foci of research need to be on the perlocutionary effects of the speech acts, i.e. the reactions of the addressees (Jucker 2000a: 375; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 72). A speech act is an insult only if its intended target feels insulted; the form and content are of secondary importance to the classification of speech acts as insults (Jucker 2000a: 376). As an example, Jucker gives the Pardoner’s invitation to the Host to kiss his bogus relics, “Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon, / And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon” (VI 943–944), which on the surface might be considered a polite offer. The Host, however, is enraged, and thus the Pardoner’s invitation can be regarded as an insult (2000a: 377; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 82). A problem that arises with this particular type of classification in a fictional context is that the reactions of the targets may not be recorded, so sometimes a degree of speculation may be called for (Jucker 2000a: 377). On the other hand, fic-

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tional material often does provide the context of the utterance “from the situation that gave rise to the exchange to the perlocutionary effects of the words used and the possibly ensuing actions” (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 70). Jucker distinguishes four different types of verbal aggression in the Canterbury Tales: direct, embedded, mediated and indirect (2000a: 383). The characters in the poem interact on the different narrative levels, and even across these levels by telling tales that insult their fellow pilgrims (2000a: 378). 3.2.2.

Threats

Rudanko (2004) explores the recurring speech acts used by male suitors to win their ladies’ consent in the Parliament of Fowls, the Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde. The main emphasis of the study is on threats, but offers are also briefly examined. Rudanko (2004: 156) notes that it is common for the suitor to threaten the lady with suicide if she will not give her consent. Even though the article concentrates on the wooing scenes, several other threats are also discussed. With examples from the Canterbury Tales, Rudanko (2004: 143) distinguishes between conditional and unconditional threats. A conditional threat is related to a promise, and often follows a specific formula: an imperative followed by an orclause including the actual threat. For example, Alison in the Miller’s Tale threatens her unsuccessful suitor, Absolon: “Go forth thy wey, or I wol caste a ston” (I (A) 3712). An unconditional threat is “a threat where the speaker, for whatever reason, gives the hearer no way out” (Rudanko 2004: 143). As is the case with insults and other forms of verbal aggression, threats as speech acts do not form a simple or uniform category. In fact, as Rudanko (2004: 142) points out, Searle does not mention threats in his classification of speech acts. However, as Rudanko clearly demonstrates with examples, particularly conditional threats can be categorised as commissives, since “the speech act sets up an expectation that the speaker will perform the act specified in the prepositional content condition” (2004: 145). Thus a conditional threat can create a social contract, albeit a weaker one than that of, for example, a promise, between the speaker and the hearer (2004: 146). Rudanko also makes a distinction between threats made in jest and serious threats. An example of the former can be found in the Miller’s Tale, when Nicholas tells Alison to “love me al atones, / Or I wol dyen, also God me save” (I (A) 3280–3281) (2004: 150). On the other hand, Aurelius in the Franklin’s Tale is obviously serious when he threatens Dorigen: “with a word ye may me sleen or save” (V (F) 975). Here, genre seems to be the crucial factor; the courtship of Nicholas and Alison is set in the frame of comedy, and thus the lover’s suffering should not be taken seriously. Aurelius, on the other hand, is akin to the prototypical suffering courtly lover encountered in romance.

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Promises

Pakkala-Weckström deals with the speech act of promising in two studies (2002b and 2008). The first focuses on the promises in the Franklin’s Tale (cf. Arnovick 1994; also 3.1 above); the second draws its material from both Chaucer’s works – the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde – as well as other contemporary and later sources with similar motifs; the main emphasis of the study is, however, on promises in Chaucer. Promises are, at least relatively often, a more “definable” category than the speech acts of threats and insults discussed above. Searle associates specific “sentence tokens” uttered under specific conditions with illocutionary acts ([1965] 1991: 254). Thus, uttering certain specific words under specific conditions will create an obligation to the hearer (or promisee). At least in theory, the set of words that constitute a promise is limited.12 As is the case with insults, when studying promises, the perlocutionary effect of the speech act is important, i.e. the promisee needs to feel that s/he is owed something by the promiser (cf. Searle’s notion that a promise must be something that the hearer wants, otherwise it is a threat). But of equal importance is the mindset of the promiser, who needs to feel under obligation to the promisee. Thus, technically, unintentional promises are not possible, but conflicts can arise if sincerity conditions are not fulfilled, as is the case with Dorigen’s promise to Aurelius in the Franklin’s Tale (see Arnovick 1994; Pakkala-Weckström 2002b and 2008). However, having characters utter the words “I plighte yow my trouthe” or “I swere” does not necessarily mean that a social contract is created between the speaker and the addressee; they can also be used as more or less empty rhetorical devices. In Chaucer’s fabliaux, negotiations between lovers in illicit love affairs often involve promises: for example, the monk in the Shipman’s Tale uses the phrase “I yow swere, and plighte yow my trouthe” (VII 198), which contains a double commissive, in the seduction scene.13 Also, characters in more serious tales, like Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde, may intensify their turns by a rhetorical, highly emotional use of sweren. On the other hand, promises can be made and binding social contracts can be entered into even without uttering “I promise” or “I swear”. The sense of obligation can be created by other means as well, which can be every bit as strong. For example, Aurelius in the Franklin’s Tale makes a commitment to pay a thousand pounds to a magician in order to fulfil Dorigen’s impossible condition by uttering “This bargain is ful dryve, for we been knyt” (V (F) 1230). The promise does not contain any of the most common Middle English performatives; yet when the condition is met, and he does not have the required sum, Aurelius refers back to the incident by saying “Allas, that I bihighte” (V (F) 1559) and “My trouthe wol I kepe” (V (F) 1570) (Pakkala-Weckström 2008: 145).

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Forms and pronouns of address

Address forms and pronouns of address are of particular interest to pragmatics, since they can act as immediate cues about the speakers’ or writers’ intentions (for details see relevant chapter of this volume; also Taavitsainen and Jucker 2003; and Nevala 2004). Because of their close relationship, address forms and pronouns of address are often dealt with together. In Chaucer research, this is the case with Mazzon (2000), Honegger (2003), and Pakkala-Weckström (2003). Mazzon draws her data from the entire Canterbury Tales, paying particular attention to address of deities; address in courting, family relationships, and between friends; the influence of social distance on address terms; and also the use of address terms and pronouns between male and female characters. Through a multitude of examples, Mazzon argues that “pronoun use is manipulated in quite subtle ways according to precise discourse strategies, or responding to specific discourse modes” (2000: 161). Pakkala-Weckström (2003) focuses on the role of gender, genre, and the power relationship between interactants in the use of both pronouns of address and address forms as seen in the dialogue between married couples and lovers in seven Canterbury Tales. The tales represent three different genres: the Miller’s, Merchant’s and Shipman’s Tales are fabliaux; the Wife of Bath’s and the Franklin’s Tales are romances; and the Clerk’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee can be classified as religious tales (cf. Pearsall 1985: 244). The study concludes that, in marital relationships, women use three out of four tokens of address forms; in illicit affairs the number of address forms is equal; and in the two cases where an unwanted admirer is to trying to woo a lady,14 the women use no address forms at all. This suggests that the female characters have less power in a marriage than they do outside it, and that women enjoy most power when they are being courted by someone they are not interested in. The distribution of pronouns of address in the male/female dialogues is not quite as clear-cut, and while the status of power seems to play an important role in choosing an address form, the choice of pronoun seems to be governed by other factors as well (Pakkala-Weckström 2003: 133–134). The article concludes that, with respect to genre, gender and power, the analysis of the address form and pronouns gives the following results: The data clearly indicate that all these variables really are at work. Genre creates a background against which the characters are depicted in a convincing manner. Gender provides its own rules and restrictions, which govern the behaviour of the characters, but ultimately it is the dynamic, ever changing balance of power between the characters that seems to most affect their linguistic choices. (2003: 136)

Honegger’s (2003) material is drawn from the Knight’s Tale. His comprehensive situational analysis suggests that the choice of pronouns can be a complex matter; for example, when addressing the pagan goddess Diana, Emelye tends to use thou,

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except when the address pronoun co-occurs with the nominal address form lady (2003: 70–72).15 Even more interestingly, Honegger (2003: 66–68) finds that sometimes the choice of pronoun can be influenced by self-reference, gestures, or spatial position, as in the case of the Theban ladies, who switch from ye to thou when they refer to themselves as wrecched women. The studies by Jucker (2000b and 2006) and Burnley (2003) focus on pronouns of address alone. In these studies, the focus tends to be on the variation between the second-person address pronouns you and thou, i.e. the T/V pronouns. Jucker’s (2000b) article is a diachronic study of the you/thou distinction in Middle English and Early Modern English; the Middle English references being to the works of Chaucer. Jucker argues that in the choice of pronoun the interactional status of a person is more important than the social status, and, in regard to politeness, a change has taken place: In contrast to Modern English and the situation in modern languages that have preserved a T/V distinction, politeness in Middle English and Early Modern English was more negotiable. Today it is unusual to switch from V to T, or from the use of title and last name to first name, just on the basis of anger or contempt. In Middle English and Early Modern English this appears to have been normal. (2000b: 158)

Burnley discusses the T/V distinction in later Middle English literature in general, although many of his examples are drawn from Chaucer’s works. He raises interesting questions regarding the authors’ linguistic choices, noting that literary sources “may seek to reproduce spoken language with greater or lesser verisimilitude, they may reflect the values and social milieu of author, audience or both, but also the fictional social milieu of the work” (Burnley 2003: 29). An intriguing example of authorial choice is seen in the character of the Clerk in the Canterbury Tales: he uses the polite V-form with his fellow pilgrims (narrative level 3; see Figure 2 above), even though the T-form was associated with learnedness – for example, the clerk of Orleans in the Franklin’s Tale uses the T-form, and the characters in the Clerk’s Tale seem to know the appropriate rules of the T/V usage (narrative level 4; see above), so why does the narrator of the tale appear to be unaware of them (Burnley 2003: 40)? Burnley concludes by reminding the current scholarship that an awareness of the uncertainty of sources as well as our limited knowledge of the historical and social circumstances should “modify our confidence both in interpretation and in building too firm theoretical constructs based on early data” (2003: 40). Jucker (2006: 57–62; see also 2008: 8–13) provides a thorough summary of literature on pronouns of address, both before and after the emergence of historical pragmatics as such. In a similar vein to his earlier study (2000b), Jucker (2006: 69) argues for the interactional nature of the choice of pronouns of address. He presents a sample analysis of four tales from the Canterbury Tales, representing different genres: the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Second Nun’s Tale, the Friar’s Tale, and the

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Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which confirms his hypothesis that the interactants in these tales choose their pronouns of address according to the development of the exchange rather than according to their fixed positions of age, social status or familiarity. 3.4.

Other studies

Taavitsainen (1999) deals with expressions of personal affect, and how these expressions reflect the personality of the speaker in four very different characters of the Canterbury Tales: the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the Miller. Taavitsainen analyses both the characters’ descriptions in the General Prologue, and their contributions to the tale-telling contest. Thus the study incorporates all four narrative levels of the Canterbury Tales (see Figure 2 above). Personal affect features are expressions of the speakers’ subjective emotions, moods and attitudes, which are embedded in their language use (Taavitsainen 1999: 219). They include oaths, exclamations, and other surge features of emotion; other linguistic features expressing personal affect include the use of personal pronouns, modal auxiliaries, and deictic elements (Taavitsainen 1999: 220). The study concludes that the use of personal affect plays an important role in defining the personalities of the four pilgrims. The Knight’s idealistic character is enforced when he accepts his opening turn in the tale-telling; according to Taavitsainen, his speech on the occasion “contains the whole code of idealized behaviour of the knightly class” (1999: 222). His tale contains surge features such as oaths, swearing, and interjections, all markers of emotional communication (Taavitsainen 1999: 230). In the case of the Prioress, Taavitsainen notes that in her tale “the focus is not so much on the development of the plot or dramatizing the events (cf. the Second Nun’s Tale) as on the narrator’s dominant rhetoric, and the focus is on her affected diction” (1999: 225). The Wife of Bath’s Prologue employs a very different technique in expressing involvement; in the first part of the Prologue, the so-called mock-sermon, the Wife uses a persuasive and very interactive style, with direct questions and pleas to her audience. In the autobiographical second part of the Prologue, there are repeated addresses to the audience and to the silent party in the Wife’s re-enacted debate. These, according to Taavitsainen, are “powerful involvement features and contribute to the volume of personal affect and the aggressive tone of the Wife’s Prologue” (1999: 228). Finally, the Miller’s bawdy character is fully confirmed in his use of personal affect, which is skilfully realised in a carnivalistic way (Taavitsainen 1999: 230). The genre of the medieval dawn-song is the topic of Thomas Honegger’s (1999) article, in which he studies a passage from Troilus and Criseyde along with a similar scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The dawn-songs are poems inspired by “[t]he often difficult and emotionally painful act of taking leave of a beloved person” (Honegger 1999: 189), and while they were quite popular in medi-

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eval German-speaking countries, Chaucer’s dawn-song in Troilus and Criseyde is the first known example of the genre in English (Honegger 1999: 189). Honegger introduces the typical structure of a medieval dawn-song (1999: 192–193), and then presents a detailed analysis of the dawn-song passage in Troilus, followed by a similar close analysis of the passage in Romeo and Juliet. Through carefully studying several features, including address forms and secondperson pronouns of address, in the dialogue between the lovers, Troilus and Criseyde, Honegger shows that, after spending the night together, they re-establish the hierarchical relationship typical of courtly love in the dawn-song. Maggioni (2000) looks at a wider array of different features – speech acts, forms of address, and politeness formulae – in the speeches of female characters in the Wife of Bath’s Tale among other Middle English Arthurian romances. Maggioni notes that women’s speeches tend to occur in private settings, and usually involve establishing relationships “based on more or less overt seduction” (2000: 109). In her conclusion, Maggioni observes that women’s words in Arthurian romances “transform female characters from passive objects of either veneration or despisal into active subjects who become the motors and causes of chivalric aventure itself” (2000: 114). Various discourse strategies in the dialogue between male and female characters in the Canterbury Tales are also the focus of Pakkala-Weckström (2001), which analyses the dialogue between spouses in the Tale of Melibee, and PakkalaWeckström (2002a), which deals with three fabliaux: the Miller’s, the Merchant’s and the Shipman’s Tales. Pakkala-Weckström (2004) analyses an array of politeness strategies and other discourse strategies such as turn-taking, speech size, and topic introduction and control in the male–female dialogue in seven Canterbury Tales (see Table 1). Pakkala-Weckström (2005: 19–37) provides a step-by-step pragmatic analysis of the dialogue between husband and wife in the Clerk’s Tale. The main emphasis in these studies is on the dynamic nature of private power in marital and extra-marital relationships.

4.

Summary and ideas for further research

The research presented here is organised according to what the individual authors have emphasised as their main focus. This may be, in some cases, somewhat restrictive; certainly at least the material could have been organised differently. For example, the speech acts of insults and threats could also have been analysed under impoliteness, while address forms and pronouns of address could have been interpreted and discussed as politeness strategies, as could other discourse strategies, too. For example, in this volume, politeness is discussed in a chapter of its own. This material could also have been organised around the perspectives of social hierarchy, gender, age, etc.

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While there is no doubt that the Canterbury Tales, with its rich generic and stylistic variety, is the most important of Chaucer’s works, and has therefore quite naturally been the starting point of most of the studies discussed above, it still seems regrettable that Chaucer’s other works have gone largely unnoticed in current scholarship. There is, for example, a fair amount of dialogue in the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde, and some in the Book of Duchess and the Legend of Good Women. Furthermore, pragmatic analyses can and should be extended beyond dialogue; this is also an area where the works of Chaucer have a lot to offer to the field of historical pragmatics. A whole array of different speech acts remains unstudied; there are studies on insults, threats, and promises in Chaucer’s works, but, for example, directives and apologies could certainly yield interesting data. For example, Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008) have studied compliments by searching for various lexical items in corpus materials; a similar methodology could perhaps be applied to Chaucer’s poetry to study not just compliments but other speech acts as well. In contrast, address forms and pronouns, in particular the T/V distinction, seem to be rather well covered, at least where the Canterbury Tales is concerned. That there should be such an extensive number of studies on the T/V distinction in Chaucer is perhaps explained by a certain ambiguity concerning, in particular, the use of thou: it can be interpreted to signify intimacy, contempt, class distinction, or a certain disregard for courtly manners.16 It is clear, however, that the approach of historical pragmatics has added a new, more contextual and dynamic dimension to the study of second-person pronouns, and the studies published in this field have each taken a different angle. Notes 1 Helen Cooper notes: “Establishing a written source is […] not the same as claiming that Chaucer had read the work in question” (1989: 10). 2 All Middle English Chaucer citations are from Benson (1987). 3 Modern English translation from: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/English/TroilusandCressidaBkV.htm. 4 Derek Pearsall notes of Troilus and Criseyde that “there can be no doubt that the literary care lavished on that poem is of a kind quite different from what we find in the Canterbury Tales, and it is designed to make it worthy of comparison with the work of the great poets of the past” (1985: 24). Barry Windeatt argues of the poem’s structure that “Troilus reads as if a shape has been discerned in the story which governs the design and structural features of the poem at every level” (1992: 181). 5 A comprehensive list of the manuscripts can be found in e.g. Pearsall (1985: appendix A). 6 The Canterbury Tales modern English translations are by Nevill Coghill (1951). 7 There is also plenty of other evidence for the incompleteness of the poem, e.g. the fact that the narrator of the Shipman’s Tale seems to have been originally female, of which

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Pearsall notes that “the lines are more naturally taken as evidence of the continuous, evolving and unfinished nature of Chaucer’s work on the Tales, and of how little inclination or opportunity he had for systematic revision” (1985: 5). C. David Benson points out that “the clearest signals of the variety of the Canterbury Tales are the sharply differentiated tellers and their intricate relationships before, after and sometimes during the tales. No other story-collection has a frame that is so lively and dynamic. In contrast to the uniformly aristocratic company of the Decameron, or the two speakers in Gower’s Confessio (the Lover and Genius), Chaucer’s pilgrimtellers come from a wide range of late medieval clerical and lay estates” (1986: 93). Sell (1985a) talks about intradiegetic levels; Jucker (2000c) distinguishes between different levels with examples from the Second Nun’s Tale, using Koch’s (1999) study as a starting point. In fact, these studies represent two of four in a series of studies (see Sell 1985b, n. 2). Burnley’s book was originally published under the title A Guide to Chaucer’s Language in 1983. Petteri Valkonen has developed a computerised method for identifying speech acts, and his 2008 study involves the speech act of promising. He observes that, despite several problems with the retrieval software, a vast majority of the explicit performatives were realised by a finite set of manifestations (2008: 269). Technically, the monk also keeps his promise; he does actually give the lady the money that she needs, and, in return, receives sexual favours. The money, however, is a loan from her husband, and the monk later tells the husband that he has repaid the loan to the wife, so when he has promised the wife that he will “delyvere yow out of this care” (VII 200), he has actually put her into a far greater one. The unwanted admirers are Absolon in the Miller’s Tale and Aurelius in the Franklin’s Tale. This is an accordance with Burnley’s observation that there is a clear correlation in Chaucer’s works between the address forms dame, madame, sire, and lord and the pronoun ye; he further notes that “the conjuration by youre curteisie never occurs with the singular pronoun, not even on the lips of the rather uncourtly Alison in the Miller’s Tale, who switches from thou when she finds urgent need to use this expression” (1990: 35). David Burnley argues that “that speaker who does not accept the formalities imposed by social sophistication, but who earnestly wishes to communicate information vital to the well-being of a kindred soul has licence to adopt the role of clerkish instructor and address a king by the familiar pronoun” (1990: 36–37). Burnley goes on to point out that the instructor’s role is evident in the Tale of Melibee, where Prudence occasionally addresses her husband with thou, and thus “moves momentarily outside the structure of relationships demanded by conventional politeness to adopt the authority of learned tradition” (1990: 37). See also Figure 1 in Burnley (2003).

Internet source: Modern English translation of Troilus and Criseyde: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/English/TroilusandCressidaBkV.htm.

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References Arnovick, Leslie K. 1994 Dorigen’s promise and scholar’s premise. In: Mark C. Amodio (ed.), Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, 125–147. New York/London: Garland. Benson, C. David 1986 The Canterbury Tales: Personal drama or experiments in poetic variety? In: Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds.), 93–108. Benson, Larry D. (ed.) 1987 The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella 2000 Is diachronic speech act theory possible? Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 57–66. Blake, Norman F. 1980 Introduction. In: Norman F. Blake (ed.), The Canterbury Tales, 3–13. London: Edward Arnold. Blake, Norman F. 1985 The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales. London: Edward Arnold. Blake, Norman F. 1992 The literary language. In: Norman F. Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II, 1066–1476, 500–541. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boitani, Piero, and Jill Mann (eds.) 1986 The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnley, David 1989 The Language of Chaucer. Basingstoke and London: MacMillan. Burnley, David 1990 Langland’s clergial lunatic. In: Helen Phillips (ed.), Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval English Tradition. Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, 31–38. Cambridge: Brewer. Burnley, David 2003 The T/V pronouns in later Middle English literature. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 27–45. Chaucer, Geoffrey 1951 The Canterbury Tales. [Translated by Nevill Coghill.] London: Penguin. Cooper, Helen 1989 Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Clarendon. Cooper, Helen 1998 Averting Chaucer’s prophecies: Miswriting, mismetering, and misunderstanding. In: Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat (eds.), A Guide to Editing Middle English, 79–94. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Di Martino, Gabriella, and Maria Lima (eds.) 2000 English Diachronic Pragmatics. Napoli: CUEN. Eckhart, Caroline 2000 Genre. In: Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer, 180–194. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Fitzmaurice, Susan M., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2007 Methodological Issues in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Herman, Vimala 1995 Dramatic Discourse. Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London/New York: Routledge. Honegger, Thomas 1999 On the fringes of interaction: The dawn-song as a “linguistic routine” of parting. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 189–214. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Honegger, Thomas 2003 “And if ye wol nat so, my lady sweete, thanne preye I thee, […].” Forms of address in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 61–84. Hussey, S. S. 1971 Chaucer: An Introduction. London: Methuen and Co. Jacobs, Andreas, and Andreas H. Jucker 1995 The historical perspective in pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 3–33. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000a Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 369–389. (Topics in English Linguistics 35.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000b ‘Thou’ in the history of English: A case for historical semantics or pragmatics? In: Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Nikolaus Ritt (eds.), Words: Structure, Meaning, Function. A Festschrift for Dieter Kastowsky, 153–163. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000c English historical pragmatics: Problems of data and methodology. In: Gabriella Di Martino and Maria Lima (eds.), 17–55. Jucker, Andreas H. 2004 Contrastive analysis across time: Issues in historical dialogue analysis. In: Dominique Williams, Bart Defrancq, Timothy Colleman and Dirk Noël (eds.), Contrastive Analysis in Language. Identifying Linguistic Units of Comparison, 197–212. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, Andreas H. 2006 “Thou art so loothly and so oold also”: The use of ye and thou in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Anglistik 17: 57–72. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Politeness in the history of English. In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossena (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006. Vol. II: Lexical and Semantic Change. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International

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Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICHEL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006, 3–29. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 296.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis. Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008 Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koch, Peter 1999 Court records and cartoons. Reflections of spontaneous dialogue in early romance texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis. Roots and Traditions in the Study of the Romance Languages, German and English, 399–427. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lambert, Mark 1986 Telling the story in Troilus and Criseyde. In: Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds.), 59–73. Leech, Geoffrey N., and Michael H. Short 1981 Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London/ New York: Longman. Machan, Tim William 2003 English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maggioni, Maria Luisa 2000 Words of women in Middle English Arthurian romances. In: Gabriella Di Martino and Maria Lima (eds.), 103–114. Mazzon, Gabriella 2000 Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), The History of English in a Social Context. A Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics, 135–167. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence. Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 64.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2001 Prudence and the powers of persuasion: Language and maistrie in the Tale of Melibee. The Chaucer Review 35: 399–412. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2002a The discourse of seduction and intrigue. Linguistic strategies in three fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 151–173. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2002b Have her my trouthe – til that myn herte breste. Dorigen and the difficulty of keeping promises in the Franklin’s Tale. In: Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Variation Past and Present. VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen, 287–300. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 61.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

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Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2003 Genre, gender and power in seven Canterbury Tales. In: Karin Aijmer and Brita Olinder (eds.), Proceedings from the 8th Nordic Conference of English Studies, 121–136. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2004 Discourse strategies in the marriage dialogue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2 CV: 153–176. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2005 The Dialogue of Love, Marriage and Maistrie in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 67.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2008 “No botmeles bihistes”: Various ways of making binding promises in Middle English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 133–162. Pearsall, Derek 1985 The Canterbury Tales. London/New York: Routledge. Pearsall, Derek 1992 The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Rudanko, Juhani 2004 “I wol sterwe”: Negotiating the issue of a lady’s consent in Chaucer’s poetry. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1: 137–158. Searle, John R. [1965] 1991 What is a speech act? In: Steven Davis (ed.), Pragmatics. A Reader, 254–277. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sell, Roger 1985a Tellability and politeness in ‘The Miller’s Tale’: First steps in literary pragmatics. English Studies 66: 496–512. Sell, Roger 1985b Politeness in Chaucer: Suggestions towards a methodology for pragmatic stylistics. Studia Neophilologica 57: 175–185. Strohm, Paul 1986 The social and literary scene in England. In: Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds.), 1–18. Taavitsainen, Irma 1995 Narrative patterns of affect in four genres of the Canterbury Tales. The Chaucer Review 30: 191–210. Taavitsainen, Irma 1999 Personality and styles of affect in the Canterbury Tales. In: Geoffrey Lester (ed.), Chaucer in Perspective. Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, 218–234. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Taavitsainen, Irma 2001 Changing conventions of writing: The dynamics of genres, text types, and text traditions. European Journal of English Studies 5: 139–150. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics. What it is and how to do it. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36.

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Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) 2003 Diachronic Perspectives in Address Term Systems. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2007 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 107–138. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2008 “Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 195–228. Valkonen, Petteri 2008 Showing a little promise. Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of written prose. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 247–272. Wallace, David 1986 Chaucer’s continental inheritance: The early poems and Troilus and Criseyde. In: Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds.), 19–37. Wallace, David 1997 Chaucerian Polity. Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Windeatt, Barry 1992 Oxford Guides to Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde. Clarendon Press: Oxford.

9.

Shakespeare Ulrich Busse and Beatrix Busse

1.

Historical pragmatics and the study of Shakespeare’s English

While Shakespeare philology has a long research tradition, linguistic contributions to the study of Shakespeare’s English are much more recent and less numerous, and those within the scope of historical pragmatics are still relatively new, but becoming more frequent. For instance, Rudanko’s book Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare, from 1993, could be mentioned as an important early contribution to the field. A glance at the tables of contents of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics, which was established in 2000, immediately reveals that quite a few studies deal with Shakespeare’s English, e.g. Blake (2002c), Troupp (2002), Honegger (2006), Rudanko (2007) and Person (2009). Furthermore, Shakespearean examples are used quite often in general pragmatic introductions to explain pragmatic principles or approaches, such as, for example, Grice’s cooperative principle, or politeness phenomena. It would, therefore, be desirable to set historical pragmatics more fully into the broader context of the larger field of Shakespeare studies by showing how pragmatic topics are connected to issues such as style, rhetoric, dialogue and other related inquiries, which have come to the fore “in the last 25 years or so” (Blake 2002a: 13). However, owing to limitations of space, the following survey will be restricted to pragmatic approaches to Shakespeare’s English. The chapters in Blake’s Shakespeare grammar on “discourse and register” (2002a: 271–303) and on “pragmatics” (2002a: 304–325) provide an accessible overview of pragmatics and related topics. In the introduction to his Shakespeare grammar, Hope mentions that “[a]fter many years of relative neglect, Shakespearean scholars are turning their attention to language” (Hope 2003: 8). He lists the following titles: Kermode (2000), McDonald (2001), Magnusson (1999) and Adamson et al. (2001), “aimed at literary students of Shakespeare, and cover[ing] language and rhetoric” (Hope 2003: 8). Adamson et al. (2001: 302–315) provide an annotated bibliography of the most important monographs on Shakespeare’s English, ranging from Kökeritz (1953) to the new millennium, and concentrating on works that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. The comprehensive bibliography in Blake’s grammar (2002a: 346–361) lists titles ranging from 1870 (Abbott) to 2000 (e.g. Kermode) (see also our survey article U. Busse and B. Busse forthcoming). As a discipline, historical pragmatics is about fifteen years old, even though the term “historical pragmatics” has existed since the 1980s (see Stein 1985). This does not, of course, imply that no “pragmatic” work on Shakespeare’s English had

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been done earlier on, quite to the contrary. However, the reception of previous work by a wider audience has been hampered by the fact that the extant “protopragmatic” studies on Shakespeare’s English are scattered, excepting the collection of papers by Salmon and Burness (1987), which contains a number of classic studies on forms of address (e.g. Barber [1981] 1987 and Mulholland [1967] 1987); on ritual utterances, such as greeting formulae, parting formulae, etc. (Salmon [1967] 1987); on salutations (Replogle [1973] 1987); and also on Shakespeare’s language in general (Quirk [1971/1974] 1987). Furthermore, Blake regards it as unfortunate that many articles on pragmatics “have so far had little impact on the editing of Shakespeare’s texts [because they] are found in journals which are possibly never consulted by editors of Shakespeare” (Blake 2002a: 13). Our overview and discussion of the relevant research literature will incorporate important earlier studies where necessary in order to bridge the gap between older and more recent studies. In the field of historical pragmatics, the two different research approaches of “diachronic pragmatics” and “pragmaphilology” are usually distinguished. However, as far as pragmatic studies on Shakespeare’s English are concerned, they do not necessarily fall under the heading of pragmaphilology, since some approaches combine a pragmaphilological stance with a function-to-form and form-to-function mapping, whereas others compare features of Shakespeare’s language use with that of earlier and/or later stages of the English language, thus falling under the heading of diachronic pragmatics. Excepting the two chapters on pragmaphilology, all the other sections of this handbook are devoted to a specific topic. However, the subject areas of pragmatic studies of Shakespeare’s English cut almost right across the board of topics dealt with in the other chapters. Therefore, and also for reasons of internal consistency of the volume, it seems to make sense to follow the individual chapters of the handbook as far as applicable by elaborating on them and illustrating them with pertinent studies and examples from Shakespeare’s English and by adding special sections where appropriate. This procedure allows for comparisons in two different ways: on the one hand, by showing, for instance, how studies dealing with the topic of address in Shakespeare’s English are related to address-term studies in general or, on the other hand, how, for example, politeness theory has been applied to Shakespearean drama. Cross-references to the relevant chapters are added in brackets to the respective section headings.

2.

Data and methodology

Pragmatic analyses of Shakespeare’s plays have embraced a form-to-function and/or a function-to-form approach, a focus on only one play (see, e.g., Troupp 2002) or even a particular scene (see Honegger 2006), a corpus-based approach

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(see U. Busse 2002a; B. Busse 2006a) or an approach in which findings of Modern English have been tested for Shakespeare’s language (see Brown and Gilman 1989). As would any scholar approaching a text, a Shakespeare scholar must name the edition on which the investigation is based, which, in turn, usually chooses as one of the copy texts an earlier printing. Since no authentic Shakespearean manuscripts have come down to us, returning to original manuscripts is impossible. Depending on the research question, the differences between the Quarto (Q) edition(s) and the Folio (F) edition of a given play may, however, be decisive. This can be illustrated by Blake’s (2002b) study on forms of address in Hamlet. He compares their use in the three different versions, Q1 (1604), Q2 (1604 and 1605) and F1 (1623), marking major differences between each Quarto and F1. Both Quartos exhibit similar variations from F1 due to the working procedures of both compositors and actors. There are also clear divisions in the various categories. Modern resources such as Spevack’s (1968–1980) concordances (based on the first edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans), which include “substantive variants” of the plays, or electronic media such as William Shakespeare. The Complete Works (1989, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor) ameliorate the problem by providing these different “source texts”. However, the process of editing involves making decisions that may be debatable. With respect to directive speech acts, Blake describes the problem as follows (see also section 5 below on discourse markers): The base form of the verb is […] used for the infinitive, the first [person] singular and all plural persons of the present indicative, all forms of the present subjunctive, and the imperative. It may, consequently, be difficult to decide whether a particular example is imperative, infinitive or subjunctive, particularly as the imperative can take a subject like thou. Modern editors reach different conclusions, for the punctuation in F may not be helpful in elucidating the grammar. (Blake 2002a: 93)

Therefore, Blake (2002a: 7) advocates: “If we are to understand his [Shakespeare’s] language as fully as possible, it is important to follow the original sources rather than a modernised version, as so many books about his language do”. Whether to do this, or to use an old spelling edition next to various modern editions, or an electronic version in which some editorial interventions may be lost and others newly invented, needs to be decided by the researcher in view of the specific research aims and questions of a given study. It also depends on the context-sensitivity or robustness of the item under investigation. If we set aside these editorial problems concerning the authenticity of the texts and questions of dubious authorship of some of the plays, then the Shakespeare corpus comprising the 38 plays and the non-dramatic works consists of 884,647 words, if we accept the word count of the Spevack (1968–1980) concordances. Thus, unlike other corpora, which usually consist only of samples of language use,

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the Shakespeare corpus is a special case of a closed and complete set of data allowing “the possibility of total accountability of linguistic features” (Svartvik 1992: 9) from one author. However, due to the textual indeterminacy some caveats remain, especially in relation to the micro features on which a pragmaphilological interpretation rests. Nonetheless, the completeness of the corpus is of relevance to an investigation that is more philologically oriented and that follows a historical linguistic, historical pragmatic or historical sociolinguistic approach. By means of investigating a corpus with its total accountability, rather than a selection of texts according to hermeneutic principles, the results can be shown as statistically representative. With the availability of other corpora on Early Modern English, results about Shakespeare’s English can be extended and projected, in order to answer, for example, questions such as whether pronoun usage in drama resembled that of contemporary society or was conventionalised. The extent to which Shakespeare’s language can or cannot be regarded as a true representation of authentic spoken Early Modern English has been frequently discussed. Salmon ([1965] 1987) reasons that it was written as a representation of spoken language arising spontaneously from a given situation. “It is, of course, a selective and inadequate representation of speech; but the more skilful the dramatist, the more skilful he will be, if presenting the normal life of his time, in authenticating the action by an acceptable version of contemporary speech” (Salmon 1987: 265). The only possible pitfall to which she draws our attention is that verse, and also rhetorical prose, can have an effect on language structures in that formality seems to favour the “use of the longer-established of a pair of free variants, e.g. V + NP? rather than Do + NP + VN?” (Salmon 1987: 267). A quantitative corpus study will have to be supplemented with a well-informed qualitative analysis and knowledge of the text. For instance, U. Busse’s (2008) investigation of directives in King Lear shows that, in order to work out the illocutionary force of a specific directive, the knowledge of its situational context is important because forms that are elaborate – making use of the “glib and oily art” (Lr. 1.1.224) of rhetoric – may be ironic, mock-polite or insincere, and forms such as simple, straightforward canonical imperatives may show more concern for the hearer’s face than “words can wield the matter” (Lr. 1.1.55). This leads to an orientation as suggested by Spevack (2002), B. Busse (2006b) and Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007) and practised within stylistics. The formerly distinct research traditions of linguistics and literary studies are coming into closer contact also within Shakespeare studies under what one could label “the new philology” (see Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 22–25). As an example of this strand of research, one could take the work by Magnusson (1999, 2007). In this respect, the study by Munkelt and B. Busse (2007) may also serve as an example. Without intending to revive the authorship controversy (it has been agreed that the play Edward the Third is Shakespeare’s, despite its belated entrance into the

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Shakespeare canon), Munkelt and B. Busse (2007) investigate the theme of governance in Shakespeare’s Edward the Third and show how the play thematically and (pragma-)linguistically reflects Edward’s personal tension between “the King’s two bodies” (Kantorowicz 1957) rather than the union of his “body politic” and his “body natural”. King Edward’s political and personal crises, which are finally overcome, and which result in the growth and maturity of both of the king’s two bodies, if not in their union, are, for example, shown to be construed and reflected in the king’s exchange of nominal and pronominal address forms with the Countess of Salisbury in Act 2, which is generally said to have been written by Shakespeare. This conflict is also related to the bifurcation of the semantics of reign – as ruling over oneself and others. B. Busse (2006b) is a systematic and corpus-based approach to the Shakespearean concept of sensuality. Via recourse to the Shakespeare Database (Neuhaus forthcoming) and to Early Modern sources focusing on sensuality, the study analyses the word-forms Shakespeare coined for their reference to sensuality and interprets them within their pragmatic co-texts and contexts. From these issues concerning data and methodology, we will now move on to individual pragmatic topics.

3.

Address terms (see also chapter by Gabriella Mazzon)

The point of the social relevance of address behaviour in Shakespeare’s plays has been much commented on, but, concerning this topic, many studies concentrate either on pronouns, especially on the variance of T and V pronouns, or on nominal forms of address. In following this tradition, the first subsection below deals with T and V pronouns, followed by a subsection on vocatives. Thematically, there is also some overlap between this chapter and the following one on politeness. 3.1.

T and V pronouns

Critical surveys of the works published on forms of address in Shakespeare’s English show that the complex problem of personal pronouns has attracted a great number of scholars from the late nineteenth century (see, e.g., Abbott [1870] 1972: §§ 231–235) until the present day (see Freedman 2007). Many of the works on address pronouns written in the late twentieth century are based on the Brown and Gilman ([1960] 1972) model of power and solidarity, which tries to elucidate the selection of the pronouns in a sociological approach. Apart from that, studies within the tradition of structuralist linguistics treat the choice and fluctuation of address pronouns primarily in terms of markedness. For recent summaries or critical reports of this extensive body of literature see U. Busse (2002a: chapter 2), Mazzon (2003) and Stein (2003).

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Whereas the change from ye to you was mainly a syntactic phenomenon, the change from thou to you was primarily a sociopragmatic matter in Early Modern English, beginning in Chaucer’s time and reaching its height between 1550 and 1620 (see U. Busse forthcoming). Thus, Shakespeare’s writing career (c. 1590–1613) falls right into this decisive period. However, the speed of the change and, even more importantly, its interpretation depend on the type of language studied. Many studies concentrate on literary language, and, in particular, on Shakespeare, e.g. U. Busse (2002a). Only more recently, due to the availability of electronic text corpora, have other genres been studied in detail. For example, Nevala (2004) analyses nominal and pronominal address on the basis of the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and Walker (2007) investigates the use of second-person pronouns in the three genres of trials, depositions and drama comedy as represented in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. As regards the factors influencing the use of thou and you, a wide range of extra-linguistic factors such as social distance, characterisation, emotion, etc. have been found to motivate pronoun usage in Early Modern English. Various models and theories have been put forward showing that the explanation for the change is not as simple and straightforward as it seems at first sight. One of the earliest and most influential is the model introduced by Gilman and Brown (1958), Brown and Gilman ([1960] 1972) and Brown and Ford ([1961] 1964). In these three consecutive articles, the development of the forms of pronominal and nominal address in European languages is dealt with. Gilman and Brown (1958) trace the difference of pronominal address back to the Roman Empire of the fourth century, when the pronoun vos appears as a reflex of the nos pluralis majestatis of the emperor. From then on, they show the spread of the plural form and the development on two social planes. The vertical dimension of status yields the polite plural pronoun as a deferential address to superiors, and the singular pronoun as an address form for social inferiors. Discourse among social equals, when not intimate or well-acquainted, favours a reciprocal exchange of plural pronouns, and the singular pronoun as a sign of intimacy. In their 1960 article, Brown and Gilman introduce the term “power semantics”, which is characterised by a non-reciprocity of the forms of address between members of different social strata. The main difficulties of Brown and Gilman’s approach to the English language in general, and to Early Modern English in particular, lie in the fact that the overlay of social and affective usages of thou is often difficult or impossible to distinguish. Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s English there is often momentary fluctuation in pronoun usage between two interlocutors, which cannot be explained by a model assuming rather static social hierarchies (see Wales 1983). Quite often, the choice of you or thou is explained in terms of markedness. For instance, Quirk argues: “You is usually the stylistically unmarked form: it is not so much ‘polite’ as ‘not impolite’; it is not so much ‘formal’ as ‘not informal’” ([1971: 70], [1974: 50] 1987: 7). Although you is taken as “the general unmarked

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form beside which the use of thou is conspicuous” (Quirk [1971: 71], [1974: 51] 1987: 8), the concept of the mutual expectancy of the unmarked pronoun usage also implies the reverse in that “where thou is expected, you can likewise be in contrast and conspicuous” (Quirk [1971: 71], [1974: 51] 1987: 8). In this respect, it seems useful to distinguish between descriptive (statistical) norms – the majority form – and evaluative (correctness) norms. It seems conceivable that the thou vs. you distinction might be exploited for a number of purposes, and the data would reflect more than one dimension of variation. Hope (1994) finds the situation with competing explanatory factors quite confusing, “with at least three competing systems – a social system, an emotional/politeness-based system, and a system in which ‘you’ is the only available form – all open to use by speakers” (1994: 58). Of these, he expects only the last subsystem “to show socio-historical linguistic patterning consistently” because the social and emotional subsystems “would be expected to disrupt it” (1994: 58). It has frequently been noted that in Shakespeare’s English and in the texts of other Early Modern English authors quite a number of sudden shifts in pronominal usage occur. Often, these are interpreted as affective overtones, regarded as erratic, or dismissed completely. For instance, Eagleson treats such shifts in pronoun usage in terms of markedness: “you had become the unmarked or neutral form, while thou was the marked form, being used to register any important shift not simply in rank but especially in emotion, be it love or anger, respect or contempt” ([1971] 1987: 142). He provides us with a striking example taken from King Lear (first mentioned in Abbott ([1870] 1972: 158 and discussed again in Stein 2003: 251)): (1) Goneril [to Edmund]: Decline your head: this kiss, if it durst speak, / Would stretch thy spirits up into the air. (Lr. 4.2.22–23, emphasis added) In trying to win him over for her plans, Goneril tries to deceive Edmund in making him believe that she is in love with him. She subtly achieves this effect by first addressing him with you, and after the bestowal of the kiss by passionately thouing him. Mazzon points out that pronoun switches that mark the turning points in the plotting of alliance between characters are conditioned by “social network density” (1992: 134). Pronoun choices and, in particular, pronoun switches such as this have been explained by micro-sociolinguistic or micro-pragmatic approaches. For example, Hope argues that “rapidly modulating forms addressed to the same person” (1993: 85) have hitherto been explained as being affectively marked deviations from the forms expected on a social basis according to the Brown and Gilman model of power and solidarity. Yet, his work on depositions suggests that such shifts should rather be interpreted on a micro-pragmatic level. Calvo (1992: 22–26) goes yet a step further. Within the framework of Halliday’s ([1994] 2004) functional grammar, she assigns not only ideational and inter-

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personal meaning to you and thou, but also textual meaning. In her analysis of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, she suggests that, besides the well-recognised expressive and attitudinal meanings of the pronouns and a Hallidayan interpersonal function of negotiating personal identities, the pronouns, or their shifting, can also mark discourse boundaries. Pronoun changes of this kind are often accompanied by changes in topic, conversational mood and in deixis. They can thus be viewed as discourse markers (see section 5) in a wider sense. However, Stein (2003: 252) in his in-depth study of As You Like It and King Lear is correct to point out that “there could be no meaningful variation if there was not constancy enough to establish what is normal, socially determined use, or, in other words, the area of ‘non-negotiability’”. He argues (2003: 254) that “the majority of studies based on markedness are non-statistic in nature, but based on the local interpretation of switches”, e.g. Bruti (2000) and Mazzon (1992, 2003). He therefore combines quantitative and qualitative aspects of previous markedness studies. For the microcosm of the two plays, he sets out to establish the social norm in a statistical way. “The approach is therefore basically informationally-based. The meaning of the deviating form is weak in intention and has a high share of inferencing. It is clear that the semiotic processes involved can be analysed as implicatures, or accounted for in terms of relevance theory” (Stein 2003: 254). Stein’s numerous and very detailed findings can only be summarised very sketchily here. He finds that Shakespeare’s use of unmarked pronouns in these two plays is in keeping with that of the social decorum of Early Modern English society at large. However, due to “the concentrated language and emphatic emotionality typical of plays” (2003: 296) in both plays about 30 per cent of pronoun uses are marked, corresponding to a 1:2 ratio in favour of the unmarked form. In fact, both T pronouns (thou, thee, etc.) and V pronouns (ye, you, etc.) can be used in a marked way. Among social equals, it is T that is the unmarked form. “V is used with marked status towards common servants, members of the lower class, and minoraged children” (2003: 296). In line with other studies on the social structure of Early Modern England, Stein finds that in these two plays it is especially the higher classes amongst themselves and the middle stations of society that have room for a “semiotic exploitation” (2003: 302) of pronoun use. By contrast, the pronoun use of the highest and lowest classes is socially highly predictable, leaving little space for social or emotional negotiation. Whereas all the previous studies investigate a limited sample of plays in a very detailed way, U. Busse (2002a) analyses the entire Shakespeare corpus and thus adds insights on the correlation between pronoun use and literary genres. In the 38 plays of the Shakespeare corpus, there are a grand total of 13,186 T pronouns and 22,400 V pronouns. However, this evidence from the Spevack (1968–1980) concordances then needs to be adjusted because it includes the plural V pronouns. By means of a control corpus of nine plays from different genres and different dates of composition, it can be established that about 20 per cent of the V pronouns are plu-

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ral. This leaves about 18,000 singular V pronouns with a relative frequency of about 2 per cent in comparison to 1.6 per cent for T pronouns. This means that, statistically speaking, V is the (unmarked) majority form and T the (marked) minority form. Once the corpus is subcategorised into genres, it becomes apparent that the two variants, T and V, are used with differing frequencies. The T pronouns have the highest frequency in the history plays and they show the lowest presence in the comedies. The correlation of the two factors of genre and date of composition (see Brainerd 1979) further points toward a divide within the corpus between an earlier period (leading up to 1600) and a later period (after 1600), with the only plays showing more T than V pronouns after this date being Timon of Athens and The Tempest. The “abnormal” pronoun distribution in King Henry VIII (77 T pronouns and 803 V pronouns) could possibly be attributed to the share of Fletcher in this play (see also Hope 1994). Since comedy makes more use of prose than of blank verse, the next factor examined is the distribution of the two variants T and V in a verse or prose context. The quantitative corpus analysis reveals that for a great many plays there is a statistically significant deviation in the distribution, with thou dominating in blank verse and you being the majority form in prose. However, on the corpus level the difference makes up only less than 10 per cent. Nonetheless, this distribution supports the working hypothesis that there exists a correlation between pronoun use and dramatic medium. However, the preponderance of you in the genre of comedy and its higher frequency in the medium of prose do not immediately support the claim that prose is an indicator of social inferiority in Shakespeare’s plays. Quite the contrary, in Much Ado About Nothing and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is the dominant medium of discourse, and even in the clowns’ prose, as represented by the constables in Much Ado About Nothing and by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you is their pronoun of rapport. This usage shows two things: if it is true that prose is the primary medium of discourse, especially of the lower classes, then it can no longer be maintained that among them thou is the normal pronoun. Rather, it seems to be the other way around: that by 1600 you is the ordinary pronoun of address even among the lower social orders (as depicted in Shakespearean comedy). This interpretation gains additional support from the theory of drift and the concept of markedness as put forward by Andersen (1990, 2001). He establishes a correlation between marked and unmarked linguistic categories and their respective openness towards language change. For example, he describes prose as being more compatible with innovation than is poetry. In the light of this explanation, it is no longer surprising to find that you dominates in prose rather than in verse. In order to substantiate this explanation, a control corpus of poetry consisting primarily of Shakespearean and other Elizabethan sonnets is investigated to check

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whether all, or at least some, of the factors analysed so far for Shakespeare’s plays could also be attributed to the use of thou and you in his non-dramatic works. The difference between the plays, viz.: 13,186 T pronouns (42 per cent) and c. 18,000 singular V pronouns (58 per cent) and his non-dramatic works, viz.: 1,094 T pronouns (74.12 per cent) and 382 singular V pronouns (25.88 per cent), tells us that the two pronouns have a very different status in drama and in poetry. Unlike the drama corpus, no corpus-internal development can be detected in the sonnets and Shakespeare’s other non-dramatic works. A further contrast to drama is pronominal consistency in the sonnets as there are only a few sonnets showing mixed pronoun use (Sonnets 24, 100, 105, 116). The pronoun switches in the sonnets addressed to the Young Man have to be attributed to changes in the relationship between speaker and addressee, shifting personae, real and/or imagined social contexts, etc. In the sonnets to the Dark Mistress, Shakespeare uses the conventional pronoun thou. In contrast to all the previous extra-linguistic factors that were found to be of importance for the variation of thou and you, no firm evidence for an intra-linguistic conditioning of the variation could be shown empirically. It has been stated that thou is used more often as subject of closed-class verbs in statements and questions and, accordingly, you for lexical verbs. This putative influence of grammar on the choice of thou and you has been upheld repeatedly; for example, by Abbott (1972), Mulholland (1987) and Barber (1987), but was refuted by Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak (1994). Nor could it be confirmed in a pilot study based on eight Shakespearean plays (see U. Busse 2002a: chapter 8). If the selection is representative for the corpus as a whole, then the above claim of the earlier research that syntactic distribution could perhaps influence the choice of pronouns to a certain degree is not corroborated by the larger set of data. Walker (2007: 237–259), in her analysis of A Corpus of English Dialogues, comes to a similar conclusion. 3.2.

Vocative constructions

It has been argued that the study of the parameters determining the variance between T and V pronouns in Early Modern English, and in Shakespeare’s plays in particular, could be made firmer by incorporating all forms of address. Until recently, however, nobody has combined the two aspects of pronominal and nominal address in a large-scale study. Earlier monographs, such as Byrne ([1936] 1970), Replogle (1967) and Stoll (1989), focus either on address pronouns or on nominal forms of address. There are, however, a number of works, mostly articles, dealing with this issue on a smaller scale. For instance, Barber analyses the collocates of you and thou in King Richard III, finding that “throughout the play there is a clear correlation between the vocative expression used and the choice of pronoun” (1987: 174). Yet, the results from a single play do not lead us very far because the data can be skewed or

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biased in a certain way, and for this reason Barber demands “statistical information on such collocations from a larger body of Shakespeare’s plays” (1987: 175). The studies by Brown and Gilman (1989) and by Kopytko (1993), carried out within the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (see section 4 below), largely leave the address pronouns aside. Thus, Brown and Gilman claim “thou and you are not very important in scoring speech for politeness” (1989: 179). They therefore only deal with a small number of unusual personalpronoun uses and Kopytko says that “the topic of forms of address in Shakespeare’s plays is so vast that so far it has not received any exhaustive treatment” (1993: 52). For reasons of practicability and the assumed futility of the effort to incorporate pronouns for the purposes of his study, he also decides to neglect them. Mazzon (2003) criticises former approaches to this topic as being “either extremely specific, discussing pronoun choices in single plays or single scenes only, or disappointingly vague” (2003: 226). She goes a step further by analysing pronouns and, marginally, terms of address in their role as markers of socio-affective relationships. She investigates relational pairs such as husband–wife, parent–child, superordinate–subordinate relationships, servant–master relationships, peer relationships, etc. in Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. In the light of these conflicting findings, U. Busse (2002a: chapter 6) investigates the co-occurrence of second-person pronouns and nominal forms of address in the entire Shakespeare corpus. The underlying research hypothesis is that the address pronouns used together with vocatives mirror the social or relational position expressed by the title, to a certain extent. Thus the more reverential and deferential vocatives, e.g. the titles of respect, should attract a V pronoun, and the more intimate vocatives and the terms of abuse should show a preponderance of T pronouns, with an area of overlap in-between. Evidence from the use of second-person pronouns and co-occurring nominal forms of address on the corpus level tells us that there is indeed a strong correlation between the nominal form of address and the address pronoun. The social impact implied in address nouns such as (my) liege, sir and other titles indicating deference has become so strong that these respectful titles almost automatically trigger the use of you, even if they are being used ironically, mock-politely or in a flippant mood. The correlation between respectful titles and you as the polite pronoun is indeed so strong that, in a context where thou is used between the interlocutors, the occurrence of a respectful title necessitates pronoun switching to a momentary you (see also Williams 1992: 92). Thus far, Brown and Gilman seem to be right when they state that the pronoun of address mostly follows the status rule and is therefore a predictable obligatory part of speech that “is automatic and ever-present and so does not function to redress an FTA [face-threatening act]” (1989: 197). The address nouns can be placed along a scale of politeness ranging from negative politeness or deference at the one end to positive politeness at the other. In declining order the titles of honour and courtesy, occupational titles and ex-

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pressions of family relationship all co-occur with more V pronouns than T pronouns. Whereas in rising order the generic terms of address, the terms of abuse and the terms of endearment all occur with more T pronouns than V pronouns. While, on the one hand, it is true that T pronouns hardly, if ever, occur in the company of titles such as sir or my liege, where the social distance first necessitates the use of the appropriate title, which, in turn, almost automatically triggers the polite pronoun, these cases of deference do not indeed add to the politeness of an utterance. However, on the other hand, it is not true to say that the choice of pronoun is totally predictable, as Brown and Gilman (1989) claim it to be, because there are quite a number of cases where there is a meaningful choice to be made, when the pronoun is not dictated by decorum and/or the elevated social position of the addressee. The husband–wife relationship is a good case in point. It provides evidence that even in asymmetrical power relationships there is space for social negotiation as expressed by pronouns. Another case that runs counter to power and solidarity semantics is the frequent use of you with abusive vocatives, when, for instance, masters find fault with their servants and address them as you rascal or you knave. These cases of unequal power relationships, which, according to Brown and Gilman’s theory should result in non-reciprocal T forms, show that such generalisations on pronoun use and vocatives are oversimplistic. This is the point of departure for B. Busse’s comprehensive study on vocatives. B. Busse (2006a) investigates the functions, meanings and varieties of address forms in a corpus of seventeen Shakespeare plays, which are selected according to editorial, thematic, generic, synchronic and diachronic considerations. Nominal forms of address in Shakespeare have been either mostly neglected within literary, linguistic and other studies on Shakespeare’s plays, and considered to be a marginal, unwieldy linguistic area, or, following Brown and Gilman’s (1972) as well as Brown and Ford’s (1964) parameters of power and solidarity, are often explained only via recourse to the rigid social structure allegedly existent in Shakespeare’s time (see Breuer 1983; Stoll 1989). Contrary to this, B. Busse (2006a) claims that the analysis of vocatives defies a neat limitation of rigidly social meanings. Therefore, Shakespeare’s use of nominal address is interpreted by an interactive use of linguistic, literary and cultural theories, approaches and methods. In a constant social transfer and exchange, vocatives in Shakespeare construe – and hence reflect and create – experience as meaning, relationships, identity and attitude as well as messages and habitus as experiential, interpersonal and textual markers (Calvo 1992; Halliday 2004: 29). Vocatives in Shakespeare are crucial to how interactants accumulate symbolic capital, construe their emotions, their relationships, their attitudes, their character and their habitus (Bourdieu 1977a, 1977b, 1997a, 1997b), and determine how and where they position one another in the play. In addition, the use of vocatives in Shakespeare is relevant to how (Early Modern) experience is reflected and verbally construed. And, the vocative in Shakespeare, in its textual function, is responsible

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for the creation and structure of a message conveyed. Vocatives are representations and therefore also versions of reality: they are a part of the cultural common stock of early modern England’s and Shakespeare’s fictional worlds, and they go beyond what is often called conventionalised routines. Vocatives construe the interplay between macro-contextual factors (institutions, power, social order) and micro-contextual aspects of the immediate situation. In B. Busse (2006a), vocatives as direct forms of address are also no longer seen as a case, but rather as direct attitudinal adjunct-like forms of address (Halliday [1994: 54] 2004: 81, 133). These are either realised as a nominal group or a single noun serving as head alone, as in the construction “Cleopatra” (Ant. 1.3.27), where the vocative consists of only one element. Vocatives are optional in form, they may be introduced in Shakespeare by the morphological marker O, and they may also be positioned initially, medially or terminally in the clause and speech move (with extrapolated pronouns and interjections being excluded). Vocatives are analysed below the clause as a nominal group, in the clause, and above the clause, and are incorporated within a Hallidayan framework. The newly developed clusters of vocatives mainly rely on the semantics of the head of the vocative, thus linking semantic and grammatical criteria. The categories are conventional terms such as “noble patricians” (Tit. 1.1.1), “dame” (Lr. 5.3.155), “lady” (Ham. 3.4.115), “dear madam” (Lr. 4.7.8), “my lord” (3H6 5.6.1–5) or “sir” (Ham. 3.2.296); terms of emotion/mind, thought such as “my dearest love” (Mac. 1.5.58); EPITHETS such as “best” (Ant. 1.3.61); generic terms such as “my boy” (Lr. 1.4.106) or “sweet wench” (Tit. 3.1.282); terms referring to natural phenomena; personal names such as “fairest Cordelia” (Lr. 1.1.250) or “Margaret” (R3 1.3.233); terms referring to specialised fields (with the subclasses of sense, perception, clothing, food, furniture, nature and parts of the body) such as “O inhuman dog” (Oth. 5.1.62), “stubborn knees” (Ham. 3.3.67); and terms of family relationships. The network of vocatives in Shakespeare connects to and construes the complex Early Modern cultural and sociolinguistic experience, such as the increase of the Early Modern English lexicon and the specialisation of lexical areas or semantic fields referred to (Görlach 1994: 111). The variety and number of vocative forms illustrates the Early Modern emphasis on rhetoric and copia (Adamson 1999: 545–548), and their complex interaction with the Elizabethan world picture (Tillyard [1943] 1973; Suerbaum 2001: 84). In Richard III, for example, the men in the play use most of the conventional terms when they address Richard, while the women, Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth, fashion themselves as antagonists both regarding men in general and Richard in particular through their language use. Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth make frequent use of vocatives from the clusters EPITHETS, emotion/mind, thought and natural phenomena – i.e. from the immediately more emotional and committal categories. Moreover, most of these vocatives raise the question of appearance and reality, emphasising that Richard’s

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actions belie his noble words. As such, the women’s analogies and metaphors from the field of natural phenomena can be read as an attempt to cohesively construe Richard’s negative identity. When Richard is addressed as “thou lump of foul deformity” (R3 1.2.57), “hedgehog” (R3 1.2.103), “dog” (R3 1.3.214), “thou elvish marked abortive rooting hog” (R3 1.3.227), “thou rag of honour” (R3 1.2.232) or “thou toad” (R3 4.4.144), the women resort to the natural world that is most heavily despised within the early modern world picture (Hammond 1997: 115). Contrary to Brown and Gilman’s claim that “in the four tragedies [Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello] more than 100 different forms of address are used, aside from Christian names and pronouns” (Brown and Gilman 1989: 175), the systematic and computer-assisted quantitative investigations reveal that there are as many as 3,111 different types of vocatives in the seventeen plays under investigation. In addition, each Shakespeare play of the corpus contains on average 500 vocative tokens, amounting to a relative frequency of roughly 2.40 for each play. For example, in the tragedies, which show the highest average relative frequency of vocatives of around 2.50, the relative frequency is highest in Titus Andronicus (3.38), and lowest in Macbeth (2.12) and Cymbeline (1.73). For Hamlet, the relative frequency is 2.27; although the actual number of vocatives occurring in Hamlet is higher than in Titus Andronicus (as is the case with King Lear as well), the relative frequency is lower. The figures for Othello and Romeo and Juliet are higher than those for Hamlet, with a relative frequency of 2.40 and 2.48, respectively; while the relative frequencies of vocatives computed for Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear are much higher at 2.67 and 2.90, respectively. On average, the transition from Elizabethan to Jacobean tragedy influences the overall relevance of vocatives to Shakespearean plays. These figures seem to decline in the course of the Elizabethan period (although numbers for Titus Andronicus are far above average) only to increase again following the year 1600, as the figures in Hamlet mark a first synchronic deviation from the general outlook of vocative distribution. These results suggest that the year 1600 constitutes a change in Shakespeare’s writing, of audience tastes and in the nature of the playhouses where many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed (Bruster 2003: 112–113). In the later period of Shakespeare’s writing, the number of vocatives decreases. The vocative figures in Cymbeline (1609–1610) bear resemblance to The Winter’s Tale – a fact confirming the romance genre of both plays (Mehl 1967) rather than the classification of Cymbeline as a tragedy (and The Winter’s Tale as a comedy) as in F1, even though the relative frequencies increase again in the final period of Shakespeare’s composition. A selection of relative frequencies of vocatives computed for the “social upstarts” in the plays provides evidence of the meaning-construing force of vocatives and explains why we perceive these characters as false and socially conformist. For example, the relative frequencies of vocatives used by Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Osric in Hamlet are high: 4.0 for Rosencrantz, 4.38 for Guildenstern and 6.12 for Osric.

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Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity, and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, B. Busse’s (2006a) study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Vocatives as emotive as Falstaff’s “Ah, whoreson caterpillars, bacon-fed knaves” (1H4 2.2.84), which he uses when he robs the travellers who carry the king’s money, illustrate more straightforwardly in what way vocatives in Shakespeare construe identity and selfhood; they do so by reflecting the experience of the interlocutor addressed and of the speaker. Initially, the vocatives seem to be purely abusive, aiming at frightening the travellers as well as facilitating the robbery. In addition, Falstaff’s attack on the travellers being fat is ironic, given his own physique. Taken from the animal world, the vocative whoreson caterpillars, for example, refers to the “larva of a butterfly or moth, sometimes extended to those of other insects, especially those of saw-flies” (OED 1). In a figurative sense, the term also alludes to a “rapacious person”, an “extortioner”, and “one who preys upon society” (OED 2). In early modern times, the meaning of the term is distinctly transferred and used synonymously with the earlier “piller”, but afterwards only employed figuratively with conscious reference to the literal sense (OED 2). Recourse to Early Modern English dictionaries also shows that, in “bacon-fed knaves”, knave is a generic term that denotes a boy or lad employed as a servant; hence, a male servant; one of low condition (OED 2). Schmidt and Sarrazin ([1874/1875] 1962: 617) describe knave as a “young fellow, a boy, a menial, and a rascal or villain”, while in Thomas (1587), knave collocates with a “vile fellow of no estimation”, but also with “a babbler” and a “vain-talking fellow”. Conventional terms such as my lord, lady, sir, and majesty may also carry and create an inherent interpersonal, textual and experiential meaning potential. In Act 1, Scene 3 in Antony and Cleopatra, for example, Cleopatra hardly reciprocates any of Antony’s vocatives, but rather uses abstract vocatival concepts, such as “Riotous madness, / to be entangled with those mouth-made vows” (Ant. 1.3.30–31) and “O most false love” (Ant. 1.3.64). Somehow, the instances when Cleopatra refrains from using direct address forms for Antony have the power of illustrating that in Cleopatra’s key the non-poetic, mostly non-hyperbolic absence of address forms is the most sincere declaration of affection, lust and desire of which she is capable. Their duel of wit and of gaining authority is an illuminating exchange that reflects and subverts early modern gender roles and power relations. Cleopatra’s vocative pattern for Antony is created and foregrounded as depersonalising in function when it is seen as an immediate reaction to Antony’s choice of vocatives for Cleopatra. Antony construes Cleopatra’s identity and his own habitus of power first by vocative switching, referring to Cleopatra by her personal name “Cleopatra” (Ant. 1.3.27), by an amplified conventional term “My precious queen” (Ant. 1.3.73), by occasional lascivious EPITHETS, such as “best” (Ant. 1.3.61), or by another amplified conventional term, such as “Most sweet Queen” (Ant. 1.3.32). However, he also uses a conventional term alone in “Hear me, Queen” (Ant.

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1.3.42) and in “I’ll leave you, lady” (Ant. 1.3.82). Antony’s strategic attempts to manipulate Cleopatra’s reaction to his departure and his creation of a multiplicity of Cleopatra’s identities by means of vocatives construe subtle meanings that are especially difficult to discern for the use of conventional terms. For example, although he may construe her as the ruler of Egypt (with queen referring to the female ruler [OED 4]), both the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the first meaning of queen is a king’s consort (OED 1), and Florio’s (1598) Early Modern English dictionary define queen as the “King’s mistress”. Hence, what Antony wraps in a saucy shell of flattering subservience is also an attempt to demonstrate and to assert his own superiority, power and habitus. B. Busse (2006a) claims, furthermore, that a vocative may function as a textual, interpersonal and experiential caesura. Antony’s last, rather brutal, short and in comparison to the previous vocatives incongruent lady in “I’ll leave you, lady” (Ant. 1.3.86) enhances its textual function, because it serves as an example of a segmentation unit, which indicates to the actor a change of performative work and behaviour. Given the editorial and historical facts that the text of Antony and Cleopatra in the F1 (1623) does not show any act or scene divisions (except for “Actus Primus. Scena Prima”) smaller micro-linguistic indicators, such as vocatives, play a crucial role as stage directions.

4.

Politeness and impoliteness (see also chapter by Minna Nevala)

This section presents an overview of how both politeness and impoliteness have been studied in the context of Shakespeare’s English. For politeness, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory usually serves as a starting point. A non-technical introduction to their theory and an illustration by several pertinent examples from Shakespeare can be found in Blake (2002a: 320–325). Brown and Levinson (1987) claim that (positive and negative) face, power (P), distance (D) and the ranked extremity (R) of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in discourse. Brown and Gilman (1989) put this claim to the test for the four tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. The four plays are systematically searched for pairs of minimally contrasting discourse dyads. That is to say, for each of the four plays stretches of discourse between two characters are selected that differ in only one of the three variables above. A factor taken into account when the degree of politeness of an utterance is evaluated is, among others, the use of names and titles as indicators of deference; the personal pronouns play only a minor role. Brown and Gilman give the following example (2 and 3), illustrating their method. They argue that “the most notable contrast in the two speeches lies in the efficiency of the first and the politeness of the second” (1989: 160):

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(2) Macbeth [to servant]: Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, / She strike upon the bell. (Mac. 2.1.31–32) (3) Messenger [to Lady Macduff]: Bless you, fair dame! I am not to you known, / Though in your state of honor I am perfect. I doubt some danger does approach you nearly. / If you will take a homely man’s advice, / Be not found here; […]. (Mac. 4.2.65–69) In summary, Brown and Gilman find: The results for P and R are those predicted by theory, but the results for D are not. The two components of D, interactive closeness and affect, are not closely associated in the plays. Affect strongly influences politeness (increased liking increases politeness and decreased liking decreases politeness); interactive closeness has little effect on politeness. (Brown and Gilman 1989: 159)

These norms of politeness are overridden when characters are enraged (e.g. Lear and Kent in King Lear) or mad, no matter whether the madness is real (e.g. Ophelia in Hamlet, Lear in King Lear) or feigned (e.g. Edgar in King Lear). Furthermore, politeness needs to be applied properly, and not overdone, as this might suggest insincerity, flattery or pomposity (see Blake 2002a: 325). Magnusson (1992) also applies the Brown and Levinson model to Shakespearean drama, analysing directives in King Henry VIII. While writing her article, she was unaware of Brown and Gilman’s paper. Nonetheless, she comes to the same conclusion regarding terms of address by referring to the predictive force of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. According to their theory, there should be “increased frequencies of vocative titles in the contexts of ‘face-threatening acts.’ A brief survey shows that this is true at least of King Henry VIII, Act 1, Scene 1. This scene contains twelve such vocatives” (Magnusson 1992: 399). More recently, Magnusson has elaborated on her study of King Henry VIII, finding that “much of the complicated eloquence of characters like Katherine and Wolsey arises not as a matter of their individual expression but instead out of the contexts of their interactions – both out of the immediate relations of their dialogue and out of their long-term, habituated speech positions” (Magnusson 1999: 11). From this she concludes that a character’s speech habits are more constrained by factors of social politeness than by matters of personality or by Shakespeare’s personal style (Magnusson 1999: 34). Despite his criticism of the theory in the first part of his study, Kopytko (1993, 1995) also carries out research in the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson. He investigates linguistic politeness strategies in four of Shakespeare’s comedies and four of his tragedies. Explicitly excluded from his study are all the forms of address, e.g. names, titles and pronouns. In contrast to Brown and Gilman, who subdivide social distance into the two independent variables of interactive intimacy and affect, Kopytko offers a more complex set of factors, such as affect, cun-

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ning, importance and intimacy. He regards this set of components as by no means final and exhaustive. Methodologically, he differs from Brown and Gilman in that his version of politeness theory is indeterministic. Kopytko finds that, in his sample of eight plays, positive politeness strategies prevail over strategies of negative politeness. The tendency is more clearly marked though in the tragedies, with 338 cases of positive politeness prevailing over only 80 cases of negative politeness (resulting in a ratio of 4.2:1). This contrast is not so clearly borne out in the comedies with only 162 instances of positive politeness compared to 57 of negative politeness (2.8:1). Kopytko says that the question of why there are more instances of politeness in tragedies than in comedies cannot easily be explained without resorting to guessing or making such trivial statements as: “because the exigency of plot, or a character delineation etc., require it so” (1993: 110). He thinks that the question of how this happened is much more interesting than why, suggesting that the more frequent use of politeness in tragedies in comparison to comedies “is closely associated with the numerical increase of some social/psychological variables correlated with particular strategies of politeness in tragedies” (1993: 111). In summary, Kopytko tentatively concludes that “the interactional style or ‘ethos’ of British society has evolved from the dominating positive politeness culture in the 16th c. towards the modern negative politeness culture” (1993: 110), if it can rightly be assumed that the strategies depicted by Shakespeare bear resemblance to those prevalent in Elizabethan society around him. Rudanko (1993) investigates Timon of Athens in the light of the above-mentioned theories of Brown and Levinson and their extension and special application to Shakespeare’s English by Brown and Gilman. While he grants that Brown and Levinson’s model is pioneering and impressive, he is of the opinion that it is incomplete and thus in need of addition. He argues that politeness theory rests basically upon two notions: face and rationality. In Rudanko’s opinion, these concepts do not automatically lead to linguistic politeness: Even if rationality is accepted as a principle guiding human behavior, it is still perfectly possible to hold that it does not always lead to politeness. Even a perfectly rational human being is capable of acting in a way other than politely, for any number of reasons. (Rudanko 1993: 167)

Because “acting in a way other than politely [is not] necessarily the same as the absence of politeness”, Rudanko introduces the concept of nastiness: “Nastiness consists in adding something gratuitously to offend the hearer” (Rudanko 1993: 167). Holding this assumption to be true, then, entails the formulation of a sixth super strategy for face-threatening acts. “Given the scale from 1 to 5 […] with 1 being ‘Do the [face-threatening act] on record without redressive action, baldly,’ this new strategy may be numbered = and labelled [as the 0-strategy] ‘Do the [facethreatening act] on record with aggravating action employing nastiness’”. Against

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the background of the substrategies of negative and positive politeness, Rudanko develops a fully-fledged inventory of substrategies for nastiness (Rudanko 1993: 168–171) and then applies this apparatus to the analysis of Timon of Athens. The application of the “0-strategy” in a conversation shows that the speaker tries to achieve a “turning the knife in the wound” effect by aggravating unpleasant matters through the means of nastiness. Some of the substrategies of nastiness have a direct bearing upon the forms of address because they affect the choice of pronouns and/or vocatives. This can be illustrated by many speeches in Shakespeare’s plays. As an example, the exchange between Duke Frederick and his niece, Rosalind, in As You Like It that leads to her banishment from his court shall be discussed briefly. (4) Duke Frederick: Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste, / And get you from our court. (5) Rosalind: Me, uncle? (6) Duke Frederick: You, cousin. / Within these ten days if that thou beest found / So near our public court as twenty miles, / Thou diest for it. (7) Rosalind: I do beseech your Grace / Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me: / If with myself I hold intelligence, / Or have acquaintance with mine own desires; / If that I do not dream, or be not frantic / (As I do trust I am not), then, dear uncle, / Never so much as in a thought unborn / Did I offend your Highness. (8) Duke Frederick: Thus do all traitors: / If their purgation did consist in words, / They are as innocent as grace itself. / Let it suffice thee that I trust thee not. (AYL 1.3.41–55, emphasis added) In (4), Duke Frederick addresses his niece formally and respectfully as mistress, a title of honour and with the corresponding pronoun you. He distances himself by resorting to the royal our, by which he stresses his independence and authority. In Rosalind’s short question (5), the vocative uncle seeks to assert common ground by stressing their family relationship with a familiar form of address, which functions as an in-group identity marker in speech. However, the effect of Rosalind’s strategy does not last long. Her familiarity has only upset the duke momentarily, when he (in 6) takes up the relational vocative with you, cousin, but then immediately stresses power and distance by resorting to thou and royal our, bluntly maximising the imposition: “Thou diest for it”. Rosalind, in turn (7), gives him deference by calling him your Grace and your Highness and asks for reasons for his behaviour, but he does not comply with the conversational cooperative principle and simply ignores her wants. Instead, in (8), he uses a number of substrategies of negative and positive nastiness: he does not hedge, is deadly serious, asserts lack of common ground, excludes all expressions of deference, personalises the hearer by means of thee, thus stating that the face-threatening act applies to the hearer in particular, and not to others.

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As another step forward, Culpeper (1996, 1998) develops a theory of impoliteness. Among other areas, he explores its role in dramatic dialogue. As an example for impoliteness in drama dialogue, he (1996: 364–366) discusses the banquet scene in Macbeth (3.4.57–73), after the murder of Banquo, during which Macbeth loses his nerve at the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and upon which his wife uses impoliteness to attack Macbeth’s face: “Are you a man?” (Mac. 3.4.57). Her tactics seem to succeed because Macbeth regains his composure and returns to the banquet table. Culpeper states that “in drama, impoliteness is not thrown in haphazardly for audience entertainment: it serves other purposes. Conflict in interaction appears either as a symptom, or as a cause of, social disharmony, and where there are tensions between characters we are more likely to see developments in character and plot” (1998: 86). By using the approach of diachronic pragmatics, Jucker (2008) investigates changes in politeness strategies over time. He compares the use of address terms in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to those in Shakespeare’s plays, and finds evidence for a development from a positive politeness culture to a negative politeness culture. While this evidence is supported by the investigation of speech acts such as apologies and directives, the study of Early English correspondence provides counter-evidence with increased positive politeness. Thus, “[o]ur knowledge in this respect is still scattered and does not allow a coherent picture” (Jucker 2008: 25), but, as with discourse markers (see below), these differences show that genre and domain are important factors.

5.

Discourse markers (see also chapter by Laurel J. Brinton and chapter by Elke Gehweiler)

The study of discourse or pragmatic markers has received much attention in the framework of (historical) pragmatics over the past years (see Brinton 1996; Jucker and Ziv 1998). In terms of function, discourse markers are used to structure discourse, oral discourse in particular. Brinton (1996: 37–38) divides their main functions into those belonging to the textual mode of language, as e.g. to initiate discourse, and those belonging to the interpersonal mode of language, as e.g. “to express a response or reaction to the preceding discourse”. In terms of form, discourse markers constitute a heterogeneous set, comprising e.g. interjections, conjunctions and adverbs. With exclusive regard to Shakespeare’s English, this topic has not attracted as much attention as address forms or politeness. However, beginning with Salmon’s ([1967] 1987) study of colloquial English in the Falstaff plays, there are a number of articles stressing the importance of attitude or stance markers. Thus, Salmon (1987: 54) points out: “For nearly every feature which characterizes spoken language […] there is a set of exponents from which the speaker makes a selection ap-

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propriate to his attitude to the other speaker, the situation and the messages exchanged”. Jucker (2002) analyses the frequency and distribution of the discourse markers o/oh, why, well, pray/prithee and marry in the Helsinki Corpus, finding that their occurrence is highly genre specific and linked to orality. They all feature very prominently in only three genres, namely in plays, fiction and trial records, all of which include representations of spoken language. “The individual markers also have different preferences to associate with specific speech acts” (Jucker 2002: 229). Among others, Jucker’s discussion of discourse samples includes extracts from The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry VI, Part 3. Blake (2002a) stresses that discourse markers are grammatically realised in Shakespeare’s plays as interjections or interrogative pronouns, such as why, what, well; or as shorter clauses/phrases, such as I say, for upon my life, believe me, as it were; or even as forms that derive from former imperatives, such as the doubling of go to or of come. Many discourse markers are also exclamations; for example, alas, alas the day, tut, fie, sblood or zounds. Depending on their realisation, discourse markers may be positioned at the beginning of a clause, in the middle or at the end. Generally speaking, discourse markers function not only to support an emotional overtone as well as the speaker’s attitude, but also to characterise a particular speaker or serve as a general marker of conversation. Blake (2002a: 297) claims that plays containing colloquialisms frequently contain a number of discourse markers and that discourse markers occur more frequently in the prose than in the verse passages (Blake 2002a: 298). Also, according to Blake (2002a: 298), male characters use more “forceful” discourse markers than female characters. Interestingly, Blake also illustrates the necessary interplay between editorial considerations and pragmatics when he shows how in, for example, F1 and in quarto editions of respective Shakespeare plays variants occur and the syntactic functions of words like, for example, well or say, can be interpreted differently. For example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1.1.73–74), we find: “I am glad to see your Worships well: I thank you for my venison Master Shallow”. In F1, well is followed by a colon and many editors also see well in this position as an adverb. Blake (2002a: 293) stresses, however, that it could also be seen as a discourse marker introducing the following clause. Say can also be a challenge in editing. In Hamlet (1.1.16), as Blake (2002a: 294) outlines, the line in F1 is: “Say, what is Horatio there?”. In modern editions, it can also appear as: “Say – what, is Horatio there?” (Wells and Taylor 1988: 655), foregrounding, by standing out from the rest of the sentence, what is going to follow. U. Busse (2002a: chapter 7) carries out a case study on prithee and pray you as discourse markers in Shakespeare’s English. As regards their numerical distribution, I pray you is the most frequent form with the function of a discourse marker. It accounts for approximately one-third of all cases. The abbreviated forms are used

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more sparingly. In comparison to all the pray forms, (I) prithee is much less numerous and is not used at all in a number of plays. In terms of politeness, pray and prithee differ clearly in their co-occurrence with the respectful title sir, which is only used with pray. The category titles of courtesy occurs most often in connection with pray but also with prithee. Contrary to Brown and Gilman’s (1989: 183–184) interpretation of (I) pray you as deferential and prithee as an in-group identity marker, corpus evidence proves that a good deal of overlap exists between the forms and their communicative functions. The investigation of the discourse functions of pray/prithee further reveals that both fulfil textual and interpersonal functions and that especially in the comedies they co-occur with interjections and other pragmatic particles to express colloquiality and verisimilitude. Furthermore, both pray and prithee play an important role in polite directive speech acts, as they are used to tone down the abruptness of a command, as the citation from Twelfth Night (3.4.321) illustrates: “Pray, sir, put your sword up, if you please.”

6.

Speech acts (see also chapter by Dawn Archer)

Discourse markers such as pray and prithee and other linguistic forms such as address pronouns and vocatives can be retrieved from a written text without much difficulty, and from an electronic text corpus even in their entirety. The only concern is assigning them their communicative function(s), which may be difficult enough in retrospect. However, with a speech-act analysis by way of function-toform mapping, both the practical and the underlying theoretical problems multiply. Therefore, in contrast to the previous sections, which concentrated on a survey of previous work, this section will begin by addressing a number of general problems before proceeding to an illustration with pertinent studies carried out on particular plays or the manifestations of specific speech acts. When we apply and adapt present-day theories such as those in pragmatics to earlier periods of a language, we have to assume that language use generally conforms to what Romaine called the “uniformitarian principle” that is to say “we accept that the linguistic forces which operate today and are observable around us are not unlike those which have operated in the past” (Romaine 1982: 122). The main problem connected with a diachronic speech-act analysis is that a function-to-form mapping is difficult, as, for instance, a directive speech act can be realised in a number of ways. While explicit performative verbs can be retrieved from an electronic corpus, this does not completely hold true for a whole spectrum of different forms that not only vary in their illocutionary force, but where the choice of available forms also depends on the period of observation. In addition,

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the problem is aggravated by “hidden manifestations” (see Kohnen 2007) of a speech act. Despite the methodological and underlying theoretical difficulties, both Bertuccelli Papi (2000) and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) are of the opinion that diachronic speech analysis is possible. Thus, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) investigate “insults from flyting to flaming” in the framework of diachronic speechact analysis. They point out that a comparison across time faces similar problems as a contrastive analysis of speech acts across different cultures. In both cases, the units to be studied need to be comparable. “Thus it is imperative to be very careful in the identification of specific speech acts for a diachronic investigation. The different realizations across time may reflect, at least partly, differences in function” (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 69). The second methodological problem owes to the fuzziness of speech acts. In their diachronic analysis, Jucker and Taavitsainen cover insults and related speech acts from Anglo-Saxon boasts and rituals to present-day sounding and flaming of contemporary African-American adolescents. In this context, they also deal with Shakespearean insults, which, according to Hill and Öttchen (1995), can be divided into “name-calling, general abuse, knavery and villainy, and expletives” (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 73). The opening scenes from The Tempest (1.1.36–45) and Romeo and Juliet (1.1.40–54) are taken as examples to show that swearing, cursing and taunting are adjacent speech acts. For this reason, Jucker and Taavitsainen introduce the concept of “pragmatic space”. They conclude that speech acts have to be seen in a multidimensional pragmatic space that they share with neighboring speech acts. Specific realizations are therefore context-specific, culturespecific and time-specific. Moreover it is not only the realization that changes over time but the underlying speech function may change too (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 92).

With respect to directive speech acts, Brown and Gilman (1989) compare examples of different Modern English request strategies to their Early Modern counterparts. Examples (9) and (10) below are, respectively, the most and the least polite examples from a set of 54 Present-day English requests. The concocted example in (11) makes use of Shakespeare’s English with respect to modern life, and examples (12) and (13) work the other way around by employing Present-day English constructions for the language of Shakespeare’s plays (here King Lear): the results sound rather odd, thus giving proof to the time-specificity of speech acts. (9) Might I ask you where Jordan Hall is? (10) Shouldn’t you tell me where Jordan Hall is? (11) ?/* I do beseech you to tell me where Jordan Hall is. (12) ?/* Could you wake the king? (13) ?/* Would you a little disquantity your train? (adapted from Brown and Gilman 1989: 181).

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From this comparison it becomes apparent that the forms used today are absent from Early Modern English and vice versa. Nevertheless, Brown and Gilman argue that the world of Shakespeare’s tragedies may be far away from our modern world, but that “in spite of the surface differences […] Shakespeare’s indirect [sic] requests are created on the same principles as the indirect requests of English today, and these principles may be universal” (1989: 181). Brown and Gilman divide Shakespeare’s requests into two major groups. One set “asserts the speaker’s sincere wish that the hearer do X and that is a major felicity condition for the direct imperative” (1989: 181). For Early Modern English they give the following examples for this type of request: “Do X, I beseech you, I pray you, Prithee, I would that, I require that, and so on” (1989: 181). Although these constructions clearly vary in the amount of deference shown to the addressee, they all have in common that they either imply (as in Do X! by means of conventional conversational implicature) or directly express sincere speaker/writer volition (as in I would that …). By contrast, the second group of requests concerns a felicity condition in the hearer, in that these requests invoke or mention willingness on the part of the addressee: “They ask not whether the hearer could or would do something, but rather if the hearer is willing, sees fit, or is pleased to do something” (1989: 181–182). In Shakespeare’s tragedies they are typically realised by phrases such as an(d) please you, if it please you, may it please you, if you please (see Allen 1995). In the diachronic perspective, from Shakespeare’s time a shift from addressor-based directives to addressee-oriented directives seems to have taken place (see U. Busse 2002b). Rudanko (1993) provides an extended study of speech acts in Coriolanus. Regarding the methodology of identifying and describing speech acts, he points out that two approaches can be distinguished, namely “classifications which are primarily guided by lexical properties of illocutionary verbs” (Rudanko 1993: 120) as exemplified by Wierzbicka (1987), or by the Searlian (1979) “direction of fit” between words and the world, resulting in the well-known classification of assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. For his purposes, Rudanko regards these two approaches “as complementary points of view” (1993: 121). Before beginning with his own analysis, Rudanko points out that speech-act theory had been applied to Shakespeare’s English before, namely in Fish’s (1976) study of Coriolanus and in Porter’s (1979) analysis of the Lancastrian trilogy. Rudanko’s underlying idea is that “considering speech acts in Coriolanus entails confronting questions about the play itself, for, as will be seen, speech acts in the play are instrumental in creating the world of the play” (Rudanko 1993: 123). He treats the following speech acts in detail: promising (either in its own right or in response to requests), requesting, praising and reactions to praising, boasting, mocking, imperatives such as “Hang ye!”, “Hang ’em!”, and dysphemistic epithets such as “you curs”, “you fragments” (Rudanko 1993: 144–145), finding that especially the last “two speech acts, more than any others, help to define Coriolanus in particular,

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to the extent that a major character in Shakespeare can be defined by one or two speech acts” (Rudanko 1993: 145). As these two speech acts are typically directed at social inferiors such as plebeians or soldiers, this reveals Coriolanus’s “obsession with social station” (147) and his own “deep sense of insecurity” (149). At this point, Rudanko broadens the perspective of speech-act theory in order to incorporate results from literary criticism, working out “the question of Coriolanus’s tragic stature” (153) and his own “(at least partial) tragic insight and self-awareness” (154). Rudanko’s summary emphasises the importance and interplay of linguistic analysis and (literary) interpretation: A number of speech acts in the play were identified and illustrated in the present survey. Further, the central question of the dramatic functions of speech acts in the play was addressed. It is not always easy to identify speech acts, even in the context of a full-length play. Teasing out dramatic functions of speech acts tends to compound the task of interpretation. No doubt there is scope for disagreement about some of the interpretations offered here. (Rudanko 1993: 160)

U. Busse (2008), in his study of King Lear, works out the relationships that hold between grammatical sentence types such as imperatives on the one hand, and their communicative functions as directive speech acts on the other. By following the approach of a form-to-function mapping, the study starts by compiling, with the help of reference works, an inventory of linguistic forms that were available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries to carry out directive speech acts. The second part of the study puts the theoretical apparatus to the test by focusing on King Lear as the central person of the play. The close investigation of Lear’s directive speech acts and those addressed to him reveals an interesting development. In numerical terms, Lear as a speaker becomes less dominant in the course of the play. The number of directive speech acts also becomes smaller and more questions occur in-between, but even at the very end there are imperatives to be found, and Lear’s final speech terminates in an imperative. However, when Lear’s directives across the play are compared to each other, it becomes noticeable that both their form and even more so their communicative function changes from commanding and ordering to inviting, offering and pleading. This would indeed signal a fundamental change in character from a selfassured person, free of doubt to somebody who has very painfully learnt to pay consideration to other persons’ feelings, and to “see better” (Kent to Lear in Lr. 1.1.158).

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Conclusion

This overview illustrates that pragmaphilological as well as diachronic pragmatic approaches to Shakespeare cannot be separated in the aim to cover the studies that focus on pragmatic features in Shakespeare, as the two complement each other. By applying either of these branches of the discipline, particular areas of Shakespeare’s English, such as the use of nominal and pronominal forms of address or politeness features, have been studied in detail. Other areas of Shakespeare’s language, such as speech acts, are less well-charted or still unexplored, such as the investigation of stance (B. Busse 2010), discourse markers or modality in the entire Shakespeare corpus. These features will hopefully be studied in the Shakespeare corpus, including sociohistorical and also cognitive aspects, and relating them to pragmatic considerations. In terms of methodology, a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach allows for fruitful and empirically representative investigations of a particular pragmatic phenomenon in the entire Shakespeare corpus, in respective genres or in relation to particular speakers. However, this needs to be complemented by a philologically driven qualitative analysis, focusing on micro-textual analysis and reading; only this interaction of methods will put historical texts in their sociocultural context. But, even then, the insights offered by this comprehensive attempt “are inevitably shaped by a present-day reading of the past” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 14). Apart from the interaction of pragmaphilological and diachronic approaches and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, another important direction for future research will be the well-informed cooperation between linguistics, literary and cultural criticism, theatre semiotics as well as historical and sociological approaches, also taking account of the fact that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed. The pragmatic potential of Shakespeare’s language is “the power of speech / To stir men’s blood” (JC 3.2.322). Therefore, we will not finish our survey by saying All’s Well that Ends Well, but by quoting from The Tempest: “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not (Tmp 3.3.135–136). Appendix: List of Shakespeare’s works referred to in this chapter References are made to G. Blakemore Evans (1997) The Riverside Shakespeare. Ado Ant. AYL Cor. Cym.

Much Ado About Nothing Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It Coriolanus Cymbeline

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F1 Ham. JC 1H4 3H6 H8 Lr. Mac. MND Oth. Q R3 Rom. Son. Tim. Tit. Tmp. TN TNK Wiv. WT

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First Folio edition (1623) Hamlet Julius Caesar Henry IV, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 3 Henry VIII King Lear Macbeth A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello Quarto edition Richard III Romeo and Juliet Sonnets Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus The Tempest Twelfth Night The Two Noble Kinsmen The Merry Wives of Windsor The Winter’s Tale

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torical Linguistics (8 ICHL, Lille, 31 August – 4 September 1987), 1–20. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 66.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Andersen, Henning 2001 Markedness and the theory of linguistic change. In: Henning Andersen (ed.), Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress, 21–57. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 219.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Barber, Charles [1981] 1987 You and thou in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Leeds Studies in English, New Series 12: 273–289. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 163–179.] Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella 2000 Is a diachronic speech act theory possible? Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 57–66. Blake, Norman F. 2002a A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Houndmills: Palgrave. Blake, Norman F. 2002b Forms of address in Hamlet. In: Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlich (eds.), Of Dyuersitie and Chaunge of Language: Essays Presented to Manfred Görlach on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, 305–318. Heidelberg: Winter. Blake, Norman F. 2002c On Shakespeare’s informal language. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.2: 179–204. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977a The economics of linguistic exchanges. [Translated by R. Nice.] Social Science Information 16: 645–668. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977b Outline of a Theory of Practice. [Translated by R. Nice.] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1997a Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen. (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 107.) 6th ed. [Translated by W. Fietkau.] Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre 1997b Sozialer Sinn: Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft. (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1066.) 2nd ed. [Translated by G. Seib.] Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brainerd, Barron 1979 Pronouns and genre in Shakespeare’s drama. Computers and the Humanities 13: 3–16. Breuer, Horst 1983 Titel und Anreden bei Shakespeare und in der Shakespearezeit. Anglia 101: 49–77. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996 Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. (Topics in English Linguistics 19.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brown, Roger W., and Marguerite Ford [1961] 1964 Address in American English. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62: 375–385. [Reprinted in Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society, 234–244. New York: Harper & Row.] Brown, Roger W., and Albert Gilman [1960] 1972 The pronouns of power and solidarity. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. [Reprinted in John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson (eds.), Communication in Face to Face Interaction: Selected Readings, 103–127. Harmondsworth: Penguin.] Brown, Roger W., and Albert Gilman 1989 Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Language in Society 18: 159–212. Bruster, Douglas 2003 Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bruti, Silvia 2000 Address pronouns in Shakespeare’s English: A re-appraisal in terms of markedness. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), The History of English in a Social Context: A Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics, 25–51. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 129.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Busse, Beatrix 2006a Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 150.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Busse, Beatrix 2006b Linguistic aspects of sensuality: A corpus-based approach to will-construing contexts in Shakespeare’s works. In: Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe and Anja Müller (eds.), Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg: Proceedings, 125–143. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Busse, Beatrix 2010 Adverbial expressions of stance in Early Modern ‘Spoken English’. In: Jörg Helbig (ed.), Anglistentag 2009 Klagenfurt: Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Busse, Ulrich 2002a Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 106.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Busse, Ulrich 2002b Changing politeness strategies in English requests: A diachronic investigation. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi, 17–35. (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 2.) Bern: Peter Lang. Busse, Ulrich 2008 An inventory of directives in Shakespeare’s King Lear. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Speech Acts in the History of English, 85–114. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Busse, Ulrich Forthcoming Pronouns. In: Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs (ed.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook, (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK) 24 Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Busse, Ulrich, and Beatrix Busse Forthcoming The language of Shakespeare. In: Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs (ed.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook, (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK) 24 Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Byrne, Geraldine [1936] 1970 Shakespeare’s Use of the Pronoun of Address: Its Significance in Characterization and Motivation. PhD thesis, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. [Reprinted 1970, New York: Haskell.] Calvo, Clara 1992 Pronouns of address and social negotiation in As You Like It. Language and Literature 1: 5–27. Culpeper, Jonathan 1996 Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367. Culpeper, Jonathan 1998 (Im)politeness in dramatic dialogue. In: Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short and Peter Verdonk (eds.), Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, 83–95. London: Routledge. Eagleson, Robert D. [1971] 1987 Propertied as all the tuned spheres: Aspects of Shakespeare’s language. The Teaching of English 20: 4–15. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 133–144.] Evans, G. Blakemore (ed.) 1974 The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghtin Mifflin. Evans, G. Blakemore with the assistance of J. J. M. Tobin (ed.) 1997 The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Fish, Stanley E. 1976 How to do things with Austin and Searle: Speech act theory and literary criticism. Modern Language Notes 91: 983–1025. Florio, John [1598] 1972 A Worlde of Wordes. [Reprinted in Anglistica and Americana 114.] Hildesheim and New York: Olms. Freedman, Penelope 2007 Power and Passion in Shakespeare’s Pronouns: Interrogating ‘you’ and ‘thou’. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gilman, Albert, and Roger W. Brown 1958 Who says tu to whom. ETC: A Review of General Semantics 15: 169–174. Görlach, Manfred 1994 Einführung ins Frühneuenglische. 2nd ed. Heidelberg: Winter. Halliday, M. A. K. [1994] 2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London/New York: Arnold. [3rd ed. revised with C. Matthiessen. London/New York: Arnold.]

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Hammond, Antony (ed.) 1997 Richard III (The Arden Shakespeare. 2nd Series.) Walton-on-Thames: Nelson and Sons. Hill, Wane F., and Cynthia J. Öttchen 1995 Shakespeare’s Insults: Educating Your Wit. New York: Crown Trade. Honegger, Thomas 2006 ‘Wouldst thou withdraw love’s faithful vow?’ The negotiation of love in the Orchard Scene (Romeo and Juliet Act II). Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7: 1: 73–88. Hope, Jonathan 1993 Second person singular pronouns in records of Early Modern spoken English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 94: 83–100. Hope, Jonathan 1994 The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-linguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hope, Jonathan 2003 Shakespeare’s Grammar. (The Arden Shakespeare.) London: Thomson Learning. Jucker, Andreas H. 2002 Discourse markers in Early Modern English. In: Peter Trudgill and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Alternative Histories of English, 210–230. London/New York: Routledge. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Politeness in the history of English. In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossen (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006, vol. II, 3–29. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 296.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H., and Yael Ziv (eds.) 1998 Discourse Markers: Description and Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kantorowicz, Ernst. H. 1957 The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kermode, Frank 2000 Shakespeare’s Language. London: Allen Lane. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Agnieszka 1994 Sociolinguistics and the computer: Pronominal address in Shakespeare. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 29: 49–56. Kökeritz, Helge 1953 Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Kohnen, Thomas 2007 Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 139–166. (Topics in English Linguistics 52.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Kopytko, Roman 1993 Polite Discourse in Shakespeare’s English. (Seria Filologia Angielska 24.) Poznan´: Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Kopytko, Roman 1995 Linguistic politeness strategies in Shakespeare’s plays. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 515–540. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. McDonald, Russ 2001 Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magnusson, A. Lynne 1992 The rhetoric of politeness and Henry VIII. Shakespeare Quarterly 43: 387–409. Magnusson, A. Lynne 1999 Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnusson, A. Lynne 2007 A pragmatics for interpreting Shakespeare’s sonnets 1 to 20: Dialogue scripts and Erasmian intertexts. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 167–184. (Topics in English Linguistics 52.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mazzon, Gabriella 1992 Shakespearean thou and you revisited, or socio-affective networks on stage. In: Carmela Nocera Avila, Nicola Pantaleo and Dominico Pezzini (eds.), Early Modern English: Trends, Forms and Texts: Papers Read at the IV National Conference of History of English, Catania 2–3 May 1991, 123–136. Fasano: Schena. Mazzon, Gabriella 2003 Pronouns and nominal address in Shakespearean English: A socio-affective marking system in transition. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, 223–249. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mehl, Dieter 1967 Die Mittelenglischen Romanzen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts. (Anglistische Forschungen 93.) Heidelberg: Winter. Mulholland, Joan [1967] 1987 Thou and you in Shakespeare: A study in the second-person pronoun. English Studies 48: 34–43. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 153–161.] Munkelt, Marga, and Beatrix Busse 2007 Aspects of governance in Shakespeare’s Edward III: The quest for personal and political identity. In: Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Literature as History. History as Literature, 103–121. (Cultural Identities 1.) Bern: Peter Lang. Neuhaus, H. Joachim. Forthcoming Shakespeare Database. http://www.shkspr.uni-muenster.de. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 64.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

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Person, Jr., Raymond F. 2009 ‘Oh’ in Shakespeare: A conversation analytic approach. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.1: 84–107. Porter, Joseph A. 1979 The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Trilogy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quirk, Randolph [1971] [1974] 1987 Shakespeare and the English language. In: Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schoenbaum (eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, 67–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Reprinted with minor alterations in Randolph Quirk 1974 The Linguist and the English Language, 46–64. London: Arnold. This again reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 3–21.] Replogle, Carol A. H. 1967 Shakespeare’s use of the forms of address. PhD thesis, Brandeis University, MA. [University Microfilms International.] Replogle, Carol A. H. [1973] 1987 Shakespeare’s salutations: A study in stylistic etiquette. Studies in Philology 70: 172–186. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 101–115.] Romaine, Suzanne 1982 Socio-historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 34.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudanko, Juhani M. 1993 Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare: Essays on Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Lanham: University Press of America. Rudanko, Juhani M. 2007 Concepts for analysing deception in discourse intended to be persuasive: Two case studies from Shakespearean drama. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.1: 109–126. Salmon, Vivian [1965] 1987 Sentence structures in colloquial Shakespearian English. Transactions of the Philological Society: 105–140. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 265–300.] Salmon, Vivian [1967] 1987 Elizabethan colloquial English in the Falstaff Plays. Leeds Studies in English 1: 37–70. [Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 37–70.] Salmon, Vivian, and Edwina Burness (eds.) 1987 A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schmidt, Alexander, and Gregor Sarrazin [1874/1875] 1962 Shakespeare-Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of all the English Words, Phrases and Constructions in the Works of the Poet. 2 vols. 6th unchanged ed. Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Searle, John 1979 Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spevack, Marvin 1968–1980 A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. 9 vols. Hildesheim: Olms. Spevack, Marvin 2002 [email protected]. The Shakespeare Newsletter 254 (Fall 2002) 1: 82–86. Stein, Dieter 1985 Perspectives on historical pragmatics. Folia Linguistica Historica 6.2: 347–355. Stein, Dieter 2003 Pronominal usage in Shakespeare: Between sociolinguistics and conversational analysis. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, 251–307. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stoll, Rita 1989 Die nicht-pronominale Anrede bei Shakespeare. (Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 41.) Bern: Peter Lang. Suerbaum, Ulrich 2001 Shakespeares Dramen. (UTB für Wissenschaft 1907.) Tübingen/Basel: A. Francke. Svartvik, Jan 1992 Corpus linguistics comes of age. In: Jan Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82, Stockholm, 4–8 August 1991, 7–13. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 65.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan M. Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36. (Topics in English Linguistics 52.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Thomas, Thomas 1587 Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae. Canterbury: R. Boyle. Tillyard, E. M. W. [1943] 1973 The Elizabethan World Picture. 11th ed. London: Chatto and Windus. Troupp, Lotte 2002 ‘Hear my soul speak’. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.1: 107–150. Wales, Kathleen M. 1983 Thou and you in Early Modern English: Brown and Gilman re-appraised. Studia Linguistica 37: 107–125. Walker, Terry 2007 Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 158.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (eds.) 1988 William Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Compact edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (eds.) 1989 William Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Electronic edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wierzbicka, Anna 1987 English Speech Act Verbs. London: Academic Press. Williams, Joseph M. 1992 O! When degree is shak’d: Sixteenth-century anticipations of some modern attitudes toward usage. In: Tim W. Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds.), English in its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, 69–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

V.

Micropragmatics

10.

Discourse Markers Laurel J. Brinton

1.

Introduction

The historical study of discourse markers began to come into its own in the mid-1990s, with studies focused on English (e.g. Jucker 1995; Traugott 1995; Brinton 1996) as well as on other languages such as Latin (e.g. Kroon 1995) and French (e.g. Hansen 1998). The studies fall into one of two types. The first type examines the existence and function of discourse markers at various periods in the history of the language; this approach can be seen as essentially synchronic, what Brinton (2001) characterizes as “historical discourse analysis proper”. A summary of studies of discourse markers in the different historical periods of English is given in section 3, followed by a brief overview of some similar studies in other (primarily European) languages in section 4. The second type of study examines the development of discourse markers over time, either changes in individual markers or changes in discourse marking systems; such studies can be understood as more truly diachronic, and hence this approach has been characterized as “diachronic(ally oriented) discourse analysis” (Brinton 2001) (see section 5). Within the larger context of language change in general, debate has focused on the processes of change responsible for the development of discourse markers and has questioned specifically whether grammaticalization, pragmaticalization or lexicalization accounts for the rise of discourse markers; this debate is reviewed in section 6.

2.

A definition of discourse markers

Discourse markers do not constitute a formal grammatical class (Hansen 1998: 65, 2006: 27; Schourup 1999: 236) since they encompass one-word items such as actually, anyway, like, now, so or well – which may be homophonous with adverbs, prepositions or conjunctions – but also phrasal elements such as in fact, after all or and stuff like that, and abridged clauses such as you know, I mean or you see. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a number of formal features of discourse markers that are generally agreed upon. They are phonologically “short” items that preferentially occur in sentence-initial position. They are syntactically independent elements that are loosely attached to (parenthetical to) their host clause and often constitute a separate intonation unit and as such have scope over global units of discourse (beyond the level of the clause). They occur with high frequency, es-

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pecially in oral discourse, and may be stylistically stigmatized. Semantically, discourse markers are seen as having little or no semantic content: they are non-referential / non-propositional in meaning (although historically they typically derive from lexemes with full semantic content, and may retain traces of the original propositional meaning of these lexemes). Some discourse markers, but not all, express procedural (inferential) rather than conceptual meaning. Discourse markers do not affect the truth value of the utterance that they introduce (Schourup 1999: 234). As non-truth-conditional elements, they are thus optional: “the absence of the discourse marker does not render a sentence ungrammatical and/or unintelligible” (Fraser 1988: 22); however, pragmatically, their absence can make a discourse “not easily comprehensible” (Hansen 1998: 199). Finally, it has been observed that discourse markers, because of their lack of semantic content, pose difficulties for translation. If discourse markers are not a formal grammatical class, they must be understood as constituting a functional class (Hansen 1998: 357; Bazzanella 2006: 451; Diewald 2006: 406; Waltereit 2006: 64). Classic definitions of discourse markers have focused on the text-connective functions of discourse markers; for example, Schiffrin (1987: 31) defines discourse markers as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (see also Fraser 1988), while Schourup (1999: 234) comes to the conclusion that the “typical” discourse marker “is used to relate [an] utterance to the immediately preceding utterance”. Günthner and Mutz argue that discourse markers “contextualize how the following utterance or longer episode is to be interpreted in relation to the preceding discourse” (2004: 83). Many definitions of discourse markers also include reference to speakers and/or hearers. For example, Brinton (1996: 35–40) argues that discourse markers can be understood as serving “interpersonal” as well as “textual” functions. In their textual role, discourse markers assist in structuring discourse as text, by, for example, initiating or closing discourse; marking topic shifts, episodic boundaries, or turns; constraining the relevance of adjoining clauses; or introducing repairs or reformulations. In their interpersonal role, discourse markers may focus either on the speaker or on the relation between the speaker and hearer. The former – a subjective function – involves, for example, expressing responses, reactions, attitudes, evaluations or continuing attention. The latter – an intersubjective function – ranges from attention getting to expressions of cooperation, shared knowledge, solidarity or intimacy (positive politeness) to deference and other face-saving devices (negative politeness) (see López-Couso, this volume). In more recent treatments, Bazzanella (2003, 2006) identifies three main functions of discourse markers: a cognitive function (e.g. procedural/inferential, epistemic, or illocutionary force meanings), an interactional function (e.g. attention getting, hedging, turn-taking, expressions of [dis]agreement), and a metatextual function (e.g. text structuring, focusing, reformulation). It is also well recognized that discourse markers are multifunctional (Jucker 2002; Bazzanella 2006)

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Discourse markers bear close affinity to interjections (Gehweiler, this volume). The two classes of items are seen as sharing formal characteristics: both are invariable, typically monomorphemic forms that are syntactically independent from the rest of the utterance. Semantically and functionally, the distinction between interjections and discourse markers is somewhat more clearly delineated: unlike discourse markers, interjections are “holophrastic” – i.e. they express the meaning of a whole sentence in one word – and they are primarily emotive, uttered as spontaneous emotional reactions to a situation (Gehweiler, this volume). However, cognitive, conative and phatic functions similar to those carried by discourse markers have been attributed to interjections (see Ameka 1992: 113–114), and, as will be seen below, historically the same forms have served as both discourse markers (with primarily textual and interpersonal functions) and as interjections (with primarily emotive functions).

3.

Discourse markers in the history of English

3.1.

Discourse markers in Old English

Some of the earliest studies of discourse markers in Old English (OE, c. 650–1150) focus on the ubiquitous þa ‘then’ of Old English prose narrative. Initially seen as a signal of foregrounded action (Enkvist 1972), it later comes to be understood as multifunctional: as a marker of narrative segmentation (Hopper 1979), a foreground “dramatizer”, a sign of colloquial speech, a peak marker (Enkvist 1986; Wårvik 1990, 1995) or a topic shifter (Kim 1992). Following the initial focus on þa, studies have expanded the repertoire of Old English discourse markers: – – –

– –

The adverbs he–r ‘here’ and nu– ‘now’ serve as “text deictic” expressions that act to distinguish domains in the discourse as distal or proximal (Fries 1993). The adverbs so–na and þærrihte ‘immediately, at once’, like þa, signal the “peak zone” of Old English narratives (Wårvik 1995). The Old English pronoun/adverb/adjective hwæt ‘what’ functions as a discourse marker that questions or assumes common knowledge, expresses speaker surprise and focuses attention. The related collocation hwæt þa ‘what then’ expresses the fact that the event that follows can be inferred from the previous event (Brinton 1996: chapter 7). The Old English adverbs witodlice ‘certainly’ and so–þlice ‘truly’ serve as highlighting devices or as markers of shifts in the narrative (Lenker 2000). Old English interjections such as eala, la, hwæt, efna and wa, while primarily focusing on the interaction between participants in a communicative situation, may also signal a “variety of discourse phenomena” such as topic shifts, turntakings and text structuring (Hiltunen 2006).

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Old English clausal structures have also been analyzed as serving discourse functions. The construction þa {gelamp, gewearð, wæs} þæt ‘then it happened that’ initiates or terminates an episode, grounds episodes in the narrative, and guides the reader through the structure of the text (Brinton 1996: chapter 5), while þæt is (to seggende) ‘that is (to say)’ functions as an appositive marker, much like Latin id est, which likely influenced its development (Brinton 2008: 104–109). 3.2.

Discourse markers in Middle English

Discourse markers in Middle English (ME, c. 1150–1500) become more diverse, both in form and function. With þa becoming a mere sequencer (Wårvik 1995) in Middle English, the auxiliary verb gan/con ‘began’ takes on many of the foregrounding functions of þa in marking significant transitions or junctures at the (sub-)episodic level in the narrative plot as well as in expressing internal evaluation (Brinton 1996: chapter 3). Other discourse markers identified in the Middle English period include the following: – The adverb anon, originally meaning ‘at once, immediately’, comes to function as a discourse marker to signal salient action, to emphasize the sequence of events in an ongoing narrative and to express internal evaluation (Brinton 1996: chapter 4; see also Fludernik 1995: 381, 386–387). – The interrogative what (ho) has an attenuated function as an attention getter (Brinton 1996: 205–206). – The adverb wh¯ılom (dative plural of wh¯ıle ‘while’) becomes a discourse marker meaning ‘once upon a time’ that marks the initiation of a story, episode or exemplum (Brinton 1999). – A text-structuring function for the adverb nu ‘now’ originates in Old English and becomes clearer in Middle English; in collocation with a verb of communication or in the structure nu … þonne ‘now … then’, nu may be a topic changer and serve as a type of meta-comment showing textual progression. Nu may assume an interpersonal function in expressing contrast (especially in nu … if/whether/ though/since structures) and in announcing personal evaluation (especially with epistemic markers such as truly, without doubt) (Defour 2008: 71–79). Middle English interjections such as ah, alas, hey, weylaway, pardee and what, though primarily emotive, have also been analyzed as serving a variety of textual functions, such as turn-taking, foregrounding and narrative segmentation (Taavitsainen 1997: 602). More specifically, the “taboo expletive” Jesus, which arises in the Middle English period, gradually loses religious reference and comes to express abstract, pragmatic functions (such as acquiring the floor, marking discourse boundaries, denoting new/old information) as well as speaker response (Gehweiler 2008). (For a more complete discussion of the function of interjections in Middle English, their relation to genre, and their use for characterization, see Gehweiler, this volume.)

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Clausal discourse markers are also found in Middle English. Descending from the Old English construction, then (it) {bifel, fel, betidd, happened} that continues to function as an episode marker in Middle English but declines in frequency at the end of the period (Fludernik 1995, 2000: 247; Brinton 1996: 145–165). The now obsolete as who(so) say/saith appears in the first half of the thirteenth century; in addition to indicating apposition, it also functions as a comment clause meaning ‘as it were’, ‘so to speak’, alternating with as it were and that is (for) to say (Nevanlinna 1974). The meta-linguistic adverbial clause as it were originates in Middle English in a clause of hypothetical comparison (Brinton 2008: 171–175, 180–182; Claridge 2008). What characterizes Middle English, however, is the appearance of a large variety of clausal discourse markers that in contemporary grammars are known as “comment clauses” (see Quirk et al. 1985: 1,112–1,118). A great deal of attention has been paid to the ancestors of the modern “epistemic parentheticals” I think and I guess (Thompson and Mulac 1991): I {gesse, trowe, deme, leve, suppose, thynke, wene, woot, undertake, know} (see Brinton 1996: chapter 8; Aijmer 1997; Wierzbicka 2006; Fischer 2007; Brinton 2008: chapter 10). These express epistemic and evidential meanings as well as serve purposes of intimacy and negative politeness (self-effacement and deference).1 The related impersonal form, methinks (< me þynceð), is fossilized and functions as a discourse marker of evidentiality, opinion or subjective truth in Middle English but is now obsolete (López-Couso 1996; Palander-Collin 1999; Wischer 2000). Likewise, now obsolete is the Old English verb hatan (behatan, gehatan) ‘to promise’, which comes to function as an epistemic parenthetical in Middle English, similar to parenthetical I promise in later English (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 211–214). There also exist non-first-person epistemic parentheticals, which serve as an attempt by the speaker to persuade the hearer of the truth of the utterance; in Middle English these include God (it) woot ‘God knows’, which coalesces as Goddot, Goddoth, or Goddote, and trusteth me wel (Brinton 1996: 255–263). A variety of other common Present-day English (PDE) comment clauses have their origin in Middle English. Perhaps the most salient comment clause of Present-day English, you know/y’know (< ye knowen), originates in Middle English as an indicator of common or shared knowledge (Brinton 1996: 206–209). Verbs of communication, cognition and perception, such as say, see, find, mean, provide the source of a number of Present-day English comment clauses first appearing in Middle English (Brinton 2008): –

Imperative say preceding a question in the sense ‘tell me/us’; I say with an explanatory or emphatic function; I dare say, expressing speaker tentativeness concerning the truth value of the host clause; and as you say, where the speaker focuses attention on the hearer’s utterance (83–84, 95–97, 102–103).

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– You see providing an explanation for or justification of a previous claim, and its adverbial counterpart as you see; let me see, used when the speaker is trying to recall something from memory; and I see, expressing the speaker’s understanding or acceptance of a state of affairs (142–145, 153, 154–155). – As I find > I find signaling an opinion derived from personal experience (235–237). – I mean used for meta-linguistic purposes to reformulate an accompanying expression or to render it more explicit; less commonly, I mean expressing the speaker’s sincerity in the sense ‘I’m serious when I say’ (120–123). 3.3.

Discourse markers in Early Modern English

The Early Modern English (EModE, c. 1500–1700) period is likewise characterized by a variety of new discourse markers. Among the one-word discourse markers, anon comes to function as a marker of attentiveness in dialogue, but then falls out of use (Brinton 1996: 104–105). In the language of Shakespeare, why is an interpersonal and subjectivized discourse marker used to introduce a new topic, denote a change in speaker, or express perplexity, incredulity or disbelief (Blake 1992; Culpeper and Kytö 1999: 305–307; Jucker 2002: 219–221), while what may be used to express surprise, impatience or even dismay (Blake 1992; Brinton 1996: 202–205). Fischer (1998) exemplifies the discourse uses of marry, which originates in the nominal phrase by Mary in Middle English and peaks in the sixteenth century, as a textual marker used to claim the floor at the beginning of the second part of an adjacency pair and as an interpersonal marker signaling the speaker’s emotional involvement (see also Jucker 2002: 227–229). Using a corpus of English drama from 1500–1760, Lutzky (2008) shows that marry is used most prevalently among the lower social ranks when addressing superiors or equals; it is used equally by men and women, though more often in reference to the opposite sex. Brinton (1998) traces the evolution of only as an ‘adversative’ conjunction that may convey an ‘exceptive’ sense in Early Modern English, where it expresses interpersonal meaning and contributes to negative politeness. Méndez-Naya (2006: 163–164) finds the earliest occurrences of right as a discourse marker at the end of the Early Modern English period, with both an interactive use to check on whether the hearer is following the discourse and a textual use for attracting attention. Moore (2006) records the specialized use of videlict (< vide–re licet ‘one is permitted to see’) in Early Modern English slander depositions for discourse-organizing purposes, namely to mark code switches and to introduce reported speech. Prior to its borrowing into English, it had already evolved into an apposition marker meaning ‘that is to say, namely, to wit’ (yielding PDE viz.). The interjection oh/o in Early Modern English has received considerable attention. Taavitsainen (1995: 439) argues that oh/o and other Early Modern English interjections, such as ah, alas, fie, tush and welaway, are a subset of discourse

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markers serving textual and interpersonal functions: they can be used for reader involvement, to mark narrative turning points, to contribute to the vividness of the narrative and to signal topic shifts (see Gehweiler, this volume). In contrast, Jucker (2002: 217–219) points out that oh/o has only an exclamatory function in Early Modern English and has not yet acquired the function as a discourse marker of information management that it has in Present-day English. More recently, Person (2009) has argued that oh/o in Shakespeare serves all of the discourse-marking functions of oh in Present-day English (i.e. as a response denoting knowledge in interaction or a shift in orientation or awareness) plus a couple of analogous, yet unrecognized functions. A number of forms that are phrasal – or phrasal in origin – begin to function as discourse markers in Early Modern English. During this period, we see the rise of as far as as a topic restrictor, indeed as an expression of elaboration or clarification of discourse content, in fact as a signal that what follows is stronger than what precedes, actually as an additive and confirmative marker, besides as a denoter of afterthoughts, and anyway as an introducer for justifications (see Traugott 1995, 2003a; Tabor and Traugott 1998: 253–260; Schwenter and Traugott 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 159–170). Koivisto-Alanko and Rissanen (2002) trace the development of it/that is to wit > to wit, which introduces a new and important piece of information. To wit is strongly epistemic and subjective and functions as an “emphasizing discourse marker”. The Early Modern English period sees the appearance of a variety of constructions of clausal origin that come to function parenthetically as discourse markers. Parenthetical (I) pray (thee/you) / prithee is commonly used to make polite or deferential requests (see Akimoto 2000; Busse 2002: 187–212; Jucker 2002: 224–227; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 252–255).2 Parenthetical I promise not only expresses epistemic modality but also acknowledges that the addressee might have doubts about the speaker’s message (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 204–211). In the Early Modern English period God forbid and I’m sorry also begin to function parenthetically as discourse markers (see Brinton 2008: 40–41), and I thank you / I give thanks to you > thank you / thanks is in its initial stages of development (Jacobsson 2002). Brinton (2008) documents a number of comment clauses that arise during the Early Modern English period: –

I expect functioning as a comment clause meaning ‘I suppose’ dates from the mid-seventeenth century (46–47).3 – I say > say used to evoke the attention of the hearer is firmly established by the early seventeenth century, while its use to express emotional response (surprise, regret, disbelief, etc.) develops somewhat later (84–85). – You say (like earlier as you say) acquires focusing and interactive functions in the late sixteenth century (102).

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– Look (you/ye) and hark (you/ye) start to function as attention getters, both later giving coalesced forms, lookee/lookey and harkee/harkey (194, 199). – Adverbial if you will assumes a meta-linguistic meaning (‘if you are willing to call it that’) in the mid-sixteenth century (170). – I mean starts to be used for mistake editing or self-repair in early seventeenth century (120). – As I gather (later I gather) used to express subjective uncertainty or caution, often in reference to hearsay knowledge, appears (228). – Parenthetical what’s more appears in the seventeenth century, replacing earlier which is more (206–207). – What’s else begins to be used in an emphatic sense (‘certainly’) and for self-retrieval (i.e. the speaker retraces his or her train of thought) (215–216). Finally, taking a somewhat different approach, Jucker (2002: 213–216) studies the frequency and distribution over time of five common discourse markers in the Early Modern English period. He finds that four of the five discourse markers increase over time (marry decreases), though their distribution is “highly genre specific”. Likewise, Culpeper and Kytö (1999) survey the frequency of a number of “hedges”, including the discourse markers I think, well and why, in a corpus of Early Modern English dialogue. They find well and why to be more frequent in constructed dialogue (drama and fiction) than in recorded dialogue, perhaps serving as a marker of oral style. Overall, they interpret their evidence as showing that the language is becoming “more oral” over time. 3.4.

Discourse markers in Late Modern English

Attention has recently begun to be focused on discourse markers in Late Modern English (LModE, c. 1700–1920). In one of the first studies, Taavitsainen (1998) looks at the function of interjections – primarily ah, oh/o and alas – in the Romantic novel of the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century. She finds that these interjections have a peak-marking function, a foregrounding function and, to a lesser extent, a turn-taking function, and serve as a mechanism for achieving the reader’s emotional involvement. Focusing on one form, Gehweiler (2008) sees the origin of the “moderated expletive” gee! (< Jesus) in the late nineteenth century. With its connection to Jesus phonologically obscured, gee! starts to be used to express an unexpected feeling or perception (77), and especially in the collocation gee! I wonder, serves textual and interpersonal functions similar to discourse markers (80). The first discourse-marker uses of after all to justify some aspect of the proposition are found in the eighteenth century (Traugott 1997), and anyway begins to be used as a concessive in sentence-final position and as topic resumer in the midnineteenth century (Tabor and Traugott 1998: 253–260). Akimoto (2002) notes the rise of parenthetical I’m afraid in the nineteenth century. Lewis (2006: 52–55)

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traces the development of of course from an adverb in the late seventeenth century (meaning ‘naturally’ or ‘normally’, appearing frequently in causal and epistemic contexts) to a purely epistemic use at the turn of the nineteenth century. Brinton (2008) records the appearance of a number of other comment clauses during this period: – – – – –

Mind (you) comes to be used as an attention getter and to emphasize or qualify the accompanying utterance (42). See (here, now) is used to ascertain the speaker’s comprehension, continued interest, or agreement beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (151–152). Let’s see develops non-literal meaning (cf. let me see above) in the mid-eighteenth century (153). Listen (up, there) is first attested as an attention-getting or truth-asserting discourse marker in the late nineteenth century (200). Lookit functions as a discourse marker used for “demanding” attention (with some degree of urgency or exasperation) in the late nineteenth century (197–199; Schourup 2004).

Finally, Fitzmaurice (2004) discusses the acquisition of stance and discoursemarker functions in I know, I see / you see / see and I say / (as) you say / say in the period 1650–1900. The frequency of you say rises in drama and decreases in letters from the mid-eighteenth century onward (441); you see shows a slow rise in frequency from the mid-eighteenth to the twentieth century, but a decline in the second half of the twentieth century (434–435); see appears in American texts in the late nineteenth century (440–441); you know exhibits a marked rise in frequency at the start of the nineteenth century (436–437). 3.5.

Summary remarks

Over the history of English, we thus see many changes in the inventory of discourse markers. They would seem to be intrinsically quite ephemeral. While many new discourse markers have arisen, as detailed in the previous sections, many – such as OE witodlice, hwaet; ME anon, gan, wh¯ılom, who(so) say/saith, God it woot; or EModE prithee, marry, in faith – have been lost, and others – such as to wit or viz. (< videlicet) – are confined to specialized registers. The loss of discourse markers is attributable to a number of causes, such as cooptation of a form as a metrical expedient and gradual loss of meaning (as in the case of ME gan), stylistic stigmatization and relegation to jocular use (as in the case of ME anon), change from oral to literate narrative structure (as in the case of ME then it bifel that), or functional overextension (as in the case of why, which no longer functions as a discourse marker in Present-day English; Jucker 2002: 221). Despite the loss of many discourse markers, we also find instances in which discourse markers are preserved over long periods of time, as in the case of the epis-

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temic parentheticals I guess and I think, which arose in Middle English and are strongly represented in Present-day English; the common discourse marker you know, which also originated in Middle English; the appositional (that is) to say, which can be traced back to Old English; a variety of comment clauses with say (I say, (as) you say, say) or see (I see, let me see, (as) you see), which first appeared in Middle English; and ‘surprise’ uses of what, which developed in Middle English. We may also discover examples of the continuity of particular discourse functions over time, with the forms expressing these functions being replaced or renewed: for example, OE hwæt is replaced by you know, OE hwæt þa by so, ME anon by now, and ME gan by the colloquial forms up and, take and, go and (see Brinton 1996).

4.

Discourse markers in other languages

Although the majority of studies of the history of discourse markers have concentrated on English, there have also been studies of discourse markers in other languages, especially Romance languages. Three quite early studies discuss Latin discourse markers. Risselada (1994) argues that to explain the meaning of the Latin directive particles (e.g. dum, age, modo, quin, vero, sane, proinde) reference must be made to the pragmatic and contextual properties of the utterance in which they are used. Bolkenstein and van de Grift (1994) demonstrate that the choice among the Latin anaphoric particles (is, hic, ille, iste, Ø) is pragmatically/functionally motivated. In a detailed study, Kroon (1995) argues that differences among the Latin adversative and causal conjunctions depend upon the discourse type in which they occur and their communicative/expressive value: nam and autem occur primarily in monologic discourse and express textual connections; enim and vero occur primarily in dialogic discourse and indicate the involvement of the discourse participants; while ergo and at have an interactional as well as a textual (connective) function. Pioneering work was carried out on French discourse markers by Fleischman (1992), who argues that in Old French, while explicit subject pronouns mark switch-reference in main clauses, the discourse marker si ‘if’4 is used to mark subject/topic continuity. She attributes the loss of si in the history of French to the elimination of verb-second and the evolution of SVX order with obligatory subject pronouns. Fleischman (1990) summarizes a number of articles treating other Old French discourse markers, including mar ‘woe unto you’, and the locative particles ci, ça ‘here’, la ‘there, then’, iluec ‘there’. More recently, Rodríguez Somolinos (2005) has provided a history of French voire ‘indeed, truly’. In what can be seen as a discourse-marker usage, Old French voire occurs turn initial, is an “utterance in itself” (315), and marks agreement with the interlocutor. It is strongly assertive and confirmative. In Middle French, the assertive nature is weakened and the marker may be used to express concession (voire … mais ‘indeed … but’), doubt,

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skepticism or even contradiction. This usage disappears in the seventeenth century. Its modern role as a focus particle derives from use of voire within the sentential structure, which likewise dates back to Old French. Hansen (2005) traces the development of enfin from its original temporal meaning ‘in the end’ to procedural and subjective (discourse-marker) uses, including a synthesizing use (summing up the previous discourse; sixteenth century), an epistemic use (in which the speaker draws a conclusion based on available evidence; sixteenth century) and a prompting use (seventeenth century). More recent semantic changes in enfin – what Hansen calls “interjectional” uses – include the expression of impatient dismissal and interruption (eighteenth century), indignation, relief and repair (nineteenth century), and hesitation (twentieth century). Hansen (1998: 221–225, 291–295, 321–323) briefly discusses the origin of the French discourse markers bon ‘good, indeed’ (originally an adjective, from Latin bonum), bien ‘well’ (originally an adjective/adverb, from Latin bene),5 puis ‘then’ (from the Latin preposition/adverb post + -ea [anaphoric element]), donc ‘then, therefore’ (‘at that time’, from Latin dum via dumque or dunc), and alors ‘then’ (from Latin illa¯ hora¯ [ablative] ‘at that hour’). She notes that these forms have all acquired non-truth-conditional meanings and pragmatic functions. Discussing discourse markers in Old Italian (e.g. credo ‘I believe’, cioè ‘that is’, (a te) dico ‘I say (to you)’, guarda/guarta ‘look’, penso ‘I think’, prego ‘I beg’, tu sai ‘you know’, vedi ‘see, look’, veramente ‘truly’), Bazzanella (2003) observes that they acquire “subjective” and “interactive” meanings and are used for purposes of politeness and intimacy; they also have “metatextual” functions in structuring discourse. However, they are not all fully parenthetical and hence perhaps not fully grammaticalized. Bazzanella and Miecznikowski (2009) trace the semantic/pragmatic development of Italian allora (cf. French alors) from Old Italian, where it primarily expresses temporal distance (‘at that time, then’), to its first non-propositional uses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to express consequential relation (‘given what you have just said’) to its inferential, discoursesegmenting and turn-eliciting discourse-marker functions in present-day Italian. Waltereit (2002) discusses the development of the Italian discourse marker guarda/ guardi, which he sees as evolving from the imperative guarda ‘look’. The imperative has the implicature that the speaker has something important to say that requires the attention of the hearer (i.e. ‘Listen to me I have something important to say’). Because of this implicature, the imperative lends itself to “improper use” in contexts where the speaker wishes to interrupt or self-select at turn-taking. This improper use underlies its function as a discourse marker. In the case of Italian diciamo ‘let us say’, the implicature of the verbal construction (i.e. ‘presupposing consent and sharing responsibility for the ensuring portion of discourse, thereby attenuating one’s own communicative act’) is conventionalized in the discoursemarker use; a brief survey of historical sources suggests that this usage arose in the nineteenth century (Waltereit 2006: 72).

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Lindström and Wide (2005) trace the history of the Swedish hör du ‘(you) listen’, vet du ‘you know’, ser du ‘you see’ and förstår du ‘you understand’ as well as the cliticized forms (hörru/hörrö, vettu, serru, fstårru), which they see as “close relatives of discourse particles of the type you know and you see in English” (212). They conclude that hör du derives from an imperative occurring in sentence-initial position; the imperative occurs early as an attention getter, approximating its contemporary uses (namely, to initiate moves, to mark change of addressee, or to express change of discourse mood). In contrast, the other forms derive from an indicative declarative or interrogative clause with anaphoric det ‘that’, which is ultimately lost. Lindström and Wide note the parallel development of other comment clauses in Swedish – tycker jag ‘I think’, tror jag ‘I believe’, ser jag ‘I see’ and vet jag ‘I know / I suggest’ – from indicative clauses (217) as well as use of the imperative form of ser, se/si ‘see’, as a discourse marker (219). Onodera (2004) argues that the Japanese adversative conjunctions demo and dakedo may express pragmatically inferable contrast and contrastive action (such as changing topic, claiming the floor, opening a conversation, making a point). Demo and dakedo acquire these textual/expressive functions when they begin to occur in sentence-initial position in the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. Onodera also argues that the na-group of interjections, although exponents of expressive meaning for the most part, acquire text-forming functions (such as marking the beginning of units of talks) and serve as discourse markers when they begin to occur in initial position.

5.

The development of discourse markers

In a diachronic(ally oriented) discourse analytic approach, it is possible to map form-to-function (that is, to explicate the discourse functions of a particular historical form, either during a certain historical period or over time) or to map function-to-form (that is, to identify those historical forms that are the exponents of a particular discourse function, again either within the confines of a certain historical period or spanning historical periods) (section 5.1). In diachronic studies of discourse markers, attention has been paid to the semantic paths of change followed by discourse markers (section 5.2) and to their syntactic origins (section 5.3). 5.1.

Form-to-function ~ function-to-form mappings

Many of the studies mentioned above (sections 3–4) take a form-to-function approach. An English discourse marker whose history has been well documented is well (see Finell 1989; Jucker 1997, 2002: 221–224; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 175–176; Defour 2008). As might be expected in the case of a discourse marker that is seen as having a number of different functions in Present-day English –

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ranging from dispreferred response signal to face-threatening minimizer to qualifier or frame6 – several different paths of development have been postulated for well. Restricting herself to its use in responses, Finell (1989) sees well as a shortening of this is (very) well (cf. also Defour 2008). As early as 1300, well can be used to indicate that the speaker is not complying with the interlocutor’s opinion; by the sixteenth century it has also acquired a concessive element and thus has interpersonal meaning. Jucker (1997) argues that the earliest form in Old English (wella, wel la) is used in direct discourse as an attention getter, often at structurally important parts of the discourse; wella does not survive beyond the Old English period and is not the ancestor of the modern discourse marker. In Middle English, well begins to be used textually as a “frame marker” introducing direct reported speech; it may also indicate acceptance of the situation that is expressed, a meaning already apparent in Old English. In Early Modern English, well begins to occur outside of direct speech contexts, again with a framing function, with some degree of speaker acceptance expressed. During this period it acquires two interpersonal uses, as a face-threat mitigator (mitigating some sort of confrontation) and as a qualifier (indicating some problems on the content level), uses which have continued to the present. For Defour (2008: 65–71), the discourse marker use of well grows out of its initial use with a verb of communication (well, she said), where it has a text-structuring function. This shows agreement or elaboration in the sense ‘I accept/consider what you just said’. Defour shows that following 1500, initial well begins to occur outside direct speech and is often followed by an expression of disagreement, modification or concession (well … but); in such cases, the speaker may acknowledge the interlocutor’s utterance without necessarily agreeing to its truth value, a strategy which allows the speaker to mitigate face loss. Less common is a function-to-form approach in which the expression of a particular discourse function is traced over time. For example, Wårvik (1990) sees a “typological” shift in the marking of ground in the history of English, which she attributes to a change from oral to literate techniques of narrative organization. When OE þa is lost in Middle English, it is initially replaced by a variety of other discourse markers, including þonne (thenne) ‘then’ (which originally marked backgrounded material), þis NP, so (that), thus, and, also and anon (Wårvik 1990: 568, 570, 1995; Fludernik 1995, 2000). Ultimately, the explicit foreground-marking system of Old English is replaced by a “fuzzy” backgrounding system, which depends on the tense-aspect system (simple vs. expanded tenses) and the syntactic status of clauses (main vs. subordinate, finite vs. nonfinite). A concomitant shift is the replacement of foregrounded meta-commentaries such as þa gelamp hit þæt with backgrounded, preposed whan-clauses in Middle English (Brinton 1996; also Fludernik 1995).

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Focus on (multiple trajectories of) semantic change

“Bleaching” has been the traditional way to account for the semantic development of discourse markers, though it has also been common to see them as undergoing metaphoric or metonymic change. However, in a groundbreaking study, Traugott (1982) argues that discourse markers, like a variety of other forms, follow a semantic-pragmatic path in their evolution from propositional to textual to expressive (interpersonal) meaning. This evolution is formalized in a set of three “tendencies” (see Traugott and König 1991: 208–209): i) ii) iii)

The shift from meanings based in the external situation to those based in the internal situation. The change from meanings based in the external or internal situation to meanings based in the textual situation. The progression towards meanings increasingly situated in the speaker’s subjective believe-state or attitude.

More recently, the simple unidimensional development has been replaced by a more complex conception of unidirectional change, involving multiple semanticpragmatic tendencies (see Traugott and Dasher 2002: 40, 281) from: truth-conditional > non-truth-conditional content > content/procedural > procedural nonsubjective > subjective > intersubjective scope within the proposition > scope over the proposition > scope over discourse However, it has been shown that procedural meaning – understood as “information about how conceptual representations are to be made use of in the inferential phase of comprehension” (Schourup 1999: 244) – is only one of several types of non-referential meaning expressed by discourse markers; thus it might be better to revise Traugott and Dasher’s formulation as follows (see, e.g., Traugott 1995: 14): referential (content) > non-referential (pragmatic, metatextual, procedural) Note that the acquisition of pragmatic and procedural meanings results from the conventionalization of conversational implicatures, or invited inferences, as has been set out most fully in Traugott and Dasher (2002: chapter 1). The change from referential to non-referential meaning is characteristic of grammaticalization (see section 6.1), as is (inter)subjectification. Subjectification is “the semasiological process whereby [speakers/writers] come over time to develop meanings for [lexemes] that encode or externalize their perspectives and attitudes”, while intersubjectification is a process whereby “meanings come explicitly to index and acknowledge [speaker/writer] attitude toward [the addressee/reader] in the here and now of the speech event” (Traugott and Dasher

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2002: 30–31). Discourse markers are clear exponents of (inter)subjectification. For example, Traugott and Dasher (2002: chapter 4) argue that the epistemic meanings of indeed, in fact and actually exhibit subjectification, while the hedging senses of actually and in fact are the result of intersubjectification. Fitzmaurice (2004) traces the acquisition of subjective force in the first-person forms I know, I see, I say, intersubjective force in the second-person forms you know, you see, you say, and, finally, interactive functions (functions associated with the dynamics of the communicative process) in you know, you see / see, (as) you say / say. Hansen’s (2005) study demonstrates the shift in French enfin from non-subjective to subjective to intersubjective in meaning (as well as from contentful to procedural and from truth-conditional to non-truth-conditional). Its synthesizing, epistemic and aspectual uses are subjective, while its later “interjectional” uses are intersubjective. 5.3.

Focus on (multiple paths of) syntactic change

The study of individual discourse markers has revealed not only that there are varied sources for discourse markers – verbs, nouns, adverbs, phrases, clauses, idioms – but also that there are a number of syntactic clines, or pathways, of development (see Brinton 2008: chapter 2). 5.3.1.

From adverb/preposition to conjunction to discourse marker

This cline is implicit in Traugott’s (1982) discussion, in which she mentions the evolution of why from an interrogative to a complementizer to a discourse marker functioning as a “hearer-engaging” form. A number of the discourse markers discussed in section 4 follow such a pathway. For example, OE hwæt would appear to evolve from an interrogative pronoun/adverb/adjective introducing direct questions, to a complementizer introducing indirect questions, to a discourse marker. OE þa also seems to follow this pathway, functioning first as an adverb, then as a conjunction meaning ‘when’ (especially in the correlated structure þa … þa ‘then … when’), and finally as a discourse marker denoting foregrounded action. 5.3.2.

From predicate adverb to sentential adverb to discourse marker

In this development, a predicate adverb (e.g. a manner adverb), which has narrow syntactic scope and evaluates the predicated event, is dislocated from clause-internal position to the position typical for wide-scope sentential adverbs (typically sentence-initial position). Here it comes to evaluate the content of the entire proposition. Over time, it may acquire new pragmatic functions, in the process assuming scope over larger chunks of discourse. When these functions become conventionalized, it has acquired discourse-marker status (see Traugott 1995: 13). The

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trajectory is thus from “scope within proposition” to “scope over proposition” to “scope over discourse” (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 40). Traugott (1995) exemplifies this cline with the development of indeed, in fact and besides from predicate adverb to sentential adverb to discourse marker. Other examples in the literature include the evolution of only, which shifts from the numeral one to the adjective/adverb only meaning ‘solely, uniquely’ to the focusing adverb only with exclusive meaning, and finally to an ‘adversative’ conjunction with discourse-marker functions (Brinton 1998). ME wh¯ılom shifts from a sentence-internal adverb meaning ‘at times’ that modifies an iterative or habitual event, to a sentential adverb meaning ‘formerly’ that modifies an entire proposition, to a discourse marker that has scope over larger chunks of discourse (Brinton 1999). ME anon likewise progresses from an adverb to a conjunction meaning ‘as soon as’ and ultimately to a discourse marker (Brinton 1996: chapter 4). The Old English adverbs witodlice and so–þlice evolve from manner adjuncts with scope within the predicate, or more often, truth-intensifying, speaker-oriented “emphasizers”, to speaker comments with sentential scope that convey an assertion of truth, and finally to discourse markers serving as signs of discourse discontinuity (Lenker 2000). 5.3.3.

From (first-person) matrix clause to indeterminate matrix clause / parenthetical to parenthetical discourse marker

This cline was first proposed by Thompson and Mulac (1991) to account for the synchronic development of the “epistemic parentheticals” I think and I guess: i.e. from I think that the world is flat (where I think is a matrix clause) > I think Ø the world is flat (where I think is ambiguous between a matrix clause and a parenthetical disjunct) > The world is, I think, flat / The world is flat, I think (where I think is clearly parenthetical as it is no longer restricted to sentence-initial position). This scenario, which may be termed the “matrix clause hypothesis” (Brinton 2008), has been proposed as the source for a number of clausal discourse markers, including methinks (Palander-Collin 1999), pray/prithee (Akimoto 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 252–255), and I’m afraid (Akimoto 2002). Despite the intuitive appeal of this proposed pathway, which has been extended to second- and third-person clauses of the type you know or God forbid, there is often minimal evidence of early matrix structures with explicit that complementizers. Many of the studies of comment clauses in Brinton (2008) also call into doubt the “matrix clause hypothesis”.

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From imperative matrix clause > indeterminate structure > parenthetical discourse marker

Like the previous cline, this one involves loss of the subordinating conjunction and subsequent reversal in the syntactic hierarchy. The original matrix imperative is reanalyzed as a parenthetical disjunct, while the original subordinate clause (usually an indirect imperative or interrogative) is reanalyzed as a matrix clause. The change may also involve a rebracketing in which the second-person pronoun, you/ye, originally the subject of the complement clause of verb in the subordinate clause, is reanalyzed as subject of the matrix verb. This cline can account for the development of English mind (you), say, see, look/lookee, hark/harkey and listen here/up (Brinton 2008: 42, 89, 157, 196, 199–200) as well as Swedish hör du (Lindström and Wide 2005). 5.3.5.

From relative/adverbial clause to parenthetical discourse marker

This cline may or may not involve loss of the subordinating conjunction, but does not involve the switch in syntactic hierarchy seen in the previous two clines. A number of clausal discourse markers can be seen as originating in relative/adverbial clauses. For example, Brinton (1996: 244–253) proposes that the I think/guess epistemic parentheticals derive not from matrix clauses but from adverbial/relative structures of the type þæs ic wene ‘which/so I think’, which actually occur in Old English (cf. Aijmer 1997: 8–10; Fischer 2007: 302). The courtesy marker please may derive from the impersonal please it you ‘may it please you’ > please you > please, from the optative please it you, or from the personal conditional if you please, though the conditional finds most support (see Allen 1995; Chen 1998: 25–27; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 255–258). If you please becomes fixed and routinized by the nineteenth century (Allen 1995: 298) and is rare in Present-day English. Please, without either if or the subject-experiencer, comes to function as a discourse marker of politeness by the beginning of the twentieth century. Brinton (2008) argues that as you say is the source of you say, that as you see is the source of you see, that as I find is the source of I find, and that as I gather is perhaps the source of I gather (103, 156–157, 228, 236). Two clausal discourse markers that have preserved their subordinating conjunctions and retained their adverbial nature are if you will and as you were (Brinton 2008: chapter 7), while that is to say / which is to say is still transparently relative (Brinton 2008: 107–109). Finally, a somewhat different relative construction, a nominal relative, is the source for the clausal discourse marker what is more / what’s more (Brinton 2008: 209–211).

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Processes of development

Whether the syntactic and semantic changes undergone by discourse markers in their development are best accounted for by grammaticalization, pragmaticalization or lexicalization has been a topic of considerable debate. 6.1.

Grammaticalization

Much research (see, e.g., Traugott 1995; Brinton 1996, 2008) has argued that, in their development, discourse markers follow a unidirectional path, undergoing many of the morphosyntactic and semantic changes central to grammaticalization.7 They become fixed in form and undergo decategorialization (change from more major to more minor word class) as well as desemanticization (generalization of meaning from referential to non-referential meanings, as discussed above in section 5.2). The latter change occurs in specialized contexts via the coding or conventionalization of invited inferences and typically involves (inter)subjectification. Discourse markers frequently follow Hopper’s (1991) principles of grammaticalization: divergence (where the original lexical forms may continue to exist alongside the newly grammaticalized form), layering (where new grammaticalized forms are continually arising and coexist with older forms), and persistence (where traces of the original lexical meaning may continue to exist in the grammaticalized form). Discourse markers do not always show the bonding and coalescence found in prototypical cases of grammaticalization, although some discourse markers do undergo phonological reduction, such as indeed, in fact / ndid, nfækt, fæk / (Traugott 1995: 14), God woot > Goddot(h), by the Virgin Mary > marry, Jesus > gee, you know > y’know, in faith > faith. While some discourse markers, like grammaticalized forms, become fixed to a particular syntactic slot – typically initial position – other discourse markers, such as comment clauses, increase in mobility. Finally, in contrast to other items undergoing grammaticalization, discourse markers apparently do not shrink in the scope of their modification (what Lehmann [1982] 1995 calls “condensation”), but, rather, come to have scope over larger units of discourse. Tabor and Traugott (1998) challenge the notion of scope reduction (from “loose” to “tight” syntax) in the process of grammaticalization generally, arguing instead for scope expansion (see Traugott, this volume).8 Many of the discourse markers discussed in section 4 may be interpreted as cases of grammaticalization. OE hwæt is decategorialized and assumes fixed, initial position, always occurring with a first- or second-person pronoun. It develops a meaning of ‘contextual implication’ (= ‘so’) on the textual level and conventionalizes an invited inference of ‘shared knowledge’ on the interpersonal level (= ‘y’know’) (Brinton 1996). As discourse markers, the Old English adverbs so–þlice and witodlice assume increased syntactic freedom and scope as well as heightened

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subjectivity (Lenker 2000). ME anon loses the cardinal characteristics of a predicate adverbial (decategorializes); it first serves as a marker of sequence on the textual level and then as an evaluative marker of salience or importance on the interpersonal level (Brinton 1996). ME wh¯ılom is decategorialized from an adjunct adverbial to a subjective discourse marker denoting the initiation of a story, episode or exemplum (Brinton 1999). Discourse markers such as indeed, in fact, besides and instead9 discussed by Traugott and co-authors, which have arisen from nominal complexes (typically preposition + noun complement), have undergone structural decategorialization, semantic change from more referential to less referential, and shift in membership from a relatively open to a relatively closed set. A number of diachronic studies of clausal discourse markers have also been undertaken in a grammaticalization framework. Brinton (1996: 253–254) discusses the evolution of I think parentheticals as a case of grammaticalization. The construction becomes fixed in the first-person, present tense, it undergoes decategorialization from a subject + verb matrix clause to a “unitary epistemic morpheme” (Thompson and Mulac 1991: 315) and it begins to function as a politeness marker with intersubjective function. The semantic change involves conventionalization of the implicature of uncertainty in the mental mode of knowing. The development of methinks is treated as an even clearer case of grammaticalization; methinks is univerbated and fossilized, undergoes phonetic attrition, loses its verbal origins and is decategorialized, becomes restricted to certain clausal spots, and functions as a disjunct marking evidentiality on the discourse level (López-Couso 1996; Palander-Collin 1999: 46–63). Wischer (2000) considers the evolution of methinks as both grammaticalization and lexicalization (see below). Pray/prithee originates in a content verb (pray), which is decategorialized, acquires procedural meaning reflecting increased subjectification, and undergoes other processes characteristic of grammaticalization, such as layering and divergence (Akimoto 2000; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 252–255). In its evolution from main clause to discourse marker, I’m afraid is decategorialized, its semantics are bleached, and it becomes more subjective (Akimoto 2002). Lindström and Wide (2005) see the forms hör du, vet du, ser du and förstår du as clearly grammaticalized because they are desemanticized (i.e. they have lost something of their literal meaning), pragmaticalized (i.e. they have acquired pragmatic functions related to turn-taking management and the achievement of mutual understanding), desyntacticized (i.e. they are not ordered as clause elements in the inner sentence but exist outside the sentence) and prosodically reduced.10 6.2.

Pragmaticalization

Some scholars have proposed that because discourse markers are members of no readily identifiable grammatical class, typically occupy an extra-sentential position, have non-truth-conditional meaning, and function pragmatically, they do not

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result from a process of grammaticalization, but what they term “pragmaticalization” (e.g. Erman and Kotsinas 1993; Aijmer 1997; Frank-Job 2006; Waltereit 2006; see also Claridge and Arnovick, this volume). In pragmaticalization, a lexical element develops “directly into a discourse marker without an intermediate stage of grammaticalization” (Erman and Kotsinas 1993: 79). Pragmaticalization leads to elements that “organize, structure, and contextualize discourse with respect to discourse-pragmatic concerns and not with respect to sentence-grammatical concerns” (Günthner and Mutz 2004: 98). Pragmaticalization and grammaticalization, while similar in some respects – by, for example, adhering to Hopper’s (1991) principles11 – are distinguished by the non-truth-conditionality and optionality of items undergoing pragmaticalization (Aijmer 1997: 2–3, 6). Waltereit argues that the development of discourse markers does not conform to any of Lehmann’s (1995) parameters of grammaticalization, except perhaps phonological “attrition”: “[t]his rather poor score should exclude them from grammaticalization” (Waltereit 2006: 74, also 2002: 1004–1006; see also Günthner and Mutz 2004: 86, 93–94).12 Nor do discourse markers undergo subjectification (Waltereit 2002: 987–988).13 Waltereit sees three stages in the development of discourse markers: (i) speakers recognize the rhetorical potential inherent in certain forms for expressing textual and interpersonal meanings and use (“abuse”) them in contexts that are not justified by their primary meaning; (ii) as the textual and interpersonal forms are used with increasing frequency, speakers reanalyze the forms as discourse markers in some contexts by conventionalizing a conversational implicature; and (iii) speakers then begin to use the discourse markers in additional contexts. Günthner and Mutz conclude that in the development of discourse markers, the outcome – namely “less grammatical elements, functioning mainly on the discourse level” – points to a “somewhat different (sub)type of linguistic (diachronic) change” than grammaticalization (2004: 99). Regarding cases of pragmaticalization, Erman and Kotsinas (1993) describe the development of you know, which they see as delexicalized, with no trace of grammaticalization; while Aijmer (1997) points to I think, which develops meanings involving the speaker’s attitudes to the hearer or the message; and Frank-Job (2006) mentions listen, look, well, okay and here now as forms undergoing pragmaticalization. Claridge and Arnovick (this volume) discuss a variety of discourse markers, interjections and conversational routines, including well, pray (you) / prithee, Jesus/gee, as it were, good-bye and bless you. In rejecting the distinction between pragmaticalization and grammaticalization, Traugott (1995) observes, on one hand, that while clearly grammaticalized tense, aspect and mood markers are not “as obviously pragmatic” as discourse markers, they “surely” have pragmatic functions (and often non-truth-conditional meaning) in most languages. On the other hand, discourse markers, though they carry scope over more than the sentence, are indubitably “part of the grammar” (Traugott 1995, 2003a: 643; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 158–159). Pragmatic el-

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ements are excluded from grammar only if grammar is viewed as restricted to the morphosyntactic and truth-conditional domain. Diewald (2006: 405), too, argues that pragmatic functions are “genuine grammatical functions which are indispensable for the organization and structuring” of discourse and thus it makes no sense to distinguish two separate processes. Rather, it can be argued, I believe, that pragmaticalization is a subtype of grammaticalization which may differ from prototypical cases but belongs to the same general process of change. 6.3.

Lexicalization

There is little consensus concerning the definition of lexicalization. From a diachronic perspective, lexicalization has been associated with (i) processes of fusion resulting in a decrease in compositionality / increase in dependency, or, conversely, (ii) processes of separation resulting in an increase in autonomy (see Brinton and Traugott 2005: 18–22, 32–61). The concept of lexicalization captures the univerbation that many discourse markers undergo, as well as their acquisition of syntactic independence (Traugott 1995: 4). Only a few studies have argued in any detail for the development of discourse markers as cases of lexicalization. In his study14 of the development of British English is it not? > in’t it > innit, Krug (1998) argues that the form becomes invariant, inseparable and morphologically opaque. There is desemanticization of it, loss of phonological substance, and acquisition of pragmatic functions, primarily a turntaking function. Here “lexicalization” is understood as the change from a complex phrase to a monomorphemic word. Wischer (2000) argues that methinks, a once free and productive collocation, has been fossilized and partly demotivated, has become unproductive, and has changed into a symbol; as a result, it is stored as a whole entity in the lexicon and classified as an “adverb” (363). This is “lexicalization”, which she defines as a syntagm becoming a new lexical item or a lexeme becoming more lexical. Once lexicalized, methinks immediately assumes grammatical functions (see above). Fischer (2007: 297–311) argues that I think type comment clauses also result from lexicalization, not grammaticalization (but cf. Thompson and Mulac 1991: 324; Wischer 2000: 364). She admits that although these expressions have undergone decategorialization, divergence and bondedness, these processes can be seen as common to both lexicalization and grammaticalization (but cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 105, 107). What argues for lexicalization here, Fischer asserts, is that these expressions retain more of their lexical meaning than is usual in cases of grammaticalization. Traugott (1995) concludes that discourse markers do not undergo lexicalization since they do not behave like lexical items: they frequently do not belong to any major lexical category, and they are syntactically and prosodically constrained. Moreover, Brinton and Traugott (2005) argue that although lexicalization, like grammaticalization, concerns the fossilization of complex structures, those struc-

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tures that are used to express the major categories of noun, verb and adjective undergo lexicalization, while those that are used to express functional categories are grammaticalized.

7.

Concluding remarks

Building on results obtained in synchronic pragmatic analyses, studies of the existence and function of discourse markers in earlier stages of language and of their development over time have thus mined a rich area of research. These studies have revealed that while the inventory of discourse markers in a particular language (such as English) may change extensively over time, some discourse markers have quite long histories, and the textual and interpersonal functions embodied by discourse markers seem to have great continuity. Many discourse markers remain to be investigated, both in the history of English and in the histories of other languages. While investigations of discourse markers in a historical framework are valuable in and of themselves, the diachronic study of discourse markers raises more general questions concerning language change and sheds light, especially, on what is entailed by grammaticalization and on what is encompassed by the grammar and the lexicon.

Notes 1 Wierzbicka (2006) has argued that epistemic parentheticals arise in the first half of the eighteenth century and are causally related to the rise of English empiricism. However, there is good empirical evidence that indicates that many epistemic parentheticals have a much earlier origin (see Brinton 2008: 223–224). 2 The loss of pray/prithee and its replacement by please as the standard courtesy marker has yet to be satisfactorily explained. 3 Wierzbicka (2006: 229) notes the growing use of I expect in the nineteenth century, but the discourse-marker use can be antedated by two centuries. 4 Fleischman (1992: 433) considers the particle “untranslatable”. Because the translation of particles is notoriously difficult, the glosses of the particles in this section must be seen as tentative and only approximate. 5 Detges and Waltereit (2009) argue that French bien is a modal particle, while Spanish bien is a discourse marker. Both arise in dialogic contexts and serve purposes of negotiation, but the former is used to establish common ground (“What do I believe that you believe?”) while the latter is used in the joint construal of discourse (“What are we going to do next?”). Adverbial bien ‘well’ is the source of the discourse-marker uses of bien, to close topics (expressing implicit disagreement) and to introduce new topics; these uses appear from the eighteenth century onward. 6 See Brinton (1996: 36–37) for a summary of some of the earlier studies of well in Present-day English.

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17 For definitions of grammaticalization see, e.g., Hopper (1991), Lehmann ([1982] 1995), Hopper and Traugott (2003), and Brinton and Traugott (2005). 18 Fischer (2007: 280–297) argues against a direct path of scope expansion in the case of discourse markers and the other forms discussed by Tabor and Traugott (1998). 19 Fischer (2007: 273) argues that instead (of) must be a case of lexicalization. 10 Lindström and Wide are not always consistent in speaking of these forms as “grammaticalized” or “lexicalized” (e.g. 2005: 212, 218, 229, 230; see below). 11 Claridge and Arnovick (this volume) consider pragmaticalization to share with grammaticalization Hopper’s principles of decategorialization, divergence and layering, but not specialization. 12 Characteristics of grammaticalization not found in the development of discourse markers, such as scope condensation and paradigmaticalization, have been extensively addressed in the grammaticalization literature (see, e.g., Brinton 2008: 52–55). 13 Claridge and Arnovick (this volume) argue that (inter)subjectivity either is a secondary feature of items undergoing grammaticalization or occurs only at certain stages in the process. Its centrality to the development of discourse markers thus argues for their being the result of pragmaticalization, not grammaticalization. However, on the centrality of (inter)subjectification to grammaticalization and to the rise of discourse markers see, for example, Traugott (2003b). 14 Although Krug’s is a synchronic study (1998), he argues that an apparent time study shows that innit is spreading and is a true change in progress.

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11.

Interjections and expletives1 Elke Gehweiler

1.

Introduction

Although every language seems to have them, interjections have often been considered “non-words” and have thus been neglected in linguistic analyses. As Felix Ameka, editor of a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics (18.2/3) devoted to interjections, notes in his introduction (quoting Schachter 1985: 60): “Although there are a good many linguistic descriptions that fail to mention interjections, it seems likely that all languages do in fact have such a class of words” (Ameka 1992: 101). Recently, however, interjections, like discourse markers, have received more attention, both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. This chapter will review studies of interjections within a historical pragmatic framework. Section 2 attempts a definition of interjections that is adequate for the present purposes, and it briefly discusses overlaps with the category of discourse markers (cf. chapter on discourse markers, this volume). In section 3, possible difficulties of interpreting interjections in historical texts are pointed out – along with how these difficulties can be overcome. Section 4 deals with the subclass of interjections that has received the most attention so far, expletives, i.e. interjections that are used in swearing. It reviews the history of swearing (section 4.1), studies that discuss developments in subdomains of swearing (function-to-form mapping; section 4.2) and studies that deal with the evolution of individual expletives (form-to-function mapping; section 4.3). In section 5, interjections other than expletives are discussed; here the main focus of the works is on interjections and genre (section 5.1). Other approaches are reviewed in section 5.2.

2.

A definition of interjections

It is perhaps impossible to define the part of speech “interjections” in absolute terms. Interjections have been defined in various ways and with reference to different criteria, some delineations including, some excluding, members of those categories that are otherwise referred to as routines or formula, onomatopoeia and particles (cf. e.g. Ameka 1992, 1994; Kryk 1992; Wierzbicka 1992; Wilkins 1992; Hentschel and Weydt 1994; Goddard 1998; Biber et al. 1999; Nübling 2001, 2004; Fries 2002). This shows that members of the word class display a number of similarities to and overlaps with other categories, and makes it appear sensible to suggest that “interjection” is a word class with a prototypical structure. It is thus as-

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sumed that its core members display all interjectional features whereas the less prototypical members only fulfil certain minimum requirements, making them prone to overlap with other word classes (cf. Nübling 2004 who distinguishes prototypische ‘prototypical’ and idealtypische Interjektionen ‘ideal interjections’ and provides an overview of obligatory and optional properties of interjections). Wilkins’ (1992) formal definition of interjections, which is based on syntactic and morphological criteria, shall serve as starting point, followed by a brief summary of a number of phonological, semantic and pragmatic properties of interjections. The hedges in Wilkins’ definition take account of the fact that it only fully applies to core members of the word class. Interjection: A conventional lexical form which (commonly and) conventionally constitutes an utterance on its own, (typically) does not enter into construction with other word classes, is (usually) monomorphemic, and (generally) does not host inflectional or derivational morphemes. (Wilkins 1992: 124)

The fact that interjections are utterances by themselves is said to be reflected by the fact that they are separated by a pause from other utterances with which they may co-occur (cf. Ameka 1992a: 108). Furthermore, core members of the word class are typically short and often phonologically anomalous (cf. Ameka 1992: 105–106). Semantically, interjections are holophrastic, i.e. they express the meaning of a whole sentence in one word. There have been attempts to paraphrase the meaning of interjections using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (cf., for example, the articles in the Journal of Pragmatics 18.2/3; Wierzbicka 1986, 1991: chapter 8). Wilkins has observed that all interjections contain a deictic element, as their complete interpretation depends on the actual speech moment (cf. Wilkins 1992: 132). A social deictic element is most prominent in expletives, whose use strongly depends on the social setting and the intended audience (cf. Wilkins 1992: 149; Evans 1992: 236). Interjections are typically uttered as spontaneous, emotional reactions to a situation or to a sudden realisation after internal reflection. They frequently function as illocutionary force indicating devices (cf. Goddard 1998: 139; Wierzbicka 1986: 99; Nübling 2004: 20) and also have illocutionary force themselves (for a discussion cf. Ameka 1992; Wilkins 1992; Wierzbicka 1992; Sadock 1994). Ameka (1992: 113–114) distinguishes a number of communicative functions of interjections, noting that one and the same form may have multiple functions. Expressive interjections express the speaker’s mental state and are further subdivided into (i) emotive interjections, which “express the speaker’s state with respect to the emotions and sensations they have at the time”, e.g. ouch! ‘I feel pain’, and (ii) cognitive interjections, which “pertain to the state of knowledge and thoughts at the time of utterance”, e.g. aha! ‘I now know this’. Additionally, (iii) conative interjections “are directed at an auditor. They are either aimed at getting someone’s attention or they demand an action or response from someone”, e.g. sh!

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‘I want silence here’ or eh? ‘I want to know something’. The final class distinguished by Ameka is (iv) phatic interjections, which “are used in the establishment and maintenance of communicative contact”, e.g. mhm! or uh-huh!. This last class shows the close affinity of interjections with the functional category of discourse markers2 (cf. definition in chapter on discourse markers, this volume): some interjections can function as discourse markers and can have textual and interpersonal functions that facilitate communication. This also becomes apparent when looking at the pragmatic markers discussed or referred to in Brinton (1996); these include Old English hwæt!, which could also be classified as interjection, as well as oh! and ah!. Taavitsainen (passim) shows that interjections had various textual functions in earlier periods of English. Fischer (1998) and Gehweiler (2008) respectively show that marry! and gee!/Jesus! can function as discourse markers; and Person (2009) treats oh! (which is an interjection according to the above criteria) as a discourse marker. Norrick (2009) provides an extensive discussion on the topic and a detailed corpus study that shows how interjections function as pragmatic markers. The diachronic relation between some interjections and lexemes of other word classes is expressed by the distinction between primary and secondary interjections, which goes back to Wundt (1900). Primary interjections are those interjections that do not have homonyms in other parts of speech, e.g. oh!, hm!, yuk!, gosh!, shh!; they are mostly core members of the category. Secondary interjections, like Jesus!, (oh) God!, or fuck! do have homonyms, namely the lexemes they are originally derived from.3 Interjections that consist of more than one orthographic word are sometimes called “interjectional phrases” (cf. Ameka 1992: 104), “complex interjections” (cf. Wierzbicka 1991: 161) or “exclamations” (cf. Taavitsainen 1997b: 573–574). Primary interjections come into being in various ways (cf. Burkhardt 1998; Nübling 2001). Phonetically extremely simple forms like oh! or ah! (called basale Interjektionen ‘basal interjections’ by Burkhardt 1998: 53) are said to be originally imitations of spontaneous nonverbal human sounds like laughing, sighing or shivering. They are the most frequently attested type of interjections in many languages (cf. Ehlich 1986: 63–66). Somatic interjections like yuk!, phew! or brr! originate from physiological sounds, i.e. they are originally reactions to a bodily experience. Somatic interjections display phonological similarities across languages as Wierzbicka notes in her discussion of interjections of “disgust and similar feelings”: in most cases they appear to be linked with certain physical gestures […] Thus, the Polish tfu and the Russian t’fu are perceived as imitations of an act of spitting (although their meaning is by no means the same). The English yuk can be perceived as an imitation of the sound of retching. The English phew, the German pfui and the Scandinavian fy can be thought to imitate an attempt to breathe out of one’s nose a repulsive smell (although again, their meaning is by no means the same). The Polish and Russian fy can

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be perceived as associated with ‘olfactory or oral revulsion’, although the use of the Russian fu, in contrast to that of the Polish one, is not restricted to physical sensations. (Wierzbicka 1992: 176–177)

Furthermore, primary interjections can have an onomatopoetic origin. Forms like German psst! and English shh! or hush!, for example, may originally have been imitations of the sound of whispering. A number of primary interjections have lexical bases: occasionally, they may come into a language through borrowing, German wow! (from English) and olala! (from French) can serve as examples here. More frequently, however, primary interjections are derived from lexemes of the same language. Although other cases are attested, e.g. German ach!, which is said to be related to the Old English verb acan ‘to have pain’, still present in headache (cf. Kluge and Seebold 1999, s.v. ach; Nübling 2001: 28), the most frequently attested path seems to be from secondary to primary interjection, more precisely from taboo to moderated expletive (cf. section 4).

3.

Interpreting interjections in historical texts

If interjections indeed belong to “those seemingly irrational devices that constitute the essence of communication”, as Ameka (1992: 101) has claimed, and if indeed every language has them, then we can probably assume that, in the earlier stages of English, interjections were used in much the same way as they are used now (cf. Hiltunen 2006: 95). We should therefore be able to determine the functions of interjections in earlier periods with reference to their functions in Present-day English. This is what Taavitsainen (1995b, 1997a, 1997b, 1998) and Hiltunen (2006) do when applying Ameka’s (1992) functional categorisation of interjections, which is based on present-day spoken language, to their historical material. Their analyses show that in spite of the fact that the outer appearance of interjections, i.e. their form, can change, their general range of functions seems to remain largely stable over time, although some functions may at a given time be more important than others. The additional functions distinguished by Taavitsainen in her Early Modern English and Late Middle English data (1995a, 1995b) seem to be at least partly a result of the written nature of the data and, more importantly, a manifestation of the special types of audience involvement of some of the genres, which is not present in the contemporary language. Interjections are characteristic of spoken language, of which we have no records from earlier periods. In contemporary spoken language the intonation, the stress pattern, etc. of a given form guide the hearer’s interpretation and may convey different nuances of meaning or even entirely different meanings. Ehlich (1986: 54) has claimed that some German interjections have tonal structures, showing that German hm!, for example, can have eight different interpretations depending on its intonation (for a comparison with English cf. Rasoloson 1994). All

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this prosodic information is absent from the written material of the past. Interjections in writing have to be interpreted without the help of intonation, which, as Taavitsainen (1995b: 440) notes, “makes the interpretation of interjections in historical texts different from that of their modern counterparts”. The co-text and the (wider) context of an interjection in a historical text, however, can provide various cues to its intended interpretation4 and its function (cf. Burger 1980; Taavitsainen 1997c). In historical texts, interjections are most frequent in direct speech quotations (cf. e.g. Taavitsainen 1995b: 445). In some of these uses, the speakers themselves interpret an interjection in the preceding or following text, as Burger (1980: 66) notes in his study of interjections in German plays from the seventeenth century. In example (1), the utterance following the interjection makes it clear that ho! expresses bravery and resolve. (1) Darad.

Ho! ich bin vor ihm unerschrocken. Der gantze Leib zittert mir vom Zorn wie eine Gallart. ‘Ho! I am unafraid of him. My whole body shivers in anger like a jelly.’ (Horribilicribrifax I: 115, quoted in Burger 1980: 66)

The reaction of the hearer and the sequence of speech acts in a dialogue can also provide cues to the “right” interpretation (cf. Burger 1980: 66). In example (2), the hearer’s reaction is a direct comment on the meaning of the interjection. As example (3) shows, ey! introduces a speech act in which (a part of) the utterance, or more precisely its presupposition, is rejected. (2) Flacc. Cleand.

Ach – Ach! Warum erseufftzet ihr so hefftig? ‘Why do you sigh so heavily?’ (Horribilicribrifax IV: 155, quoted in Burger 1980: 66)

(3) Ebbe:

Guten Abend / guter Freund. ‘Good evening, good friend.’ Lars: Ey was hudeln wir uns um deinen guten Abend / ein andermal komm / wenns Tag ist. ‘Ey why do we fuss over your good evening, next time come, during daytime.’ (Weise, Schauspiel vom Niederländischen Bauer I 3, quoted in Burger 1980: 66)

In plays, the meaning of an interjection may be elaborated in the stage directions, as in example (4).

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(4) Ach wir armen Weiber / was sollen wir sagen / da steht das Ebenbild / sehts nur an das arme Thier. (Sie heulen wieder.) ‘Ach we poor women, what shall we say, there stands the image, just take a look at the poor animal.’ (They cry again.) (Weise, Schauspiel vom Niederländischen Bauer, V 6 quoted in Burger 1980: 65, emphasis by Burger) The interpretation of utterances involving reference to religious matters, such as for Gods sake! or (by) Jesus!, can be particularly problematic. For Middle English, Taavitsainen (1997c: 816) notes that “the implications of the same common collocations range from pious oaths to neutral asseverations and forms of swearing”. First of all, therefore, “an intimate knowledge of the cultural period concerned” is the prerequisite for deciding “what degree of literalism is being invoked in a particular form of words” (Hughes 1991: 6). Taavitsainen (1997c: 824) points out that the descriptions of the personalities of the characters who utter these forms – e.g. whether they are pious our not – and genre itself are the best interpreting aids here, as they can be said to “reflect[.] ‘speaker intentions’ in this period”. Taavitsainen (1997c) demonstrates that different genres use these religious phrases in different ways. In religious treatises, for example, they are honest, pious pleas, whereas their use as swearwords / taboo expletives is virtually restricted to fiction and drama. The next section is devoted to such taboo expletives, i.e. to interjections or interjectional phrases that are used in swearing.

4.

Swearing and expletives

“Bad language” is a topic that has always received attention, be it in the form of criticism or in the form of (more or less) scientific exploration. This is reflected by the bulk of publications that exist on the topic. The first slang dictionaries, for example, appeared in England in the late sixteenth century (cf. Hughes 1991: 255), more recent publications on the topic include Sharman ([1884] 2008), Montagu (1968), Andersson and Trudgill (1990), Hughes (1991), Daly et al. (2004) and Thelwall (2009), to name but a few. Slang dictionaries include Partridge ([1949] 2006), Partridge ([1955] 1968), Holder (1995), Hughes (2006) and many others. In the last decade or so, bad language has also been studied from the angle of historical pragmatics (cf. Jucker 2000 on forms of verbal aggression in the Canterbury Tales; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000 on the development of the speech act “insult”; McEnery 2005 and 2006 on attitudes towards bad language and swearing from 1586 until today; Chapman 2008 on insulting epithets in Old English). Swearing is one manifestation of bad language. In its original use the term referred to the taking of a religious oath, i.e. to a solemn or formal declaration or statement invoking God; later it was also used to refer to the use of profane or blas-

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phemous language (cf. Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. swearing) and today this meaning is sometimes extended to include the use of taboo expressions in general, which do not necessarily have to be blasphemous or profane (for example in Andersson and Trudgill 1990). In German, two different words are used to refer to the different types of swearing, and analogously to the different types of oaths, which are instantiations of swearing: schwören – fluchen and Schwur – Fluch. In the following discussion, the terms “religious swearing” and “religious oath” are used to refer to the original meaning of “swearing” and “oath”, i.e. to (the taking of) a solemn or formal declaration or statement invoking God. The terms “profane swearing” and “profane oath” are used to refer to the second meaning.5 The domains from which the expressions used in profane swearing are taken include religion, sexuality and bodily functions, disease and other areas of life that are subject to taboos. There is a widely held assumption that there is a more or less direct relation between societal taboos and the expressions used in swearing (for example in White 1963; Montagu 1968; Andersson and Trudgill 1990; Allan and Burridge 1991; Hughes 1991). Accordingly, changes in the vocabulary of swearing in a language are expected to reflect social and cultural developments.6 Often, differences in the swearing inventories between Catholic and Protestant countries are cited in order to support the above view; see, for example, Hughes (1991: 249): “The decline of the invocation Mary! in English, first to marry!, and then to oblivion, is in sharp contrast to the such grotesque Catholic variations as Italian Porca Madonna! (‘that sow of the Virgin Mary!’) and Madonna puttana! (‘that whore of the Virgin Mary’)” (cf. also Andersson and Trudgill 1990: 57). The use of potentially offensive interjections such as Jesus!, oh my God!, crikey!, gee!, gosh!, shit!, fuck! is one way to swear. These interjections are termed expletives (thus “expletive” is synonymous with “profane oath” or “swearword”). Following the classification by Biber et al. (1999), expletives with homonyms in other parts of speech, i.e. expletives that are secondary interjections, are called taboo expletives. Through their homonymic form – which is the word they stem from – taboo expletives have an obvious connection to a taboo domain. Taboo expletives draw their taboo potential, i.e. their potential offensiveness, from this clear connection. Although identical in form to the word they are derived from, taboo expletives are not related in meaning to their lexical base (cf. Andersson and Trudgill 1990: 59; Wierzbicka 1992: 165; Gehweiler 2008: 74). Moderated expletives are taboo expletives that have been modified phonologically by speakers in order to obscure their taboo origin, meaning that they are no longer visibly connected to the taboo expletives and the taboo domain they stem from (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 1094). In contrast to taboo expletives, moderated expletives are primary interjections with no homonyms in other parts of speech. For some moderated expletives the relation to the underlying taboo expletive may be reconstructable for some speakers, for others it may be entirely opaque. In 1898, Swaen argued that for many moderated expletives the underlying taboo expletives are no longer recog-

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nised because “[p]eople in the habit of making constant use of oaths try to distort and mutilate them past recognition, and in this they often succeed but too well” (1898: 21). This is why moderated expletives typically differ in meaning from their base form (cf. Wierzbicka 1992; Reisigl 1999; Gehweiler 2008), they are said to be the “milder” and “less offensive” variants. Speakers who first used a moderated expletive did not want to use a taboo word but seemed to have felt the need to do so anyway. In the case of religious taboo expletives, speakers probably wanted to avoid (being accused of) blasphemy or profanity. One of the Ten Commandments handed down in Exodus 20:7 says: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain”. In other passages of the Bible, too, swearers are threatened with serious punishment, even death (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 24:16). Thus, by consciously circumventing the objectionable word, speakers could avoid using “the name of the Lord in vain”, being disrespectful or offensive in regard to religious instances and contents, or using a form that was directly associated with the offensive or tabooised behaviour, material or body part. The connection to the taboo word (and therefore to the taboo referent) was obscured, as the new form was no longer explicitly related to it. This is a phenomenon Hock (1992: 295) has called “tabooistic distortion”: “a deliberate ‘mispronunciation’ of a tabooed word which enables speakers to utter the word without ‘really’ saying it”. The types of “mispronunciation” that are attested are diverse and include clipping, blending, substitution of a vowel or, more frequently, of a consonant, insertion or addition of a syllable and substitution on a rhyming basis in Cockney rhyming slang (Friar Tuck! instead of fuck!). The different types of modification can also be combined, and many examples resist a clear classification. The only requirement that must be met, it seems, is that there be a “sufficient” amount of similarity between the taboo expletive and the derived moderated expletive. Many of the derived forms – except the rhyming slang examples, which rhyme – alliterate with their bases. Often the initial syllable, the syllable/vowel that receives the main stress in the word, or the first and last sounds are identical. A number of moderated expletives are characterised by omission rather than modification. In forms like ’sblood! (for God’s blood!), ’snails! (for God’s nails!), zounds! (for God’s wounds!) or ’sbody! (for God’s body!) the original phrase was made unrecognisable by the deletion of the word that renders the phrase blasphemous. Apart from taboo expletives and moderated expletives there is one further type: forms which, like taboo expletives, have homonyms – but these homonyms are not their base forms. These are called euphemistic taboo expletives by Gehweiler (2008). They include forms like goodness!, gracious! (instead of god!); heck! (instead of hell!); shoot!, sugar!, shucks! (instead of shit!); basket! (instead of bastard!); crumbs! (instead of christ!); German Scheibe! ‘pane’, Scheibenkleister! ‘pane paste’, or Schade! ‘what a pity’ (instead of Scheiße! ‘shit’); Italian zio!

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‘uncle’ (instead of dio! ‘God’); cavolo! ‘cabbage’ (instead of cazzo! ‘dick’); or Swedish järnvägar! ‘railway’ or järnspikar! ‘iron nails’ (instead of jävlar! ‘devil’). Euphemistic taboo expletives are often used humorously. Instead of making taboo expletives unrecognisable, like moderated expletives, euphemistic taboo expletives only pretend to do so. The taboo expletive is substituted with a word that is phonologically similar but otherwise entirely unrelated to it. Thus, through the use of a word whose meaning does not at all fit a given context, the hearer’s attention is drawn to the euphemistic taboo expletive and thereby to the “disguised” underlying taboo expletive. Further emphasis may be achieved by a pronunciation of the euphemistic taboo expletive that differs from the usual pronunciation of the unrelated homonym (cf., for example, the lengthening of the initial sound in shoot! or German schade!). A vast number of expletives originate from the religious domain, most of them from religious names. As “people swear by what is most potent to them” (Hughes 1991: 249) it is not surprising that the taboo expletive god! has given rise to perhaps the greatest number of moderated expletives and euphemistic taboo expletives, starting with gog! in the fourteenth century (cf. OED, s.v. Gog). Moderated expletives derived from god! include agad, bosh, cod, cokk, coo, cor, ecod, egad, gad, gaw, gawd, godsookers, gog, gol, goles, golly, gorry, gosh, jolly, jove, od, odsbobs, odso, ounds, begorrah, cor blimey, doggone, drat, gorblimey, gosh darned, gum, odrabbit it, ye gods, ’sblood, ’sbody, ’slid, ’slight, ’snails, gadzooks, gods bodykins, odsbodikins, ’sfoot, ’strewth, ’zounds. Euphemistic taboo expletives include by the holy spook, George, Godfrey, good grief, goodness gracious, goodness knows, good gracious, goodness, gracious, great ghost, great Holy, great Scott, s’elpe me Bob, Gordonbennet!, Gordon’ighlanders! (cf. Montagu 1968; Hughes 1991; Allan and Burridge 1991). 4.1.

The history of swearing

The following sections provide an overview of the treatments of swearing from a historical pragmatic perspective. A review of Hughes (1991) serves as an introduction to the topic. The focus is on swearing involving reference to religious matters – to my knowledge there are no detailed studies of other types of swearing within a historical pragmatic framework. Hughes (1991) is a sociohistorical account of swearing in English (similar approaches include Montagu 1968 and Sharman 2008). Lötscher (1981), Arnovick (1999) and Reisigl (1999) discuss developments in subdomains of religious swearing, e.g. cursing and vocatives; they can thus be broadly characterised as diachronic function-to-form mappings. Fischer (1998), Nübling (2001) and Gehweiler (2008), on the other hand, deal with the emergence of individual forms of swearing (diachronic form-to-function mapping). Taavitsainen’s (1997c) discussion of “pious oaths or swearing in Middle English” is reviewed together with her other work in section 5.1 below.

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Hughes’ (1991) monograph on Swearing is a comprehensive sociohistorical account of swearing, and is referred to by almost every historical pragmatic study on swearing. Hughes discusses the developments within and across different domains of swearing and the debates surrounding swearing for all periods of English. The following summary will focus on Hughes’ treatment of religious and profane swearing. According to Hughes, the Anglo-Saxons “took language very seriously” and had “an intense respect for the relationship between words and deeds” (43). Oaths, for example, were considered binding and oath-breaking was a serious malefaction. Appeals to God seem to have been quite uncommon, and profane swearing is unattested in Old English (on religious cursing cf. Arnovick 1999, discussed in section 4.2 below). Hughes notes that, although mentioned in Beowulf and other writings of the time, God is “never invoked as a prop and never named in vain” (38) even though Beowulf was written at least three hundred years after Christianity was brought to England. The picture looks entirely different for the Middle Ages. In the age of faith, the “great and obvious force behind most […] swearing was Christianity” (Hughes 1991: 55). Through the course of the period, Hughes notes, religious swearing seems to have increased in scale and intensity, from “the mildest invocations of spiritual qualities”, such as by my faith!, to “intimate references to the person and sufferings of Christ” (56), as in by Goddes corpus!. False swearing was one of the most common sins in medieval times, which induced institutional opposition in the form of “judicial punishment or ecclesiastical denunciation” (59). The motif of the dismembered Christ child, a victim of “dismembering” oaths like by his nails! or by his wounds! also originates in that period (cf. Woolf 1968: 396 quoted in Hughes 1991: 61). Moderated expletives (called “minced oaths” by Hughes) also first appear in Middle English; marry! and gog!, for example, are both first attested from the fourteenth century. Swearing in the Canterbury Tales is mostly religious swearing; the tales are said to contain more than 200 different oaths (cf. Hughes 1991: 63 with reference to Elliott 1974: 262). Chaucer, as Hughes notes, was extremely creative in inventing words and phrases to swear with, not only using the conventional inventory of swearwords but also “exploring all kinds of perversions of Holy Writ and blasphemous abuses of religious language, such as curses, mockblessings, pseudo-sermons and the like” (63). Thus, the Canterbury Tales contains taboo expletives, like by Goddes arms!, by Goddes precious herte!, and “minced” forms, such as pardee! or cokes bones!. As Hughes shows, swearing in the Canterbury Tales is a strong indication of a figure’s piety and character and “as we descend from the ‘high seriousness’ of the courtly romance down to the bedroom farce of the fabliau and the still uglier scenes of low rustic cunning in the Cambridgeshire fens, so the swearing becomes more casual, more mocking and more personal” (71). Accordingly, Hughes divides the pilgrims into three broad categories: the pious, who take religious language seriously; “those who exploit it cynically” (79); and the vulgar characters who swear most and most seriously. Swearing in the

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Knight’s Tale, for example, is measured and only used on serious occasions, whereas the Pardoner’s Tale is a “tour de force of blatant blasphemy” (82), which is full of false and profane swearing (cf. chapter on Chaucer, this volume). Although a number of words of religious abuse were created during the English Reformation (e.g. papist), no new taboo expletives seem to have emerged. According to Hughes, however, the Reformation had an influence on the already existing swearing vocabulary in that it “[disarmed] the potency of the Catholic sacred names” (95). Hughes (1991: 95) quotes the example of marry!, which is derived from the name of the Virgin Mary and according to the OED “[b]y the 16th c., […] had probably ceased to be apprehended as anything more than a mere interjection” (Fischer 1998 discusses the evolution of marry! in detail; cf. section 4.3 below). Swearing in the Renaissance period is characterised by creativity and restraint at the same time. Hughes shows that two interdependent developments shaped the swearing vocabulary of the time: the first development was the shift from religious to secular swearing, the second development was “the emergence of the first stringently organised forms of secular censorship” (102). This censorship began with the institution of the Master of the Revels in 1574, who had the right to censor plays, which had to be shown to him before public performance. The censorship was further instituted in 1606 under James I in the form of the “Act to Restraine Abuses of Players” against swearing on stage, followed by a more general prohibition of swearing in 1623. Throughout the period, Puritan treatises against swearing circulated. The 1606 Act, according to Hughes, had two major effects. Firstly, there was a shift from religious to secular referents (e.g. animals or sexual organs) in swearing and the invocation of pagan deities increased. The second effect was an “interesting efflorescence of newly-minced forms” (104), many of which actually preceded the Act. Hughes quotes the following examples: ’sblood (1598), ’slid (1598), ’slight (1598), ’snails (1599), ’zounds (1600), ’sbody (1601), ’sfoot (1602), ’sdeath (1606), ’slife (1634), ’slidikins (1694; from Gods little eyelids). The consequent loss of understanding, i.e. the loss of the relation to the underlying taboo expletive, is shown in the re-spelling of ’struth as ’strewth. “In the case of zounds, the form so efficiently obliterated the meaning that within a century the nonsensical alternative pronunciation [zaundz] had grown up” (104–105). According to Hughes, Shakespeare’s works also show various signs of censorship, either by the Master of the Revels or the author himself. In Hamlet, for example, O God! is variously changed into O fie! or O good Horatio! (cf. 110–111) and most of the deities involved in King Lear are pagan, “partly to evoke the primitive era of the action, and partly because the play was written after the period when the edict against Profanity on Stage had been enforced” (112; for a detailed treatment of swearing in Shakespeare cf. Shirley 1979; also cf. chapter on Shakespeare, this volume). The Augustan and the Victorian periods were characterised by a separation of linguistic registers. The literary decorum “preferred brute fact to be presented […]

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as an artificial ‘poetic diction’ or, in prose, in polysyllabic, opaque abstraction” (143). From this register and from good society in general, taboo expletives were virtually absent. That swearing must have existed, however, is shown by the existence of a number of writings on swearing, e.g. Jeremy Collier’s tirade A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, from 1698. These writings, in turn, were satirised by writers like Swift and Sterne, as in the following passage (5) Zounds! Z----ds! Cried Phutatorious, partly to himself – and as yet high enough to be heard – (Tristram Shandy chapter xxvii, Book IV, quoted in Hughes 1991: 150) Whereas the newly founded OED omitted many taboo words, it was during this period that dictionaries of slang and underground language started to be published. For Present-day English, Hughes states “an upsurge of swearing […] as a virtual consequence of the decline of religion as a vital force in most people’s lives” (190). Swearing today is mostly swearing in sexual terms, “[t]he ‘lower’ physical faculties of copulation, defecation and urination have come very much to the fore” (4). This “great modern expansion of swearing” (161), Hughes argues, already occurred in the late Victorian period, but was then suppressed and held underground by the prevailing decorum. The decline in profane swearing in English is explained by the general decline of the influence of the Church in Protestant societies (249). According to Hughes, the history of swearing over the different periods of English is characterised by one major shift, from swearing by and to to swearing at: “the various forms of personal abuse, or swearing at, have assumed the dominant mode, while asseveration and the invocation of higher powers, or swearing by and to, have correspondingly diminished” (237). This goes along with a shift in the focus of swearing and accordingly with a change in the vocabulary of swearing: from religious matters, i.e. breaching the commandment against taking the Lord’s name in vain, to sexual and bodily functions (237). 4.2.

Function-to-form mapping

Lötscher (1981) compares the present-day forms of swearing and verbal abuse in Swiss German to the situation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, quoting examples from a historical Swiss German dictionary (Schweizerdeutsches Wörterbuch; SDW) and from older texts for illustration; with regard to swearing, he mostly discusses expletives involving Gott ‘God’ and its euphemisms (e.g. botz, bocks, box). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, forms of verbal abuse in Swiss German included blasphemic imprecations such as dass dich gotts lichnam schend!, literally ‘that God’s corpus disgraces you’, and das dich botz fud schende!, literally

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‘that God’s cunt disgraces you’ (SDW Vol. 8: 894, quoted in Lötscher 1981: 154). These imprecations, Lötscher argues, were also used as self-imprecations, where, instead of an addressee, the speakers imprecated themselves or the present situation, thereby turning the imprecations into impersonalised imprecations, i.e. profane oaths or expletives. Such use is still reflected in the present-day Swiss German expletive Gottverdammi(ch)!, literally ‘God damn me’, which was also originally a self-imprecation. Unlike Gottverdammi(ch)!, however, most of these profane oaths were shortened to simple noun phrases in which Gott was substituted by a euphemism, yielding expletives like botz liden!, literally ‘God’s lids’, or botz bluot!’ literally ‘God’s blood’. A second source of expletives with botz, Lötscher argues, is the fixed expression sam mir Gott(s) … helfe ‘so help me God(’s) …’ that was originally used in religious oaths. This expression came to be used as an asseveration, asserting the speaker’s sincerity; in these uses it was modified into forms like somer gotts liden or sammir gotts fleisch (SDW Vol. 7: 904, quoted in Lötscher 1981: 156). In its use as asseveration, as Lötscher illustrates, the emotions accompanying the utterance, e.g. anger, could come to be foregrounded, and the expression could either be interpreted as asseveration or as expression of the speaker’s emotions. These sammir-collocations are attested as religious oaths and asseverations up to 1530, then they suddenly disappear. Lötscher suggests that they have survived in simple botz-expletives without sammir, like botz liden! or botz bluot!. The semantic-pragmatic development of the originally fixed religious imprecations and asseverations into expletives includes semantic bleaching (Abschleifung), during which the original religious-magical meaning is superseded by an affective-illocutive meaning. The blasphemous aspect, Lötscher argues, is invariantly present in the simple expletives (156). Swearing and verbal abuse in present-day Swiss German is characterised by an almost total absence of religion/blasphemy, which has survived in only very few expletives like Gopfertoori!, Gopfridstutz! and Herrgott!. In contrast to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lötscher argues, the almost total secularisation of today’s public life now makes it almost impossible to violate religious taboos in blasphemous utterances. Arnovick’s (1999) monograph deals with illocutionary developments in the history of English. Chapter 5 is concerned with a subtype of swearing, i.e. with “subjectification in the common curse”. Here, Arnovick traces the semantic-pragmatic development “through which profane, expressive cursing comes to supersede a sacred, volitional speech act” (73). She thus shows that not only the vocabulary of swearing can change, but also the speech act itself, which she traces through the three periods of English: Old English, Middle English and Present-day English. The original declarative speech act, which is “a ritualized, religious act whereby a speaker with special authority […] declares malediction upon a victim” (75), is termed “execratory cursing”. Execratory cursing is characterised by the invocation of an institution of cursing, i.e. it is assumed that there are supernatural powers that

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affect the curse. Common cursing or “cussing” is defined as an expressive in the sense of Searle (1975), which has a very different perlocutionary effect: it conveys the speakers’ emotions, more specifically, their anger. Here, no special authority or reference to an institution is involved. On the basis of a corpus of 43 Old English curses and 50 Latin curses, Arnovick first describes the pragmatic features of “real” religious curses. Old English curses can be described as a linguistic institution – this is reflected by their almost fixed structure; they were assumed to possess spiritual power and were therefore not uttered thoughtlessly. The propositional content of these execratory curses “is restricted to future events detrimental to the target of the curse” (78). According to Arnovick, Old English curses express a deontic meaning and have specific sincerity conditions: The invocation of the Divine in a clearly defined context of intentional action (e.g. a binding legal covenant) supports a judgment that cursing in Old English is a deontic act. Felicitous curses require the psychological state of desire on the part of the speaker; in order for the curse to be sincere, those who curse must want to inflict the suffering proposed. Anger or emotions may accompany desire, but volition itself must motivate the curse. (Arnovick 1999: 79)

Arnovick shows that both Christian and pagan traditions have influenced the Old English curse, regardless of the Christian wording. In the Christian tradition, the curse is part of a number of sacred and church-related rituals (disappearing from official practice only at the end of the Middle Ages). The pagan institution of the curse as non-religious wish, Arnovick notes, “exists alongside Judeo-Christian tradition wherever it has not been appropriated and transformed by it” (82), and refers to the belief in spells alluded to in the Old Testament, and to the widespread use of curse tablets7 in Ancient Greece and Rome. In Middle English, the speech act of cursing undergoes dramatic semanticpragmatic changes. Although volitional, deontic curses of the Old English type are still found, another type occurs in the Late Middle English literature: curses that express anger, rather than to curse. The emergence of these expressive curses is explained by Arnovick by the “secularization of swearing vocabulary” (86), i.e. the disappearance of the religious meaning within the wording of the curse, which is regarded as a result of a larger sociohistorical change at the end of the Middle Ages. The disappearance of the religious meaning within the curses coincides with their increasingly frequent use. In Middle English, many curses contain embedded oaths, where “[a]ctivation of the curse depends upon the truthfulness or realization of the utterance it accompanies” (87). When vowing to hunt down the baby Jesus the Wakefield Herod utters: “The dewill me hang and draw” (Magnus Herodes: 132–135, quoted in Arnovick 1999: 87). Arnovick argues that through frequent use in the above illocutionary contexts, “the force of this curse formula changes until it comes to emphasize the speaker’s sincerity” (87). This shift from execratory to ex-

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pressive cursing or cussing also involves a change of speaker and addressee. To “cuss”, no special authority is needed, and no reference to an extra-linguistic institution, i.e. a worldly hearer (often the target of the curse) is the addressee, rather than a Divine power. The present-day cursing situation partly coincides with Middle English, but, in addition to using curses to punctuate exclamations, speakers use them to swear at others. The propositional content of a contemporary curse “must be taken figuratively rather than literally” (90) and the performance of a curse does not require a belief in God, nor does it require the psychological state of desire. Profane cursing in Present-day English expresses anger, and, because it remains to some extent socially unacceptable, Arnovick notes, “it notifies the hearer of the strength of the speaker’s anger”, signalling “a loss of the speaker’s self-control” and providing a release for anger (1999: 91 with reference to Jay 1992: 75, 96,). Whereas the perlocution of an Old English curse involved living under the curse’s influence, common curses are insults. Arnovick summarises the locutionary and illocutionary development of the curse as follows: OE

ME

Locutionary Structure:

religious curse

> religious curse

Illocutionary Function:

declarative > declarative/expressive

LME/ EModE > religious curse

PDE > religious curse

> expressive > expressive

Figure 1. The functional evolution of the common curse (Arnovick 1999: 92)

Arnovick argues that the pragmatic change accompanying this development is subjectification as described in Traugott (1989, 1995, 1997; see also chapter on subjectification, this volume): “In the common cursing derived from deontic cursing, the objective curse is replaced by a subjective expressive, its concrete proposition transformed into one that is abstract, and its lexical meaning made to serve an interpersonal function” (Arnovick 1999: 93). In a subsection of his monograph on secondary interjections – one of the very few treatments of secondary interjections – Reisigl (1999) discusses the emergence of taboo expletives (apostrophische Vokative ‘apostrophic vocatives’)8 from religious vocatives, referring to forms like German (o) Gott, Italian (o) dio, or English (oh) God (213–220). The functional shift these religious vocatives have undergone is described within a framework called Funktionale Etymologie (cf. Ehlich 1994) and on an introspective basis. The development as described by Reisigl can be summarised as follows: in prayers, vocatives are used to identify the addressee, and they are embedded in ritual contexts in order to ask for the help of powers

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authorised by the church – which are assumed to be able to change one’s fate and to have apotropaic9 powers. Through the frequent use of the vocatives in these contexts, Reisigl argues, the pragmatic-apotropaic intention, which was originally only part of the context of usage, is passed on to the vocatives themselves. These can now be used with an apotropaic meaning outside ritual religious contexts, meaning that through contextual pragmatic enrichment their purely identifying function has gained an apotropaic dimension. Their pragmatic “misuse”, i.e. use in non-religious contexts, and their excessive use, Reisigl argues, further led to a semantic bleaching of the vocatives, meaning that their identifying function was lost – they were now secondary interjections / taboo expletives. Although the connection between taboo expletives and the religious vocatives from which they are derived is opaque, Reisigl claims, the taboo expletives still contain “traces” of their former usage: they all contain a component of negative evaluation. According to Reisigl, this can be explained by the fact that these “fake” vocatives are still used as “real” vocatives in contexts where speakers ask (or pray) for help from an unpleasant situation. With reference to Rasoloson (1994), Reisigl discusses the status of oh! in these secondary interjections, concluding that (at least in English and German) prosodically integrated oh! merely serves an introductory and emphasising function; it does not have meaning itself (216–218). 4.3.

Form-to-function mapping

Fischer (1998) studies the emergence of the primary interjection / moderated expletive marry!, which is derived from the religious name Mary, using the OED quotations database as a historical corpus. Fischer shows that the interjection emerged in the late fourteenth century, that it was most popular at the turn of the seventeenth century, and became archaic or obsolete in the nineteenth. Semantically, marry! seemed to have been “indicative of (strong) emotions” (43). Fischer shows that functionally marry! can be considered a discourse marker as it fulfilled many of the textual and interpersonal functions of pragmatic markers established by Brinton (1996) (cf. also the discussion of Jucker’s 2002 and Lutzky’s 2008 treatment of marry! in the chapter on discourse markers, this volume). Fischer argues that the phonological and graphological changes involved in the emergence of forms like marry! and gee! (from Jesus!) are caused by “two opposite but related tendencies” (36). Firstly, “real” religious oaths are modified for euphemistic reasons. Secondly, due to secularisation processes secondary interjections / taboo expletives like Jesus! lose their religious associations and are therefore free to change. Fischer proposes the following generalisation: “religious oaths have a tendency to develop into pragmatically weaker assertions or interjections, in which process they tend to lose their religious associations. Formally, full oaths such as in the name of Jesus may be reduced to single-word expressions such

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as Jesus; these, in turn, may be expanded again for emphasis, or else they may be changed phonologically and/or graphologically and thus completely lose the connection with their Christian origin” (36–37). Nübling (2001) deals with the emergence of primary interjections from secondary ones from a synchronic perspective, but does not attempt to explain the reasons for or the underlying mechanisms of that change. After discussing the formal and functional properties of primary interjections, Nübling shows that the German moderated expletive oje!, which goes back to the taboo expletive oh mein Jesus!, literally ‘oh my Jesus’, is a primary interjection and displays not only what she terms the minimum requirements of interjections, but also those properties that pertain to core members of the interjectional class (cf. section 2 above). Gehweiler (2008) studies the historically related expletives Jesus! and gee!. Using data from the British National Corpus and Google, she first shows that the two expletives differ in meaning: both express surprise, but Jesus! contains an additional element of negative evaluation. As taboo expletive it still has an obvious connection (homonymy) to the taboo word from which it is derived, the religious proper name Jesus. Furthermore, the two forms have different collocational patterns. In the diachronic part of her paper, supported with data from the OED and the Middle English Dictionary, Gehweiler (2008) argues that the primary interjection / moderated expletive gee! emerged from the religious name Jesus in two major steps. The first step involved the emergence of the secondary interjection Jesus! from the proper name. Here, the repeated use of the proper name Jesus as invocation/vocative in religious oaths, asseverations, prayers and cursings (in a certain syntactic position, set apart from the rest of the utterance), led to a pragmatic enrichment of Jesus (cf. Reisigl 1999). When it came to be used in non-religious contexts its pragmatic meaning came to be foregrounded and was eventually lexicalised (in Middle English). This development, it is argued, can be explained by the “standard” model for subjectification, Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, i.e. it is a gradual and largely speaker-based change. The second step, the emergence of the primary interjection gee! from the secondary interjection / taboo expletive Jesus! (which took place in the Victorian period), cannot be explained by invited inferencing as there are – in contrast to the process through which Jesus! emerged – no transitional stages attested. Gehweiler proposes the following scenario: Jesus! was phonologically (and graphologically) modified into gee! (clipping) for euphemistic reasons. The new form was no longer recognised by hearers as being related to the taboo expletive, and accordingly gee! was free to develop a meaning independent of Jesus!. In opposition to Fischer (1998), the emergence of gee! is therefore regarded as abrupt and hearer-based. Gehweiler further argues that the meanings of both gee! and Jesus! are results of a process of subjectification as defined in Traugott and Dasher (2002), while the collocations gee I wonder! and I mean Jesus!, in which the expletives are frequently

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used in Present-day English, express an additional intersubjective meaning (cf. chapter on subjectification, this volume). Taavitsainen (1997b) contains a few notes on the diachronic development of single expletives. Middle English benedicite!, which is a pious greeting and a formula of blessing, is said to have undergone a process of subjectification in grammaticalisation. In Middle English, benedicite! “is found in both its original meaning and as an expression of astonishment, and the diachronic development can be seen in these examples” (596). Gramercy! and pardee!, on the other hand, which are originally phrases of foreign origin (OF gra(u)nt mercy and de part Dieu), “have become single words by lexicalization” (601).

5.

Other interjections

Most historical pragmatic studies on interjections other than expletives consider the relation of interjections and genre, a field of study initiated by Irma Taavitsainen (cf. section 5.1). There is, however, a recent article that deals with interjections from a different point of view: Person (2009) analyses the use of oh! in Shakespeare within a conversation analytic framework (cf. section 5.2 below). Although oh! is only studied in its function as a discourse marker, Person’s article is nevertheless included here, as oh! also qualifies as an interjection according to the criteria presented in section 2. Note, however, that there are other studies on discourse markers that could at the same time be considered interjections (for example, some of the forms discussed in Jucker 2002, e.g. oh!, marry! or why!); these are reviewed in the chapter on discourse markers in this volume. 5.1.

Interjections and genre

In her work, Taavitsainen traces the uses and functions of interjection in different genres and texts within and across earlier periods of English. Her aims involve (i) to distinguish different genres with reference to personal affect features such as interjections (mainly 1993, 1997a), (ii) to determine the functions of interjections in earlier texts and genres (mainly 1995a, 1995b, 1997c), and, more recently, (iii) to show how interjections and expletives are used as means of character description in texts (mainly 1998, 1999). Sikorska (2000) studies the use of interjections in the two genres of The Book of Margery Kempe; Hiltunen (2006) traces the use of interjections in Old English with special attention to their use in different genres. Burger (1980) remarks on the use of interjections in seventeenth-century German. He notes that interjections seem to be extremely frequent in seventeenthcentury texts and that some have undergone a considerable functional change on their way to Present Day German, e.g. ei!. The frequent use of interjections in seventeenth-century texts is explained by the fact that in these texts interjections

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fulfilled functions that today are fulfilled by so-called Abtönungspartikeln. Burger also notes that interjections are genre-dependent: different genres contain different interjections, and a form may have different functions in different genres. However, he stresses the need for more comprehensive and differentiated analyses. One such analysis is presented in Taavitsainen (1993). Taavitsainen (1993) assesses the text types and the individual texts of the Late Middle English parts of the Helsinki Corpus (ME3: 1350–1420 and ME4: 1420–1500) with respect to the occurrence of emotional and interactive features, showing that different (sub)genres can be distinguished according to the volume of personal affect, which is defined as “the expression of subjective emotions, feelings, moods and attitudes” (Taavitsainen 1997a: 193). The following linguistic features are assessed: personal pronouns, interjections, direct wh-questions and private verbs, i.e. emotion and perception verbs. The results of the corpus statistical analysis (an exploratory factor analysis; for details cf. Taavitsainen 1997a: 202–226; also chapter on corpus linguistics, this volume) are particularly interesting with respect to interjections: the analysis not only shows that all of the features contribute to the emotional and affective mood in a text but also that the first-person singular pronoun and interjections/exclamations are the most important features, i.e. they are especially indicative of emotional loading. Drawing on her earlier work, Taavitsainen (1995a) studies the use and functions of interjections in four genres of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the religious genres of sermons (the Parson’s Tale and the Pardoner’s Tale) and saints’ lives (the Prioress’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale), and the secular genres of courtly romances (the Knight’s Tale) and fabliaux (the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale). She shows that the use of interjections in these genres differs, not only according to frequency and the types of interjections that occur, but also according to their functions. Genres in Chaucer’s works can thus be characterised by the use of features of personal affect such as interjections. The article focuses on primary interjections, but secondary interjections are included in the appendix, which contains a list of all the interjections found. The following textual functions of interjections can be distinguished in the Canterbury Tales: interjections are used (i) to organise discourse and (in their use as vocatives) signal turn-taking, (ii) to highlight turning points in the plot, and (iii) to create suspense and apprehension. Furthermore, they create a specific type of audience involvement. The most common interjections in sermons are allas!, lo!, and o!. Allas! achieves reader involvement and frequently occurs together with rhetorical questions and repetitions, for example; lo! is often followed by a reference to an authority, an assurance of the truth value of the statement, or by a comment from the narrator; and o! is found in cumulative lists “in which a very fervent tone of voice is employed” (195) – it thus expresses the narrator’s stance. Saints’ lives are marked by a very restricted range of interjections, only o!, lo! and allas! occur in this genre, o! being the most prominent: it occurs in pious invocations,

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often marking important points in the plot. The range of interjections used in romances is wider than in sermons and saints’ lives. In addition to allas!, which here conveys feelings of despair, sorrow, loss and regret, and o! and lo!, there are, for example, the genre-specific interjections hoo!, an outcry in the middle of fighting, or fy!, an expression of contempt. The use of interjections is most varied in fabliaux. Fabliaux contain the same interjections as the other genres, but these have a number of additional functions and create genre-specific types of audience involvement. In fabliaux, “interjections and other short exclamations are the chief means of achieving […] surprise effects”, which are typical of the genre, and “contribute to the quick pace of the story” (200), e.g. what! and how! in example (6). (6) What! Nicholay! What, how! What, looke adoun! Awak, and thenk on Cristes Passioun! (A3477 quoted in Taavitsainen 1995a: 201, emphasis by Taavitsainen) Collocations of interjections with other interjections or with other short components are also typical of fabliaux, these sequences often mark turning points in the plot or have a humorous effect. The transfer of interjections that originate in another stylistic register (religious language or classical rhetoric) to the genre of fabliaux creates irony. A case in point is the use of lo! – which in its prototypical use is didactic (to attract the attention of the audience to important points in sermons), has religious connotations and is frequently used in sermons – in the moral lesson of the Reeve’s Tale (202). The ironic effect draws on the audience’s recognition of the expression’s “normal” use and connotations. When lo! is transferred to fabliaux, “the didactic connotations become comical” (205) as in example (7). (7) His wyf is swyved, and his doghter als. Lo, swich it is a millere to be fals! (A4317–18 quoted in Taavitsainen 1995a: 202, emphasis by Taavitsainen) Taavitsainen (1995b) studies the use of interjections in Early Modern English and how their use differs from that of their modern counterparts and from that of their predecessors in Late Middle English. She classifies all occurrences of primary interjections in the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki Corpus (1500–1700) according to the genres in which they occur. Each of the interjections is also classified according to its function(s), based on Ameka’s (1992) functional categorisation of interjections (cf. section 2). Taavitsainen’s analysis shows that there is significant variation between the different genres with regard to frequency and functions of interjections; the results are said to indicate “the place of various interjections on the scale from colloquial to solemn uses of language” (461). Interjections occur most frequently in comedy, where they have the widest range of functions. They also occur frequently in fiction, mostly in direct speech quotations, but there is variation according to fre-

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quency and function within the works of individual authors. Private letters, for example, contain only few interjections with a restricted number of functions; in philosophical and educational texts only o! occurs; and the Early Modern English translation of the Bible also contains only a very limited range. Taavitsainen offers a number of explanations for the differing uses: the frequent and diverse occurrence of interjections in comedy, for example, is explained with reference to the discourse form of comedy, which is based on dialogue that imitates the everyday language of common people and is therefore “the nearest approximation to everyday spoken language in historical texts” (460). The interjection o!, on the other hand, which frequently occurs as a vocative in philosophical and educational texts, follows the Latin exemplars and reflects “the rhetorical rules that served as a model of writing” (461). The functions of interjections in Early Modern English thus range from imitations of spoken to conventions of written language. Compared to Late Middle English, where the marking of turn-taking is one of the most important functions of interjections, and “the use of interjections at the beginning of each speech act is almost regular” (461) in drama and romances (cf. Taavitsainen 1997a), interjections do not have this function in the assessed material. According to Taavitsainen, this has to do with important changes that concern the consumption of these texts: in Late Middle English this use “had the practical function of aiding the hearer in distinguishing the speakers’ turns in the performance of the text when read aloud […] With the spread of literacy reading habits changed, and with cheaper production methods and materials, books or booklets became more readily available to a wider audience” (461–462). Comparing her material to that of Aijmer (1987), who has studied the presentday uses of ah! and oh! in the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English, Taavitsainen establishes a number of differences between these and their Early Modern English counterparts: in Early Modern English, o!, for example, is much more common than oh!, and it “seems to be used in the functions taken over by oh in Present-day conversations” (461). Furthermore, it is shown that the functions determined by Ameka (1992) can only partly be applied to the Early Modern English material. Whereas Ameka’s phatic function is not attested in the assessed material, an additional function emerges: the vocative function (expressed by interjections such as ah!, alas! or o!) that focuses on the addressee/reader/audience. Furthermore, a number of additional textual functions are attested that are not included in Ameka’s classification. As Taavitsainen shows, Early Modern English interjections can be used for reader involvement (alas!), to mark turning points in the plot (alas!, fy!), to contribute to the vividness of the narration (o!), and to signal topic shifts (alas!, oh!). Taavitsainen (1997a) is a continuation and elaboration of her 1993 study. The ultimate aim is to find out whether differences between fiction and the adjoining non-fictional text types can be established with the help of a corpus-based statistical analysis. The basic assumption, based on the findings of Taavitsainen (1993), is

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that text types can be distinguished with the help of linguistic features that are used to express personal affect. As in Taavitsainen (1993), a factor analysis (for a description of the method cf. 1997a: 202–220; also see the chapter on corpus linguistics, this volume) is performed on texts from those genres10 of the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki Corpus that are nearest to fiction (travelogues, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, history writing). In the later study, the presumptive affect features are extended to include: personal pronouns, direct questions, expressions referring to proximity or distance (the demonstratives this/that and these/those and the adverbs of proximity now and here), the contracted forms ’d and ’ll of modals and ’d of past tense forms, a number of exclamations (i.e. interjections), a number of swearwords (i.e. taboo expletives), a number of pragmatic particles (overlaps between the three classes are acknowledged), a number of private verbs, and a number of modals expressing possibility, necessity or volition. Whereas in the 1993 study the features were selected to fall on one factor, in the later study a three-factor solution is chosen; the factors are interpreted as “interaction”, “reasoning” and “narration”. Interjections have the highest factor loading on factor 1 “interaction”, other features contributing to this factor are pragmatic particles, direct questions, second-person pronouns, expressions of proximity, swearing and sensory perception verbs. A comparison of the importance of each factor for the individual texts shows that factor 1 is most salient in texts of the fictional genre. Closer scrutiny of the individual texts that score high on this factor (as well as texts that score high on the other factors) reveals the types and qualities of personal affect as well as stylistic features that could not be captured by a statistical analysis. However, no simple picture emerges as to “whether there are any salient features that tell various text types apart and reveal relevant genre conventions” (224). In the next step, the genres with the closest affinity to fiction with respect to the features that reflect personal affect (indicated by the factors of interaction and narration) are selected, i.e. history, biography, autobiography, diary and travelogue. A microanalysis of the linguistic features that are potential text-type markers (using t-tests and variance analysis; cf. chapter on corpus linguistics, this volume) shows that fiction and non-fiction indeed form two different groups and that interjections and expletives are the most important text-type markers of fiction. Thus, interjections and expletives can be used to tell fictional and non-fictional writing apart. The other significant features are: that-deletion, second-person pronouns, modals of volition and possibility, and deictic now. A manual grouping of the features suggests four different qualities of personal affect, all characteristic of early fiction: (i) “surge features in the form of emotional outbursts”, (ii) “an interactive dichotomy between self and other”, (iii) “indexical features of proximity”, and (iv) “boulomaic modality” (256). The uneven distribution of exclamations across the genres further shows the differences between fiction and non-fiction: the total number of occurrences in fic-

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tion is 94, the next frequent number of absolute occurrences in the adjoining genre of autobiography is only 7. The same distribution is found in the Late Middle English material of the Helsinki Corpus. Taavitsainen argues that this is due to the fact that a number of genre traditions were carried over from Late Middle to Early Modern English: the genre conventions of Late Middle English fabliaux, where interjections are especially frequent, for example, are continued in Early Modern English funny short stories like Merry Tales and Penny Merriments. Here “the characters represent the lower or middle layers of society and the speech quotations have the pretence of natural talk with colloquial idioms, oaths and swear words” (235). And Chaucer’s use of interjections to signal turning points in the plot is reflected in Early Modern English short fiction, where e.g. alas! and fye! are used in the same way. The signalling of turn-taking, which was a very prominent function of interjections in Late Middle English, is not attested in the 1997a material. This has to do with changes concerning the consumption of texts (cf. Taavitsainen 1995b). Based on material from the Late Middle English parts of the Helsinki Corpus and a selection of texts from the Canterbury Tales, Taavitsainen (1997b) provides an analysis of the uses of primary interjections (and a few other exclamations) in the different (sub)genres of the period. Again using Ameka’s (1992) classification as a starting point, Taavitsainen gives a survey of the functions of the different interjections in her material (a!, a ha!, ah!, al(l)as!, ey!, fy!, ha/haa!, harrow!, hey!, ho/hoo!, lo/loo!, o/oo!, tehee!, weylaway!, benedicitee!, gramercy!, pardee!, out!, what! and how!). The absolute occurrences of the different interjections indicate that some are restricted to certain genres (e.g. harrow!, which occurs only in fabliaux), while others have a broader distribution (e.g. fy!, which is attested in romances, fabliaux, fiction and drama). Following up on Taavitsainen (1997a), it is shown with the help of a t-test, that in Late Middle English, too, interjections act as a marker of the fictional mode. In texts of the non-literary genres, they perform a much narrower range of functions. Taavitsainen shows that in addition to Ameka’s (1992) functions of interjections (again, the phatic function is not attested), textual functions, such as signalling turn-taking, marking turning points in the plot and creating apprehension, foregrounding, segmenting and intensifying, as well as stylistic functions, turn out to be important in the written genres of the Late Middle English material. O/oo!, for example, is originally Latinate and solemn, and is transferred from translations of the Bible to other religious writings and then to contexts where it mocks imitation or parody. By contrast, harrow! is fabliau style and of French origin. Taavitsainen concludes with the remark that interjections are a strong tool to create reader involvement. In direct speech quotations they may be directed to other characters; in these uses they signal turning points in the plot and thus create apprehension in the reader. Secondly, interjections may be addressed to the reader as a way of “direct manipulation” (602).

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Secondary interjections11 and expletives are assessed in Taavitsainen (1997c), based on material from the Late Middle English sections of the Helsinki Corpus, as well as on additional texts from the Canterbury Tales and from Late Middle English drama. Taavitsainen establishes four different uses of secondary interjections; in both the literary and the non-literary subsections of her corpus, secondary interjections are used (i) in opening phrases, greetings, formula, (ii) in asseverations of truth, (iii) in pious wishes and in order to express man’s submission to divine guidance, and, finally, (iv) in oaths and in swearing. Although there is variation concerning frequency between the genres within the subsections (cf. below), on a very general level it can be said that the use of secondary interjections is “extended” in the literary genres of fiction and drama: in addition to the “normal” uses, there are, for example, greetings in the form of imprecations (e.g. God’s curse instead of God’s blessing); asseverations of truth can be expressed by mild swearing in all fictional genres (e.g. be the feythe of my body instead of for soothe), and pious wishes are sometimes reversed into cursings such as God lett you neuer the!. Secondary interjections in oaths and swearing are virtually restricted to the literary genres. They draw their effect from the contrast between religious/ sacred and secular/profane. The expressions used to swear range “from God, Christ, and the Holy Trinity, to the saints, beginning with the Virgin Mary and then going to those of lesser degree, and to the opposite pole with Mahound and the Devil” (820). In addition, in the Canterbury Tales the crucifixion is a central topic and parts of Christ’s body, the cross and the nails are sworn by (cf. also Hughes 1991). Taavitsainen shows that within the literary genres of fiction and drama there are significant differences concerning the use of oaths and swearing. The noblemen in courtly romances, for example, swear by classical references or invocations to pagan deities, and by Christian concepts only in their mild form. In fabliaux, swearing and oaths are frequent and “[e]ven the pious wishes at the end become mocking in tone […] and thus they can be associated with imprecations” (822). In drama, too, the use and function of interjections is varied. In some plays, the religious references vary according to the religion of the swearer: in Digby Plays Muslims swear by Mahound, whereas Christians swear by their saints and by God; the Jews in Ludus Coventriae swear by God and by Moyses. These differing references are used to condition audience reactions. Pagan characters swear by those whom they worship. For a Christian audience, for whom Mahound was equal to the devil, this “makes the characters appear even more cruel and merciless” (824). The frequent use of swearwords by Noah’s wife in The Towneley Cycle has a comical effect and makes the contrast between human and divine stand out. Thus “[s]wearwords […] are powerful means of conveying the emotional loading in texts and in participant relations, involving both text-internal characters and the audience” (815). Romantic prose is the focus of Taavitsainen (1998). By studying the personal affect feature “(primary) interjection” in such texts from different periods of Eng-

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lish, she establishes generic conventions for the use of interjections and shows how these conventions change diachronically. This “linguistic approach to generic conventions” is intended to “illuminate genre evolution at the concrete level” (195–196). Two of the three textual functions of interjection established in her earlier work on Chaucer (Taavitsainen 1995a), the highlighting function and the foregrounding function, remain fairly constant over the periods. In the Middle English romances (Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, The Life of St Katherine of Alexandria), in the Early Modern romances (Aphra Behn’s writings) and in the Gothic romances (Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho), interjections serve to highlight peaks in the plot and, together with other personal affect features, signal a strong emotive loading. In these texts – though not very commonly in Middle English – they are also used to foreground passages of the narration in order to create suspense and thus they direct the audience’s expectations. The turn-taking function is most prominent in Middle English, and was modified to some extent in the later periods. This, as shown by Taavitsainen (1995b), has to do with changes regarding the consumption of the texts. In the Gothic romances, turn-initial uses of interjections mostly mark a topic shift or a shift of the deictic centre. Reader involvement is another important function of interjections in the texts and Taavitsainen (1998) shows that interjections are used in various ways to direct the reaction of the audience. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, interjections are used with a new function that is not attested in any of the earlier texts. As a linguistic feature of emphatic language, interjections are characteristic of the genre of Gothic novel. Through exaggeration of that feature in Northanger Abbey, a parody of the Gothic novel from the same period, interjections come to be used as devices of character description, i.e. “characters of the novel are described by their varying use of affective language […] instead of routine reactions and typified instances of story-telling, interjections are used as projections of the emotional qualities and mental abilities of the characters” (214). Taavitsainen (1999) shows that personal affect is not only a good tool for defining genre styles, but that the personal affect features established in her earlier work (1993, 1997a), among them very prominently interjections, also reflect the fictional characters’ personalities in the Canterbury Tales. For each of the fictional characters discussed, the Knight, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath and the Miller, the character description in the General Prologue, the frame story and the tale itself is taken into account. A close qualitative analysis of the personal affect features in these passages reveals that the fictional characters’ personalities are indeed “formulated through their use of language” (231). Of all the personal affect features studied, interjections and swearing play perhaps the most important role in the characterisation of the Miller. In the General Prologue, the Miller is attributed physiognomic details that signify arrogance. In addition, he is described as a man with dubious moral standards, as reflected in the

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frame story, which contains instances of rude swearing. In the Miller’s Tale itself, interjections fulfil different functions: in accordance with their use in other texts of the fabliau genre, interjections mark turning points in the plot, together with other short elements they add to the pace of the story, and they mark the climax of the plot. In contrast to courtly romances, where emotive states of mind are described by interjections, interjections in the Miller’s Tale are used to mock these conventions. Rather than “describing emotive states of mind they depict stereotypical reactions to situations” (229). The interjections lo! – frequently used in sermons – and allas! – typical of romances – are also used ironically. Thus, a special kind of audience involvement is created though the use of interjections and other personal affect features. [These are] removed from their original meaning and used in a carnivalistic way in a condensed and typified form as signals to the audience. Readers are guided through the story, and are asked to pay attention to certain points, enjoy the apprehensions and sudden turning points of the plot and laugh at the characters. The Miller is in charge and controls the reader’s reactions, and he is extremely skilful in doing so. (Taavitsainen 1999: 231)

Sikorska (2000) focuses on the use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whanclauses in The Book of Margery Kempe. She analyses the occurrence of these linguistic items in the fragments of the book contained in the Helsinki Corpus and in the Meech and Allen (1993) edition, focusing on possible differences between the two types of narration contained in the book: hagiography and visionary writing. Her ultimate aim is “to show the relativity of linguistic structures assumed as oral or written” (391). A number of occurrences of a! and lo! are discussed in more detail. They occur mainly in direct speech quotations and Sikorska detects some of the functions established by Taavitsainen: In The Book of Margery Kempe interjections are used to mark turn-taking, they are focused on the speaker (emotive function) or on the addressee (vocative function). The uneven distribution of interjections in the two parts of the book – they are more frequent in the visionary revelation – is explained by the fact that dialogue constitutes the core of Kempe’s visionary experience: interjections “are a fundamental property of the ritualized dialogue of visionary revelation, which are based on the immediacy of experience and render that immediacy to the reader” (400–401). As interjections “suggest interpersonal features and high involvement”, they are used to compensate for “[t]he fact that the reader is not directly addressed in her book” (400). Thus, interjections, “although they belong to the textual level of the narrative, […] represent a convention, that is determined by the oral composition of the text” (401). Hiltunen (2006) studies primary interjections in Old English with a focus on their use in different genres. His analysis concentrates on those interjections that occur with sufficient frequency, i.e. more than ten times, in the Old English sec-

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tion of the Helsinki Corpus. These are eala!, efne!, hwæt! (the only secondary interjection), la! and wa!. Of the genres, homilies have the highest rate of occurrence (normalised frequencies), followed by philosophy, fiction, rules and verse; history has the lowest rate of occurrence. The genres also differ in which interjections they contain. Eala!, the most frequent form in the corpus, is attested in a broad range of texts, it is most often used in verse, fiction and homilies. The interjection efne!, a gloss to Latin ecce!, on the other hand, is far less frequent and mainly occurs in the Bible. The five interjections and their uses and functions are discussed in detail, showing that in Old English interjections mostly occur in direct discourse, i.e. in direct speech quotations and dialogue and that they fulfil a number of the functions established by Taavitsainen (1995b; 1997a) with reference to Ameka (1992), i.e. the emotive, the cognitive, the conative as well as a number of textual or discourse functions like signalling turn-taking or highlighting a particular topic. Eala!, for example, is very frequently used interactively, it “has a conative meaning by virtue of the expression including a reference to the addressee” (98–99). In poems, it is also used to introduce new topics. Its general function is to emphasise what is being said, sometimes it is repeated for emotional intensification. With reference to the Early Middle English section of the Helsinki Corpus and to Taavitsainen’s earlier work on interjections in Late Middle English and Early Modern English (1997b, 1995b), Hiltunen briefly refers to the development of his interjections in later periods. Though the contexts in which interjections are used remain similar, i.e. direct speech quotations, “[t]he most apparent change in Middle English is that the items themselves have changed or have been replaced entirely” (109). This is reflected by the fact that Taavitsainen’s (1997b) corpus searches yielded an entirely different set of expressions. Hiltunen argues that the emergence of new genres of imaginative writing in Middle English and Early Modern English, which increasingly draw on emotions and affective meanings, has also led to an increasing use of interjections. “However, it is the items and contexts that change; the basic functions of interjections persist. The roots of the uses and function of English interjections are already present in OE” (111). 5.2.

Other approaches

Person (2009) takes a conversation analytic approach to the use of oh! in Shakespeare. His study is one of few applications of conversation analysis to written data, and probably the first that looks at historical material from a conversation analytic perspective. Drawing on work on contemporary oh!, mainly by Heritage (1984, 1998, 2002), Person analyses 2,140 instances of the form as it is used in The First Folio and Early Quartos of William Shakespeare. He shows that the use of oh! exhibits a significant degree of continuity over the last 400 years: all the different uses of oh! as a change-of-state token that have been established in the above

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studies of oh! in contemporary English conversation are already present in Shakespeare’s works (reflecting the use of oh! in Elizabethan conversation). Person gives examples of extra-conversational uses of oh! to (i) mark change of topic or (ii) change of addressee; responsive uses of oh! prefacing either (iii) assessments following announcements of information or (iv) responses to repairs. In a number of uses, oh! asserts “superior epistemic authority” (95) in (v) responses to questions that challenge the presuppositions of the questions and in (vi) responses to assessments, where it signals prior independent and superior knowledge to what is said. Furthermore, (vii) oh! is used ironically in argumentative contexts, as in contemporary conversation (cf. Hutchby 2001). In addition to the above uses, Person establishes two previously unidentified uses of oh!, where it is likewise used to claim epistemic authority over the addressee: oh! prefacing (iix) responses to requests and (ix) responses to offers. These two uses are not explicitly discussed in contemporary studies although they seem to be present in contemporary conversation. This leads Person to argue that “the historical practices in literary discourse may provide some additional observations to the study of contemporary talk-in-interaction” (103).

6.

Concluding remarks

The historical pragmatic approach to language has considerably enhanced our knowledge of how interjections were used in earlier periods (mainly of English). Historical pragmatic studies of interjections have traced changes in the inventories and functions of interjections across genres and periods, and developments within certain domains of usage (swearing); they have provided different models of the evolution of primary interjections (moderated expletives) from secondary ones (taboo expletives); and they have pointed out the significance of interjections in historical texts for distinguishing different genres. Furthermore, they have shown how a historical pragmatic approach can even contribute to a better understanding of how interjections are used today. Most of the studies on interjections are corpus based, providing qualitative analyses, but some also apply corpus-statistical methods. A number of theoretical concepts and approaches have been found to be useful for historical pragmatic research on interjections; for example, speech-act theory, Ameka’s (1992) functional classification of interjections and, most recently, conversation analysis. With respect to conversation analysis, Person states: Although I certainly agree that the field of conversation analysis must be grounded first and foremost on observations of contemporary talk-in-interaction with the use of modern recording devices, in my opinion this does not completely exclude the use of other naturally occurring data, including literary discourse as institutional talk. This is certainly the case for any study of conversation that includes some historical interest. How-

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ever, those studies that incorporate written texts for the purpose of historical pragmatics must continue to engage closely with studies of contemporary talk-in-interaction. Therefore, I hope that this study demonstrates the fruitfulness of such an approach and encourages others to contribute to historical discussions of conversation, despite the limitations inherent to such work. (Person 2009: 104–105)

It has to be agreed with Person that future desiderata in the field include the further application of the above-mentioned approach(es) – and perhaps of others that have so far been restricted to synchronic applications – to historical data. Additionally, a larger number of studies on the topic would be desirable. Compared to discourse markers, on which by now a large body of research exists, interjections still appear somewhat neglected. Thus, many interjections and domains of usage of interjections, especially in languages other than English, remain to be investigated.

Notes 1 I would like to thank three anonymous referees for a number of very helpful comments and suggestions for improvement on an earlier version of this article. Financial support of the Sfb 447 at the Freie Universität Berlin is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Ameka (1992: 107) draws attention to the fact that, whereas interjections are a lexical/ grammatical class, discourse markers are a functional/pragmatic class. 3 Some scholars (e.g. Ameka 1992; Jespersen 1924; Fries 2002) argue that secondary interjections should be regarded as members of other word classes that are used as interjections. An example of the opposite view is Wierzbicka (1992: 165), who states that an interjection “is not homophonous with another lexical item whose meaning would be included in its own meaning (that is, in the meaning of the putative interjection)”. 4 Taavitsainen (1997c: 816) notes with reference to Ljung (1989: 187) that what ultimately determines how such utterances should be taken is the speaker’s intention. 5 On the differences between blasphemy and profanity cf. Allan and Burridge (1991: 37–38). 6 Nübling and Vogel’s (2004) contrastive study of swearwords in present-day Swedish, German and Dutch, however, indicates that the relation between taboos in a society and the expressions used in swearing is not as one-dimensional as suggested by the above view. The authors argue that the differences between the swearing inventories of the three languages are too significant to be explained with reference to taboo alone, but they acknowledge that a convincing explanation for the differences is yet to be given. 7 These were lead or clay tablets, inscribed with curses, that were customary in Ancient Greece and Rome, by which people performed malediction on someone else. The fact that curse tablets were excavated in vast numbers “suggests an extensive belief in the power of cursing” (Arnovick 1999: 84). 8 Apostrophe: “The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition” (American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. apostrophe). 9 “Having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck” (OED, s.v. apotropaic, a.).

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10 “In this paper […] I follow the use of Biber (1988) according to which the term genre applies to classification according to external evidence, and text types are groupings made according to internal linguistic features of texts” (Taavitsainen 1997a: 187). 11 Here, a broad definition of secondary interjections is assumed, which includes pious oaths as well as swearwords, and formulaic language use such as greetings.

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Swaen, A. E. H. 1898 Figures of Imprecation. Englische Studien 24: 16–71. Taavitsainen, Irma 1993 Genre/subgenre styles in Late Middle English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kyto and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), Early English in the Computer Age. Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus, 171–200. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1995a Narrative patterns of affect in four genres of the Canterbury Tales. The Chaucer Review 30.2: 191–210. Taavitsainen, Irma 1995b Interjections in Early Modern English. From imitation of spoken to conventions of written language. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 439–465. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma 1997a Genre conventions: Personal affect in fiction and non-fiction in Early Modern English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), English in Transition. Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles, 185–266. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1997b Exclamations in Late Middle English. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 573–607. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1997c By Saint Tanna: Pious oaths or swearing in Middle English? An assessment of genres. In: Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel (eds.), Language History and Linguistic Modelling. A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday, Vol. I: Language History, 815–826. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1998 Emphatic language and romantic prose: Changing functions of interjections in a sociocultural perspective. European Journal of English Studies 2.2: 195–214. Taavitsainen, Irma 1999 Personality and styles of affect in the Canterbury Tales. In: Geoffrey Lester (ed.), Chaucer in Perspective. Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, 218–234. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Thelwall, Mike 2009 Fk yea I swear: Cursing and gender in MySpace. Corpora 3.1: 83–108. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1989 On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65.1: 31–55. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995 Subjectification in grammaticalization. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1997 Subjectification and the development of epistemic meaning: The case of promise and threaten. In: Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), Modality in

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Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, 185–210. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth C., and Richard B. Dasher 2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Beatrice 1963 Decline and fall of interjections. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 64: 356–372. Wierzbicka, Anna 1986 A Semantic metalanguage for the description and comparison of illocutionary meanings. Journal of Pragmatics 10.1: 67–107. Wierzbicka, Anna 1991 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, Anna 1992 The semantics of interjections. Journal of Pragmatics 18.2/3: 159–192. Wilkins, David P. 1992 Interjections as deictics. Journal of Pragmatics 18.2/3: 119–158. Woolf, Rosemay 1968 English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wundt, Wilhelm 1900 Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythos und Sitte. Erstes Buch: Die Sprache. Leipzig: Engelmann.

12.

Terms of address Gabriella Mazzon

1.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the main developments in, and results of, the historical study of forms of address, i.e. forms like English you, Dr Smith, mommy, my liege, dear cousin, my darling, vile rogue and so on, used to signal that a stretch of speech is addressed to one or more specific interlocutors. This kind of study started earlier than the actual formalisation of historical pragmatics as a discipline, and the forerunners will be referred to here. As concerns the forms that will be looked at, it was decided to start with pronouns; these are not univocally considered terms of address proper, but many studies mentioned below indicate that pronouns are at least as indicative of the pragmatic elements conveyed by address as other terms. In fact, it will be seen that pronouns and terms of address both convey relationships between interlocutors, but the ways in which they do so do not overlap. While section 2 of the chapter outlines some methodological developments in research, section 3 deals with the development of different pronouns of address. The discussion exemplifies the most widespread processes that have led to changes in pronominal address, drawing mainly on research carried out on English – however, other languages will also be mentioned, and their address systems compared and contrasted with those of English. Subsections 3.1 and 3.2 survey two main aspects of situations in which there is more than one pronoun of address for a single interlocutor, i.e. respectively, the variables that determine the choice between these pronouns and the phenomenon of changing or “switching” pronouns with a single addressee. Both aspects have been widely investigated for English, and hypotheses have been put forth, in spite of the limitations and inconsistencies in the evidence, problems which are not only confined to the written registers but also found in textual transmission. Section 4 is devoted to comments on terms of address proper (i.e. nominal and phrasal terms) and on the way they interact with pronouns; again, some of the results of research in this field will be reviewed, mainly from studies on English.

2.

Review of research

Research on historical pragmatics has always looked at terms of address as one of the loci of language use in which interactive dynamics emerges most clearly. This was the consequence of the application of sociolinguistic theories to the study of

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documents from the past, especially in relation to English historical linguistics. Similar to what was done on modern languages following Ervin-Tripp (1972, 1986) and other sociolinguists and anthropologists (e.g. Friedrich 1986; Hymes 1986), scholars started to look at forms of address in older documents, both to trace changes over time and to acquire insight into how such language uses encoded socially determined uses. Besides the intrinsic interest of systems of address, these studies were spurred on by two factors: i) the existence of previous research in this field, especially on literary documents, and ii) the development of computerised corpora of texts. As concerns the first factor, the use of pronouns and terms of address has been studied by several philologists and literary critics, particularly in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and other early literary works (e.g. Kennedy 1915; Stidston 1917; Abbott 1925; Byrne 1936; Finkenstaedt 1963; Salmon 1967). Although these studies mostly antedate (historical) sociolinguistics and (historical) pragmatics, they formed an important basis for further research; they often analyse address qualitatively, and consider it as a key to interpreting social and “affective” relations between characters (early quantitative studies are Bock 1938; Johnson 1959 and 1966; and Mitchell 1971). Through these contributions, we acquired a first inventory of terms of insult, endearment, deference, and mocking, terms which were used according to specific social roles and categories, and which had increased or decreased in frequency over time. We also gained insight into the distribution of thou and you, and into the fact that it was not only the social rank of characters, but also the context and tone of the exchange, the emotions involved and the communicative intentions that determined the choice of pronouns. The following sections of this chapter trace the ensuing developments of research in this field, without forgetting that these pre-theoretical studies were in many ways ground-breaking and are still important references. The second factor that boosted these studies, as it did for many other strands of historical linguistics, was the compilation and circulation of computerised corpora. Pronouns and (some) terms of address have shown, over time, relatively little formal change, and are thus items that are easy to search for automatically:1 a wider quantitative basis could thus be added to studies (Bock 1938 is, as mentioned, one of the few wide-scope quantitative works in the pre-computer era). More importantly, corpus studies highlighted differences between text types, and enabled scholars to assess more precisely the incidence of literariness, e.g. of declamatory styles or of metrical constraints. The availability of wider and more diverse samples, such as corpora of dialogues, of correspondence, of early scientific texts, etc., allowed research to expand and to respond to the deeply felt objection that literary texts were not necessarily the only, or the best, source for many types of research on historical linguistics. Therefore, diachronic studies on address widened to include other texts that, although still following written language conventions, could be considered more reliable sources for the study of dialogue than literature

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because they depict interaction between real people, not fictive characters. Drama and fictional works were still objects of investigation, but they could be compared with trial records, non-fictional prose, and correspondence, and although they are less prototypically dialogic text types, the results they yielded, showing a partly different picture than that gleaned from the analysis of literary texts, are highly relevant. Recent work on dialogue often integrates, or at least takes into account, these different results, since they all contribute to forming a wider picture. A decisive development came two decades ago with the first applications of politeness theory to the study of older texts (e.g. Wales 1983; Brown and Gilman 1989). These contributions included forms of address in their evidence, interpreting them in terms of strategies of positive or negative politeness, i.e. either boosting the interlocutor’s social image or avoiding imposition. An alternative view is provided by Watts (1989, 1999, 2003), who distinguishes between “polite” and “politic” behaviour, i.e. language choices that tend to either reproduce the social status quo or deviate from it, according to the main general attitudes of volition (conscious, determined or “marked” choice) and discernment (acknowledgement of the “rules” of interaction considered acceptable): the latter tends to prevail in cultures where interaction is rigidly codified, e.g. in Japan (Ide 1989; Matsumoto 1989). Despite criticism (Calvo 1992; Kopytko 1993, 1998) invoking a less taxonomic and more flexible framework, studies within politeness theory continued, flanked and integrated by sociohistorical studies that tried to frame terms of address within an image of social structure (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003) or, more recently, within social network analysis. The present decade has seen the systematisation of studies within these frameworks through the publication of important contributions in which the coming to maturity of such studies was shown (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2003). Also important is the development of dialogue studies (Walker 2007; Culpeper and Kytö 2010; Mazzon 2009), which emphasise the sequentiality of exchanges and the dynamics of power and relationships, and show how these factors, and their linguistic indicators, are negotiated during the exchange rather than given on the basis of fixed categories only. Studies in interactional sociolinguistics, relevance theory, and cognitive science have investigated these dynamic processes in contemporary dialogue, both constructed (Spitz 2005) and spontaneous, and have revealed that the relative salience of different factors of interlocutor stance, as well as elements of audience design and speaker self-perception, has a considerable influence on pragmatically “sensitive” language items such as terms of address. This holds also for text types that are not fictional but not dialogic either, e.g. letters, in which issues of politeness do not seem to take precedence over the marking of stance and relation (Nevala 2004: 2150). In spite of the obvious differences in the quality of evidence in terms of register and text type, and of the overall bias of samples in terms of representation of gender and social strata, and besides the problems created by the inconsistencies

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and limitations in the material transmission of older texts and by the arbitrariness of many choices in early editions, this line of research is already yielding interesting results, which will be reviewed in the next sections. 3.

Pronouns of address

Sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies on the development of pronouns of address have been prompted by the fact that many languages tend to introduce several pronouns for singular address, to indicate different relationships between interlocutors. When there is more than one pronoun of address, the choice between them is therefore determined by extra-linguistic factors; initially, these were held to be essentially sociolinguistic, but the advancement of studies has shown that pragmatic factors also play a role, especially in relation to the phenomenon of pronoun switching, which will be dealt with in subsection 3.2. The system of pronouns in many European languages developed historically from a single pronoun for the address of one interlocutor to a two-term situation in which another form was selected as a pronoun of address signalling formality, distance or deference. This development started already in late Latin, where vos started to be used along with tu. This directly influenced the Romance languages and, more indirectly, all the societies where Latin was known and was a model at least for high language registers, in other words the whole of Europe. At this point, speakers have to decide, during each exchange, whether to use the formal or the informal pronoun. The system often crystallises in this phase for a long time, especially if sociolinguistic factors contribute to stabilising it, for instance standardisation processes or unchanging categorisation of socio-economic structures. The two-term system is the most widespread in European languages (the common abbreviation used in the specialised literature, T/V, reflects the Latin usage and the French opposition tu/vous, but many other languages have similar systems), but there are cases in which more pronouns developed, conveying different levels of formality and/or degrees of intimacy, especially among non-European languages but also, at some time in their history, in German, in Spanish, and in Slavonic languages (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2003: 1–2; Walker 2007: 61–62). However, the stage in which more than two pronouns were involved seems to have been only transitional in most of Europe (e.g. in Czech in the seventeenth century; Betsch 2003: 142), probably due to uncertainty about appropriate social codes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age. As concerns the origin of such forms, deferential pronouns tend to be chosen through mechanisms such as: i)

extension to singular use of a plural second-person pronoun, as in the case of French vous, English you, older and regional Italian voi, older and Latin American Spanish vos. This use is often hypothesised as originating from

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the use of pluralis majestatis, first employed in addressing kings in the early Middle Ages (i.e. from the split in the Roman Empire which resulted in the existence of two emperors at the same time) and continuing into the modern era; the same extension happened in Swedish, Russian, Finnish (Fernández-Conde 2007: 82) and in some non-European languages (for examples, and for some alternative explanations of this extension, see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2003: 4–5); exaptation or “recycling” (Lass 1990) of a third-person form in the feminine or in the plural, as in German Sie and modern Italian Lei, possibly because of the connection that indirectness seems to have with higher levels of politeness, and therefore as an alternative to direct address. It is often the case that third-person reference is employed for second-person address “of respect” (for these processes in Polish and Portuguese see Braun 1988: 25–26, 78–79); modification or contraction of honorific terms of respect and deference, as in Modern Spanish Usted derived from vuestra merced ‘your grace’, but also in Czech vasˇnost from vasˇe Milost also meaning ‘your grace’ (Betsch 2003: 137), as well as in Dutch and in Polish.

These origins show that new uses tend to develop to indicate higher, rather than lower, degrees of formality: a community seems to start feeling the need for a new pronoun to address especially “high” or “important” interlocutors, to have a linguistic tool through which to show extra respect, and not, for instance, extra intimacy or extra affection. This indicates that T/V systems originate in formal and/or public speech events, rather than in private ones, which in turn seems to be confirmed by the fact that courtly genres show a higher proportion of V pronouns (Fernández-Conde 2007: 93–94); for the “highest” type of address, i.e. that of divine entities, see note 5 below. Once they have been introduced, these uses spread to more and more interlocutors, contexts and speech events, often corresponding to social changes that create uncertainty as to the expression of power and of the relation between interlocutors – which typically happened in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance period in many European countries.2 Whereas in some languages this system stabilised from that time onwards, and in others it was changed by the introduction of new forms, in English, by the beginning of modern times, the cycle was complete in the standard, which went back to using one pronoun for single address, derived from the old plural. In German, the situation was complicated by the fact that the first pronoun of formal address that was introduced, ihr, from the second-person plural, was superseded by Sie in the sixteenth century.3 The same happened in Italian, with voi and more recently Lei, and similar developments can be traced for some Slavonic languages (Betsch 2003). Old Spanish introduced a plural “of respect”, used to address women and high-status characters in works like the Cid;

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this form generalised even more quickly than you, so that by the fifteenth century it was no longer considered respectful (Penny 2002: 137–138). Sixteenth-century Spanish developed other forms, which Bentivoglio (2003: 178) puts on a four-term scale of formality. The same holds for Finnish, where several forms are still in use today, though marginally (Seppänen 2003), as the singular emerged as predominant. In Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish and Norwegian, singular du was flanked, from the Middle Ages onwards, by ni and I respectively, which later became very marginal, but have not disappeared completely, and compete with thirdperson forms used for “high respect”; in Swedish, ni has been retained in some varieties, and is even partially re-emerging in the standard (Bandle et al. 2005: 1333–1335, 1595; Clyne et al. 2006: 291–312). Contrary to changes in other aspects of language, the use of pronouns of address is more directly influenced by extra-linguistic elements, and therefore it can be assumed that the different rates of change should not be attributed to typological differences or other internal reasons, but to the sociolinguistics of the community and to the salience of pronominal address in the speaker’s perception of the “rules” for encoding interactional dynamics. Therefore, a greater understanding of the reasons for the earlier disappearance from English of the T/V system at the expense of T would probably be gained by using the frameworks of relevance theory and sociopragmatics, and the more recent studies are starting to explore these new paths. Calvo (1992: 8) argues that if solidarity factors had been paramount, then T would have spread to more and more contexts over V, as in other languages where the T form has gained ground. But, on the contrary, English seems to have preferred highlighting the encoding of power, as shown by the abundance of asymmetric T/V exchanges in historical evidence (Leith 1997: 105–106). However, other motivations for the demise of T have been proposed, such as, for literary texts, metrical and euphonic concerns to do with the association of T with verb endings that have the heavy consonant cluster -st (Salmon 1967: 67); for similar motivations for the spread of vous in Middle French see the quotations in Hunt (2003: 49). Alternatively, Simon (2003: 100–103) explains the modern rationale of German pronoun use on grammatical grounds. Although pronouns are then selected on a sociolinguistic basis, the same interaction between grammar and sociopragmatics is relevant to studies of honorifics in Japanese. For remarks on the grammatical factors in T/V choice in Early Modern English see U. Busse (2002). Apart from the acceleration in the demise of the two-term system in the standard and in many other varieties, another peculiarity that makes English address pronouns so interesting for historical pragmatics is the fact that for the whole time-span during which the language did have two pronouns for singular address these showed the property of retractability, i.e. a speaker could employ either of the two pronouns with the same interlocutor, often “switching” pronouns within the same turn. This feature is not common in modern languages,4 and it is highly significant from a pragmatic point of view; therefore, it will be discussed further in subsection 3.2.

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The very first examples of V pronoun use in English have rarely been investigated in depth. They start to emerge in written documents more or less in the thirteenth century, along with the previously “universal” T (Kennedy 1915; Byrne 1936). Similar developments are seen in other European languages at the same or a slightly different time (for French see Mason 1982: 66; and Ayres-Bennett 1996; for Spanish see Moreno 2002: 15–16; for Italian see De Ventura 2007: 188; for Czech, where the plural only started to spread in the fifteenth century, see Betsch 2003: 129–131). Cases of singular V increase steadily in number over the next three centuries according to a sociolinguistic mechanism aptly captured by Strang (1970: 139): “in all cases of doubt one would rather be polite than risk giving offence, and every precedent widens the range of cases of doubt”, and later defined as “hunger for reverence” by Burnley (2003: 33). Again, this is a powerful process but not a universal one: some languages show uses of plural address to individuals that remain occasional, and do not generalise with a steady progression, e.g. Arabic (Braun 1988: 177). By the end of the sixteenth century, English T forms were declining as they had started to be considered offensive (a similar development is attested for Renaissance French, as treatises of the time suggest; Williams 1992: 91; G. Stein 1997: 348–350, 364, 463), while the old subject form ye was replaced by the non-subject form you, for reasons that seem to be both formal and sociolinguistic (Lutz 1998; Mausch 1992–1993; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). As with many other phenomena, this decline concerns the standard but not dialects, where T forms often survived longer, and to some extent still remain (Trudgill and Chambers 1991). The first studies based on modern sociolinguistics and pragmatics concentrated on Shakespeare’s plays, since these constitute a corpus which, if taken together, is quite extensive and portrays various characters and situations. In practice, however, most early studies dealt with only a few plays, representing specific social milieus and/or styles (e.g. McIntosh 1963; Mulholland 1967; Barber 1981). The corpus seemed a good starting point despite being mostly in verse, which could have an effect on the forms chosen, and despite the high degree of variation it shows, even between editions of the same play; in fact, the Shakespearian corpus is still one of the most frequent objects of study (e.g. Bruti 2000; U. Busse 2003; Mazzon 2003; D. Stein 2003; B. Busse 2006; Freedman 2007) within a sociolinguistic or pragmatic framework. Other, comparable textual sources have received less attention till recently: Walker (2007) and, in part, U. Busse (2002) show the decline of T forms in drama after Shakespeare’s time; and Mullini (2005), Fernández-Conde (2007) and Mazzon (2009) analyse address in cycle plays, i.e. texts from an earlier time than Shakespeare’s. Fictional dialogue also occurs in other text types and this has led to studies on other Middle English works, especially the Canterbury Tales, which also display various characters and styles; Paulik Sampson (1979) was a precursor of such studies (along with Kerkhof 1966) and tried to find a systematic connection between the social class of characters and

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pronoun usage, allowing special consideration for pragmatically “marked” situations such as requests or ironic statements, and for pronoun switching. This study was followed by many others (Mazzon 2000; Burnley 2003; Honegger 2003; Jucker 2006; see also contributions by Pakkala-Weckström, U. Busse and B. Busse, and Nevala in this volume), where more recent frameworks are employed. Some recent attempts concern Old English, for which the most promising contexts are found in sermons, saints’ lives and complaints. (Chapman 2008). Many of these studies started with the general assumptions acquired from previous research, i.e. that V spread from the upper-middle ranks of society downwards, thus tending to exclude the very high ranks (kings and deities), who still received T of “high deference”, often associated with declamatory style (e.g. in invocations).5 The parameters of distance–intimacy, and power–solidarity, introduced in politeness theory (Brown and Gilman 1960; Wales 1983; Brown and Levinson 1987), were then applied to create sociopragmatic diagrams of character interaction through pronoun use. Although pronominal forms were excluded from the first studies on politeness strategies in drama as not being particularly relevant, subsequent research has highlighted the fact that pronoun choices are quite significant pragmatically (Calvo 1992: 7). The main problem in these studies lies with the degree of systematicity and regularity of pronoun choices. Quantitative analyses do indicate clear trends, with T and V pronouns often associated with specific relationship types, but the number of “exceptions” is always very high. This has led scholars to define the correlations as far as possible, and then try to assign the exceptions to various contextual factors (formality of the situation, stylistic issues, affective elements) or else to dismiss them, attributing them to the instability of the system. Such factors cannot be ruled out, and still others have to be considered, for instance the correlation between pronouns and terms of address, which is briefly reviewed in section 4. Objections on the grounds of reliability of results are often related to the type of texts in the sample – literariness can be accused of leading to either “biased” choices, due to the desire to “hyper-mark” some dialogues for formality or informality, or to lack of consistency, in the same way as “stage dialect” cannot be considered a reliable source for historical dialectology. These objections do not seem insurmountable since, independently from any notion of realism, writers tend to use forms in such a way that their audiences can make the correct inferences, e.g. concerning relations between characters. In spite of their conventionality, literary texts are based on the linguistic competence of the speech community to which writer and audience belong, although they are not comparable to transcripts of spontaneous speech. Pronouns and terms of address were perceived as sensitive areas of language behaviour, as revealed by the fact that they were the object of explicit comments in Elizabethan times, when deep changes in the social structure made socially salient language behaviour even more important, and when language use started to be codified (Williams 1992: 85). Given the importance of this marker, it is not likely

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that it would be employed haphazardly by authors (D. Stein 2003: 254; similar remarks have been offered for earlier literary German, e.g. by Ehrismann 1995). The examination of non-literary texts, as mentioned, yielded data which sometimes are in contrast with results of studies on literature. Hope (1993, 1998) investigated address in Early Modern English trial records and found confirmation of some results (which did not, however, hold for depositions), including strategic pronoun switching, but also (similar to the later work by Walker 2007) a frequency of T and of switching much lower than that found in literature, as mentioned below. Similar results were obtained by Nevala (2003, 2004) and Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) when studying Early Modern English correspondence. These results are even more significant since, going back further in time to analyse the late Middle English Paston Letters, Bergs (2005: 130–131) found only a few cases of T. Some further differences are now being established, for instance between trial records and depositions (Walker 2000, 2003, 2007), among other types of courtroom discourse (Brownlees 2005: 177), and between different types of letters. For instance, depositions tend to more frequently depict contexts of high emotional involvement and in such cases many other factors seem to be overridden. Whether this, or the high frequency of fixed formulae, is more responsible for the approximately 32 per cent overall difference in frequency of T between trial records and depositions is still a moot question (Walker 2007: 289–290). Less direct sources include prose works such as treatises and handbooks, which contain instances of constructed dialogue that can, nevertheless, be useful. One interesting case is that of language textbooks, which were often based on dialogues to be repeated and learnt (Watts 1999); courtesy and letter-writing manuals can also be interesting sources of information about how different forms of address were perceived as appropriate in various situations, especially since they show that there were differences between public and private contexts of addressing. 3.1.

Variables in the distribution of pronouns

Early studies already showed that T very soon tended to be pushed to the ends of the sociopragmatic scale to signal the inferior status of the interlocutor and thus potential face-threatening speech, or to signal intimacy and affection; the latter seems to happen in French even earlier than in English, as shown by asymmetries in translated texts where French originals show uses of V between peers, which are then translated using T in English versions (see Mason 1982: 66, 74 and discussion in Hunt 2003: 48–50).6 The choice between T and V in drama has also been interpreted in terms of markedness, i.e. of being marked/unmarked with regards to the general picture that emerges from the sociolinguistic analysis. Social factors would thus account for the basic distribution of the pronouns, with local choices made on the basis of micro-contextual factors.7 As for the diachrony of uses, studies on the Canterbury Tales show that T forms still predominate over V forms used for sin-

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gular address (Mazzon 2000: 136), but the latter are already used very frequently. Burnley (2003: 29) establishes a taxonomy for the choice of T or V on the basis of text genre,8 familiarity of addressee, and other character-related parameters such as age and status. The relation between stable features regulating uses and the negotiation generating marked uses on the micro-level remains largely unexplored even if unmarked options can generally be established; the difficulty of setting clear boundaries between the two types of elements is often quoted, even in synchronic studies (for instance, see Oliveira 2005 on Portuguese). More recent dialogue analysis suggests that there are specific types of sequences in which the strategic use of address emerges more clearly; this has to do with the expression of agreement or disagreement, for instance in Mullini (2005) and Mazzon (2009), where cooperative or conflictive stance is shown through several linguistic indicators. This leads to a reduction in the weight of the relatively fixed element of social status and, conversely, to an increase in the importance of the more flexible and interactionally defined social roles, which can vary in moments when the relationship balance changes (Jucker 2000b: 158 and 2006). These seem to be also the favourite loci for pronoun switching, which is dealt with in the next subsection. The last two decades of research have shown that there are patterns; analyses were often focussed on linguistic domains or types of relationships in literary texts portraying dialogues, and revealed clear tendencies. In English drama, for instance, wives tend to use V to husbands from a rather early date (Mazzon 2000; U. Busse 2003); this is often said to be a typical asymmetric relationship, with husbands using T to wives to mark their own superior status. Yet this tendency is less prominent than that shown by the wives’ behaviour, and its consistency much lower (U. Busse 2003: 201). On the other hand, there seems to be a tendency for men (both fictional characters and “real” people, e.g. in depositions) to generally use more T, in all contexts. These results can also be compared with results from comedy, where V is found to be used reciprocally between spouses (Walker 2007: 291–292). Conversely, there is evidence for a rather high use of V from husbands to wives in Middle French (Ayres-Bennett 1996: 26), which not only further shows the cultural relativism of these “rules”, but also confirms the difference between medieval French and English. Older Spanish also shows a higher degree of symmetry and reciprocity, not only between spouses but also in other relations (Moreno 2002: 25–27). Greater consistency is found in address between parents and children, which is more asymmetric, conveying a hierarchical view of the family (D. Stein 2003: 255; Fernández-Conde 2007: 89), although with adult offspring the markers of the relationship become more symmetrical (Brown and Gilman 1989: 177). Between friends and peers, address pronouns are quite variable from the early stages of the two-term system, as this is the area of highest tentativeness, where issues of class, age and gender interact with the micro-context and the type of

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speech activity involved, not to mention the fact that pronouns can be argued to convey in- or out-group identity rather than status as such (Calvo 1992; Mazzon 2003: 232–234). Among the most typically sensitive social factors, gender seems to be prominent, because formal V is used more by women between themselves in many contexts (Calvo 1992: 10), and because women receive more V in most contexts, e.g. mothers receive it more than fathers (Mazzon 2000: 142). The same results were found by Walker (2003) in various text types, although later investigations revealed a sharp contrast between these text types, for instance in depositions rank seems to determine pronoun choices much more heavily than other factors, including affective ones (Walker 2007: 166–169). Conversely, women, even those belonging to high classes, seem to use more informal pronouns in Scandinavian languages, even at a time when formal pronouns were quite widespread among the upper classes (Bandle et al. 2005: 1888). Status, though not paramount, is important, as shown by the fact that there is a strong tendency towards the use of T with servants, although there is high variability, e.g. in Renaissance Spanish, where different pronouns could be used with different connotations according to the context (Moreno 2002: 34–45). Similarly, in seventeenth-century German drama, lower-class characters seem neither to receive nor employ the “higher” Sie, but only the lower and middle forms du and ihr (Young and Gloning 2004: 231). Of course, this general picture is also complicated by stylistic factors: T correlates quite regularly with invocation (and therefore tends to be more persistent in tragedies; see U. Busse 2002: 49–52) and other “rhetorical” contexts, such as asides, address of abstract entities or absent characters, vocatives in courtship, and insults. The former two cases are particularly interesting for the study of pronouns in relation to politeness theory; while courtship, especially in the Middle Ages, is a context in which deference to the “lady” is expected, although in interplay with a certain intimacy (Mazzon 2000: 140), and insults are obvious cases where the intention to demean the addressee’s status is prominent, asides and address of absent characters show situations in which the status of the addressee is not so much denied as suspended. This means that the physical absence of the interlocutor entails a “licence” for the speaker to ignore conventions in address: there is no “face” to be preserved. In the same way as abstract entities (nature, world, moon, etc.) and objects (heart, dagger, etc.) are invariably addressed with T (Yang 1991), so also interlocutors who are not present do not need to be addressed respectfully (Mazzon 2000: 138–139). This phenomenon is responsible for a number of pronoun switches; the cases in which the speaker feels that it is possible to dispense with respectful address include the addressing of interlocutors who are dead, mad or even only asleep, i.e. all cases of what has elsewhere been called “social absence” (Mazzon 2002). In all these cases, the addressee is somehow not his/her “usual self”, i.e. not a vigilant member of a social group whose face needs to be taken into account. Other contexts for pronoun switching that seem determined by stylistic reasons are

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points at which dramatic intensity is high, for instance when the true identity of a character is revealed, a choice that is the object of meta-comments already in the Middle Ages, e.g. by Dante Alighieri (De Ventura 2007: 190–194). 3.2.

Pronoun switching

The feature of pronoun retractability, as mentioned, is dealt with quite frequently even in early studies on Middle English and Early Modern English, in connection with analyses of affective factors in dramatic dialogue. Most cases of pronoun switching in T/V languages are explicit, conscious, and determined by changes in the relationship between interlocutors that are acknowledged on both sides – usually this is a transition from the formal to the intimate pronoun with the progressing of acquaintance. There can be, of course, many shifts in interaction between strangers, when feelings about which pronoun is appropriate do not coincide, and one interlocutor accommodates the other’s perception of the degree of formality required. In Late Middle English and Early Modern English documents, pronoun switching appears to be a common practice, regulated primarily by pragmatic, more than social, factors. Although this practice is not unknown in old documents in other languages, its role seems to have been neglected by earlier research, and traditional handbooks, as well as some more recent publications, often simply report that the pronouns were “freely interchangeable” or the like (for French, see Hunt 2003: 48 and references, as well as Ayres-Bennett 1996: 54; for German, see Simon 2003: 93 and references). Therefore, the rest of this subsection will focus on the situation of English The switch from T to V seems triggered by situations in which the speaker tries to distance him/herself from the interlocutor, or to emphasise (seriously or ironically) the formality of the exchange; conversely, a switch to T can mark a reduction of distance, either in conflict or in intimacy contexts, and is therefore a feature commonly accompanying face-threatening acts. Depending on the starting point in the exchange or on the relation between the interlocutors, therefore, pronoun switching can represent different sociopragmatic values, and often occurs repeatedly within the same stretch of dialogue or turn of discourse, seemingly following changes in cooperative–conflictive orientation. The gap that separates us from the text takes, however, a high toll here, since many switches remain unexplained in all the analyses that have been carried out (e.g. Barber 1981; Mazzon 1992), which are, necessarily, qualitative and micropragmatic (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2003: 14). Burnley (2003: 41; italics added) tries to classify the phenomenon: “Rhetorical switching may be associated with role-playing, affective switching with temporary shifts in interpersonal attitudes and genre shifting with quoted speech or intertexual reference within a discourse”. The problem, again, may be related to switching being examined and assessed as deviation from a “norm”, but this, as we saw, is

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very hard to establish for any time between the Middle Ages and the modern era. This difficulty of placing early English T/V pronouns on a clear hierarchy is what makes the case of English particularly interesting (Braun 1988: 39). There are specific speech acts and interactional attitudes that trigger switches in a certain direction. Some hypotheses have been put forth elsewhere (Mazzon 2000: 155) and it was found that strongly deontic utterances featuring modal forms such as shall (formerly conveying a strong sense of obligation) in the Canterbury Tales correlated with use of T to stress dominance over the addressee. Some hints at genre-determined shifting are those traced by Bentivoglio (2003: 184) in an analysis of sixteenth-century Spanish correspondence, in which pronoun switching seems triggered by specific contextual elements such as salutation formulae, besides the affective switching employed to express tenderness between family members. But, mostly, switching is connected with facework, especially micro-switching of a rather transitional character. This strategic use of switching is found especially in literary texts: already in the Canterbury Tales, for instance in the Summoner’s Tale (Mazzon 2000: 161–163) and in the Knight’s Tale (Honegger 2003: 65–67), and, later, in Shakespeare, for instance in Othello (Mazzon 2003: 236–237; D. Stein 2003: 268–270). Similar dynamics of switching to highlight the progression of the relation between two characters in a Middle French religious play are described by Hunt (2003: 51–56). In short, the main aspects that trigger switching towards T are: display of affection, as in the case of Joseph and Mary in the York Plays (Fernández-Conde 2007: 90–91), and quarrelling, as in the dialogues between Noah and his wife in the Towneley Plays (Mullini 2005: 166). Contrarily, requests often entail an elevation of the interlocutor, which sometimes borders on flattery and therefore can trigger switching to Y (for examples from the York Plays see Fernández-Conde 2007: 85–89).

4.

Nominal and phrasal address

Studies on terms of address that apply pragmatic frameworks to old documents also date back to the beginning of historical pragmatics; in this case, topics of interest are the sociopragmatic values of terms and their shifts over time, as well as structural and semantic elements. Like other sensitive items, terms of address are often subject to reduction and/or grammaticalisation into pronouns (Simon 2003), e.g. madam < ma dame ‘my lady’, Romanian dumneata < domnia ta ‘your lordship’, or Dutch U < Uwe Edelheid ‘your grace’ (Braun 1988: 60–61), and the above mentioned Spanish Usted. They also undergo bleaching and generalisation or weakening of meaning at a rather fast pace, when not pejoration (e.g. lady from respectful to generic, sirrah from generic to demeaning, dame from respectful to demeaning/ironic; Salmon 1967: 63). Terms of address tend to be nouns or noun

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phrases of different lengths; their inventory changes in size and typology over time within a language, besides varying widely across languages (Braun 1988; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2003: 2). They are pragmatically important, especially in languages that do not express sociopragmatic values through pronouns, for instance ancient Greek (Dickey 1997) or modern English. Such terms often have a separate tone unit, and relate both to social elements (as in the case of titles, professional terms and kinship terms) and to pragmatic elements, as in the case of terms of endearment or insults. This tends to occur particularly in their function as vocatives (i.e. address forms used in invocation or in opening an utterance, to select the addressees and attract their attention, therefore with mainly phatic functions), a category that is considered a subset of address, and that involves, in many languages, the use of a specific case marking or other structural properties (Hill 2007). Research on English has traced the introduction, changes and obsolescence of many terms of address; for instance, goodman was widely employed for yeomen in the Middle Ages, then came to indicate people of inferior status in Elizabethan times (Salmon 1967: 53), when master and sir became widespread for addressing men of higher status, and were later generalised (Williams 1992: 84–85). A considerable amount of research concerns sir, originally a highly deferential title connected with sire, and used in this way in Chaucer (Mazzon 2000: 149). Although in the Renaissance it was still mainly used to address gentlemen (Salmon 1967: 52), in Shakespeare sir is employed also in ways that are not deferential (Brown and Gilman 1989: 189), and it can even be challenging, downgrading or offensive in post-Elizabethan English (Williams 1992: 86; Brownlees 2005: 181–182), depending on the context and on the interlocutor.9 The issue of which title to use to address a stranger without causing offence is often commented on and mentioned explicitly, also in literary texts, since addressing seems to have been a vital aspect of social skills at that time (Nevala 2003: 162). The addressing of strangers is particularly sensitive because, through the first address formula, one “places” the interlocutor with respect to the self: some cultures tend to stress the solidarity end of the scale by using a term equivalent to ‘friend’ (Braun 1988: 254), and this tendency can be so strong as to override other factors, even kinship (on the use of vriunt in this way in Old High German, see Jones 1990: 97). Another strategy is the use of kinship terms for interlocutors who are not related: many cultures employ equivalents of ‘father’ or ‘mother’ for elderly interlocutors, often indicating respect for their age, or loosely use terms like ‘brother’ or ‘cousin’ to stress solidarity (Salmon 1967: 50; Mazzon 2000: 150; for Middle High German, see Jones 1990; Braun 1988: 279).10 Other cultures prefer deference terms, stressing specific aspects of the interlocutor’s appearance, as in the use of ‘teacher’ to apparently educated interlocutors in Arabic (Braun 1988: 281). Contrary to what happens with pronouns, where usually the newly introduced form indicates higher deference, this is not necessarily the case with terms of address (for evidence in ancient Greek, see Dickey 1997: 10–12).

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Diachronically, the widest range of such terms in English seems to be found in Elizabethan times, as reflected, again, by literary texts, which were the first to be investigated by the same researchers who were quoted above in regard to pronouns (but see also Koskenniemi 1962); interestingly, the period in which terms of address were most numerous and their use started to be most attentively codified was also the time when the T pronoun started to be abandoned (Leith 1997: 83). Salmon (1967: 50–51) gives a quite detailed inventory of nouns, and emphasises the significance of the adjectives that often form part of address formulae. Adjectives are important in previous times, too: in Old English, an important form is leof ‘dear’, used in combination with other terms, but also on its own, and so frequent that it was occasionally added to the address in translations from Latin without other explicit vocatives (Kohnen 2008: 147–149); in medieval and Elizabethan English, a restricted class of adjectives is found, including good (which soon declined in this use; Mazzon 2003: 239), gentle, fair, honest, etc. Similarly, the presence or absence of a possessive form (e.g. ‘my dear friend’ or ‘my liege’) could be considered significant because it establishes a bond between the interlocutors. The combination of these with specific nouns has not been taken up in detail in research, but might deserve keener attention. Similarly, Replogle (1973) is an early analysis of a wide typology of “conversational” routines as represented in drama, and draws attention to the fact that the absence of a title or of an honorific term can signal disregard for the interlocutor’s status. Although pragmatics has, since those times, established that language use does not correlate in an univocal, watertight way with sociopragmatic attitudes (which makes it even more difficult to speculate on negative evidence), these remarks remain useful. There is scarce evidence in historical corpora of occupational terms used as vocatives; it is interesting that those cases that are found do not necessarily involve high social distance, and that the recognition of social position often also entails some form of negative politeness, e.g. use of V pronouns or modification through adjectives (U. Busse 2003: 207). Occupational terms are a form of address that, at least until Shakespeare’s time, collocate higher on the scale of respect than the use of first names, and in some cases are difficult to distinguish from the use of titles (Braun 1988: 10). Plain names, conversely, are often employed with demeaning intent or with interlocutors of inferior status (Williams 1992: 86–87). Besides establishing the value of each term through examining its uses in various contexts, an interesting aspect to look at is whether terms of address have a direct correlation with pronouns. This aspect was considered peripheral by the scholars who first applied pragmatics to older data (Brown and Gilman 1989; Kopytko 1993) because they viewed the system of pronouns as too limited and too constrained by socially obligatory rules to be of interest in this perspective; in fact, Jaworski and Galasin’ki (2000) found no clear evidence, for modern Polish, of a direct correlation between pronouns and terms of address. On the other hand, there is evidence, in some cases statistically significant, that specific terms trigger a pro-

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noun choice, especially in cases of switching the pronoun used with the same interlocutor, but in other contexts (see e.g. U. Busse 2003 on Shakespeare’s English). This leads U. Busse (2002: 22) to conclude that “in a hierarchically structured society as in Early Modern English the forms of nominal and pronominal address do not work as separate systems but in unison, and they should hence not be reduced to a dichotomy.” This phenomenon concerns most visibly terms of insult, which have recently received some attention; as with pronouns, the analyses involve, first and foremost, dramatic and fictional dialogues (Replogle 1973; Jucker 2000a; U. Busse 2003), and then also trial records (Walker 2003: 331; Brownlees 2005) and correspondence (Nevala 2003, 2004). The tendency in this context is for terms of abuse to co-occur with T, although there are terms, such as rogue, that do not correlate so systematically. Working on Old and Middle English, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) found a double typology, a ritual form of insult that involves conventional formulae, and a “more serious” form of insult that is personal and therefore gives rise to stronger reactions, being perceived as particularly face-threatening. This difference is similar to that found by anthropological linguists and sociolinguists in “verbal duelling” in some contemporary communities (Hymes 1986), where there are ritualised insults that are not considered offensive, and only expressions that deviate from such routine formulae elicit a strong reaction. Similar comments are offered for Old English by Chapman (2008), who found different proportions of ritualised or “creative” epithets according to genre. The latter are often used to ridicule or belittle an opponent, as happens later in combination with T pronouns, which reinforce the demeaning effect. It is also safe to assume that high honorifics such as sire, lady, lord, which, like all honorifics, tend to express distance and negative politeness (Nevala 2003: 154), trigger the use of V quite frequently and from an early time (Barber 1981: 174; Burnley 2003: 35; Honegger 2003: 63–64; on parallels with French see G. Stein 1997: 361–364). This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that ironic uses follow the same trend; an example is the distancing of King Lear from Goneril: “Your name, fair gentlewoman?” (King Lear, I.4.233), where the estrangement derived from her attitude is emphasised by the father through a display of affected extraneousness, in contrast with the terms of endearment used elsewhere to his daughter (Mazzon 2003: 230). On the other hand, there are cases in which terms and pronouns do not seem to “agree”, which, according to Honegger (2003: 70), may be due to a sort of “division of pragmatic labour”: terms are used to set the tone of the interaction and establish the relationship, pronouns to indicate the shifts and nuances in the dynamics of the interaction. This is very clear in sixteenth-century Spanish, where titles often appear in combination with T forms even in highly asymmetric relations, such as that between master and servant (Moreno 2002: 24, 36). This could explain the fact that changes in the two subsystems do not proceed in parallel – studies tend to register a gradual increase in positive politeness in English terms of

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address (Nevala 2003: 160–161), which would account for the loss of deferential value in many terms; conversely, pronouns develop responding also to grammatical factors and therefore, in contrast with what happens in many other languages, English has taken the direction of making the formal pronoun the only one, thus extending a negative politeness strategy of deference to more and more interlocutors.

5.

Conclusion

Recent historical (socio)pragmatic studies have started to show, more systematically than their predecessors, the complexity of pronouns and terms of address, and their changes over time. Some of these studies have highlighted the fact that T/V systems are far from being a universal, since many languages have several forms, and even in those that have two, the differences in their use cannot so obviously be attributed to established social parameters, or even to politeness factors (Braun 1988: 33–39). The chapter has reviewed some of the elements that seem to be important in the selection and modulation of forms of address. It could be contended that, in spite of the fact that a comprehensive diachronic study does not exist yet (even for English, let alone other languages), the many pieces of evidence available form a reasonably reliable picture. Starting with older studies and then recalling contributions in literary pragmatics and in pragmaphilology, the chapter has also looked at research which starts with other frameworks within pragmatics: politeness theory seemed the most promising approach for some time, but then the limitations of this approach emerged and more flexible frameworks were called for. Apart from sociopragmatics and relevance theory, today dialogue studies and interactional sociolinguistics offer interesting insight: they are helping to show that address is not established by general “rules” but can also vary with the changing of the tone of the exchange. Factors like power and solidarity, or politeness, are not to be discounted, but they have to be considered as more flexible and changeable notions. Accordingly, methodologies for sampling have also changed over time: qualitative studies predominated in the pre-theoretical stage; later, the need was felt for wide-ranging studies, and computer-aided sampling provided the opportunity to view occurrences of items in a broader perspective. Nowadays, the tendency is to consider results from quantitative analysis as indicative of general trends, but to resort then to qualitative analyses of longer contexts in order to gain more insight into the interactive factors that preside over single address choices. The interrelationship between different systems of address, especially between pronouns and other terms, is still unclear in many respects, and awaits further research. Specific aspects of address choices also have to be clarified, not only through further quantitative analyses of different text types at various stages in time, but also through deepening our qualitative analyses of the dynamics of single

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exchanges between interlocutors. It is difficult for scholars working on distant periods and cultures to avoid the danger of circularity stressed by Braun (1988: 259), i.e. to consider a term “respectful” because of the context in which it appears, or, vice versa, to define an utterance as deferential because of the address terms it contains. It is hoped that a deeper understanding of the interplay between different linguistic indicators in establishing stance and power dynamics in dialogue will also help in the study of address systems.

Notes 1 By this I do not mean that the researcher has no checking or “sifting” work to do in such studies, but I merely refer to the limited range of forms that English second-person pronouns can take in texts from all periods, as compared to words like through for which over 500 different spellings have been identified in manuscripts produced 1350–1450 (according to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, as reported by Horobin and Smith 2003: 33). 2 This stability was not gained without friction: Burnley (2003: 39) reports a correspondence in Latin between a French and an Italian – high bureaucrats and intellectuals – in the fourteenth century, in which one objects to the use of plural address by the other as something “vulgar” and a “corruption” with respect to the model of classical Latin. These views strongly influenced the Italian and French humanists, but by that time the use of V pronouns was widespread in society and could not be expelled by intellectuals. 3 This first form of respect, introduced already in the ninth century and later reduced to ir, could be used as a marker of formality even at the beginning of modern times, especially in drama (Simon 2003; Young and Gloning 2004: 128, 131; Clyne et al. 2006: 302). 4 One case seems to be modern Cypriot Greek, where a V form is now spreading, and its use is apparently determined by pragmatic, as well as sociolinguistic, constraints, e.g. it seems to be preferred in requests (Terkourafi 2005). Research on modern Greek has emphasised politeness factors in the choice of V forms (Sifianou 1999). As will be mentioned, older languages often went through stages in which retractability of pronouns was quite frequent. 5 It seems problematic to agree with Fernández-Conde (2007: 95–96) that T is often used to address God because the relationship is a private and intimate one. Notice that Middle English diverges from French (usually considered influential in the spread of V) in this respect, in that the addressing of God shifted to vous in the thirteenth century in French (Mason 1982: 66; Honegger 2003: 69–70). 6 This is often remarked on both in essays, as mentioned, and in literary works, also in cooccurrence with the conversion of thou to verb in the second half of the fifteenth century. Examples are in Mullini (2005: 167); for an early study on a less exploited source see Evans (1967). 7 The first remarks in these terms are in Quirk (1971: 7–8), similarly Eagleson (1971: 142); more recent contributions are Calvo (1992); Bruti (2000) and D. Stein (2003). See also discussion in Mazzon (2003: 227–228). 8 For instance, U. Busse (2002: 63–65, 85) found almost twice the number of T in a verse sample as in a prose sample of Renaissance English texts.

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19 A similar case is made for the history of the term pan in Czech (Betsch 2003: 134–135). 10 Braun (1988) also reports the practice of the so-called “inverted address” whereby, for instance, a child is called ‘mother’ by the mother. This practice is of high interest sociopragmatically and deserves further attention to explore its possible historical forerunners.

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Kohnen, Thomas 2008 Linguistic politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A study of Old English address terms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9.1: 140–158. Kopytko, Roman 1993 Polite Discourse in Shakespeare’s English. Poznan´: Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Kopytko, Roman 1998 Relational pragmatics: Towards a holistic view of pragmatic phenomena. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 33: 195–211. Koskenniemi, Inna 1962 Studies in the Vocabulary of English Drama 1550–1600. Excluding Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Turku: Turun Yliopisto. Lass, Roger 1990 How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26: 79–102. Leith, Dick 1997 A Social History of English. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Lutz, Angelika 1998 The interplay of external and internal factors in morphological restructuring: The case of ‘you’. In: Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (eds.), Advances in English Historical Linguistics, 189–210. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 112.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. McIntosh, Angus 1963 As You Like It: A grammatical clue to character. Review of English Literature 4: 68–81. Mason, Patricia 1982 The pronouns of familiarity and respect in the Roman de la Rose and its Middle English translation. In: Patricia W. Cumming, Patrick W. Conner and Charles W. Connell (eds.), Literary and Historical Perspectives to the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1981 SEMA Meeting, 66–75. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. Matsumoto, Yoshiko 1989 Politeness and conversational universals – observations from Japanese. Multilingua 8.2–3: 207–222. Mausch, Hanna 1992–1993 Democratic you and paradigm. Studia Anglica Posnanensia XXV–XXVII: 143–153. Mazzon, Gabriella 1992 Shakespearian thou and you revisited, or socio-affective networks on stage. In: Carmela Nocera, Nicola Pantaleo and Domenico Pezzini (eds.), Early Modern English: Trends, Forms and Texts, 123–136. Bari: Schena. Mazzon, Gabriella 2000 Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), The History of English in a Social Context, 135–168. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 129.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Mazzon, Gabriella 2002 Riflessi linguistici della pazzia come assenza sociale. In: Daniela Corona (ed.), Rappresentazioni della follia e contesti culturali. Narrazioni delle differenze, 111–118. Palermo: Flaccovio. Mazzon, Gabriella 2003 Pronouns and nominal address in Shakespearean English: A socio-affective marking system in transition. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 223–249. Mazzon, Gabriella 2009 Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 185.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mitchell, Eleanor Retting 1971 Pronouns of address in English, 1580–1780: A study of form changes as reflected in British drama. Unpublished PhD thesis, Texas A & M University. Moreno, Maria Cristobalina 2002 The address system in the Spanish of the Golden Age. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 15–47. Mulholland, Joan 1967 Thou/you in Shakespeare. Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 1987: 153–161. Mullini, Roberta 2005 ‘Avaunt, caitiff! Dost thou “thou” me?’ Dialogue as mirror of face-to-face interaction in Early English drama. In: Antonio Bertacca (ed.), Historical Linguistics. Studies of Spoken English, 163–173. Pisa: Pisa University Press. Nevala, Minna 2003 Family first. Address and subscription formulae in English family correspondence from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 147–176. Nevala, Minna 2004 Accessing politeness axes: Forms of address and terms of reference in early English correspondence. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 2125–2160. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. (Longman Linguistics Library.) London: Longman Pearson. Oliveira, Sandi Michele de 2005 A retrospective on address in Portugal (1982–2002). Rethinking power and solidarity. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.2: 307–323. Paulik Sampson, Gloria 1979 Sociolinguistic aspects of pronoun usage in Middle English. In: William C. McCormack and Stephen A. Wurm (eds.), Language and Society. Anthropological Issues, 61–69. (World Anthropology Series.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Penny, Ralph John 2002 A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, Randolph 1971 Shakespeare and the English language. Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 1987: 3–21.

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Replogle, Carol 1973 Shakespeare’s salutations: A study in stylistic etiquette. Studies in Philology 70: 172–186. Salmon, Vivian 1967 Elizabethan colloquial English in the Falstaff plays. Reprinted in Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), 1987: 37–70. Salmon, Vivian, and Edwina Burness (eds.) 1987 Reader in the Language of Shakespearian Drama. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 35.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Seppänen, Eeva-Leena 2003 Demonstrative pronouns in addressing and referring in Finnish. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 375–399. Sifianou, Maria 1999 Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-cultural Perspective. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon, Horst 2003 From pragmatics to grammar: Tracing the development of respect in the history of the German pronoun of address. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 85–123. Spitz, Alice 2005 Power plays: The representation of mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by women; A study in discourse analysis. PhD dissertation, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. Stein, Dieter 2003 Pronominal usage in Shakespeare. Between sociolinguistics and conversational analysis. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 251–307. Stein, Gabriele 1997 John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist: A Pioneer in Vernacular Language Description. (Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stidston, Russell Osborne 1917 The Use of Ye in the Function of Thou in Middle English Literature from MS. Auchinleck to MS. Vernon. (Leland Stanford Junior University Publications. University Series 28.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. Strang, Barbara M.H. 1970 A History of English. London: Methuen. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) 2003 Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Terkourafi, Marina 2005 Identity and semantic change. Aspects of T/V usage in Cyprus. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.2: 283–306. Trudgill, Peter, and Jack K. Chambers (eds.) 1991 Dialects of English. Studies in Grammatical Variation. (Longman Linguistics Library.) London: Longman Pearson.

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Wales, Katie 1983 Thou and you in Early Modern English: Brown and Gilman re-appraised. Studia Linguistica 37.2: 107–125. Walker, Terry 2000 The choice of second person singular pronouns in authentic and constructed dialogue in late sixteenth century English. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.), Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Papers from the 20th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 20), 375–384. (Language and Computer Studies in Practical Linguistics 33.) Amsterdam: Rodopi. Walker, Terry 2003 You and thou in Early Modern English dialogues. Patterns of usage. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 309–342. Walker, Terry 2007 Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 158.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Watts, Richard J. 1989 Relevance and relational work: Linguistic politeness as politic behavior. Multilingua 8.2–3: 131–166. Watts, Richard J. 1999 Refugiate in a Strange Country. Learning English through dialogues in the 16th century. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 215–241. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 66.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Watts, Richard J. 2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Joseph M. 1992 “O! When degree is shak’d”: Sixteenth-century anticipations of some modern attitudes towards usage. In: Tim W. Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds.), English in its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, 69–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yang, Yonglin 1991 How to talk to the supernatural in Shakespeare. Language in Society 20.2: 247–261. Young, Christopher, and Thomas Gloning 2004 A History of the German Language Through Texts. London: Routledge.

VI. Interactional pragmatics

13.

Speech Acts Dawn Archer

1.

Introduction

This chapter explores the history of speech acts in a way that draws from modern studies as a means of allowing for points of contrast. It also traces the European roots of speech-act research. The focus is primarily on speech acts in English; particular attention is paid to how our English ancestors gave commands, made promises, complimented others and so on. Or, to use Searlean (1976: 10–15) terminology, how speakers constructed their directives, commissives and expressives at different points in time between the mid-fifth century and the nineteenth century, and how these were interpreted by their targets. Given the recent trend towards utilising (im)politeness approaches and/or a “prototype” approach to explain speech acts and their development over time (see, e.g., Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Busse 2002, 2008; Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008; Kohnen 2008a; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a), the relationship between speech acts and facework and the extent to which speech acts share a “pragmatic space” with neighbouring speech acts (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000) will be discussed in some detail. I will also outline researchers’ attempts to cope with shifts in the form and function of speech acts over time by, for example, utilising annotation (see, e.g., Culpeper and Archer 2008) or other corpus linguistic methodologies (see, e.g., Kohnen 2000a, 2002, 2004a, 2008b; Jucker et al. 2008; Valkonen 2008). I begin, however, by sketching some ongoing “concerns” regarding the (at least theoretical) possibilities of diachronic speech-act research. 2.

The debate surrounding the diachronic analysis of speech acts

Stetter (1991: 74, 79) is one of the most outspoken critics of the diachronic study of speech acts. Indeed, he has argued that, as we cannot completely recover the context of past communicative events – especially in respect to intended speaker meaning – speech-act theory has no historical application. Bertuccelli Papi (2000) is more positive than Stetter about the possibility of undertaking diachronic speech-act studies. However, she stresses that research in this field “must proceed very cautiously” (2000: 64). Bertuccelli Papi is particularly concerned by the existence of contradictory theoretical accounts for how we actually do things with words, which affect synchronic and diachronic studies alike. In her paper (2000: 57–66) in the inaugural edition of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics, she details “theoretical divergencies” pertaining to:

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– the relationship between sentence meaning and speaker meaning (that is, between “propositional meaning” and “illocutionary meaning”); – the relationship between the illocutionary force of the utterance and its grammatical realisation; – the best means of accounting for indirect realisations of speech acts; – whether the performative meaning ascribed to the utterance is cognitively derived and/or is determined by the role of, or relationship between, speaker [S] and hearer [H], and the social activity in which they are engaged; – whether there are “universal laws regulating human verbal activities” that transcend social (and historical) variation. 2.1.

Speech acts: Fuzzy concepts showing synchronic and diachronic variation?

Researchers have begun to address a number of the theoretical divergencies highlighted by Bertuccelli Papi (2000). For example, in the introduction to their edited collection, Speech Acts in the History of English, Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008a: 4) ask readers to consider the extent to which “pragmatic meaning works uniformly over periods and societies” (in and across languages).1 They go on to suggest that, for speech acts at least, the answer may depend on the type of speech act under investigation. Indeed, ritual insults seem to repeat a basic pattern – albeit in slightly modified form – “in Old English in Beowulf, in Old Icelandic sagas, in Middle Dutch romances, in the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, in health guides in Early Modern England”, and among today’s “London teenagers and black youths in New York” in a way that suggests ritual insulting is “deeply rooted in human behaviour (Labov 1972; Arnovick 1999; Bax 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Hasund and Stenström 1997; Moik 2007; Chapman 2008)” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a: 4). Yet, “inherently polite speech acts” such as compliments and thanking appear to be “more sensitive to changes of fashion and cultural variation” (2008a: 4). Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008a: 4) therefore prefer to think of speech acts as being “fuzzy concepts that show both diachronic and synchronic variation” (see also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000). What this means, in practice, is a rejection of the application of speech-act theory in its most conservative Searlean sense in favour of a view of speech acts as “prototypes” linked by a shared multidimensional “pragmatic space” (analogous to a semantic field capturing word meanings in relation to neighbouring words). By way of illustration, insults are identifiable via their disparaging “predication about the target” (2008a: 6) – a feature that can be signalled on a number of clines, including form (cf. “ritual/rule governedcreative”), context-dependence (cf. “conventional-particular”) and speaker attitude (cf. “ludic-aggressive”, “intentional-unintentional”, “irony-sincerity”) (see section 5.1 below for further details). Another important shaping aspect of this particular speech act is that of culture, of course, as “what people considered insult-

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ing” historically is, as today, “a matter of culture to a large extent” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a: 6). According to Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008a), the framework they initially drafted for (English) insults and verbal aggression can also be applied to other speech acts or speech-act categories. However, they suggest that – depending on the speech act or speech-act category under investigation – some of the components of the multidimensional framework will be foregrounded and others backgrounded. For example, they predict that, with apologies, the form category is likely to be most prominent, as apologies tend to be “expressed in routinised, perhaps even ritual and rule-governed forms”; the dimension of “irony versus sincerity” (the third aspect of speaker attitude) will become “prominent with compliments”; and speaker attitude is also likely to be “of special concern” when constructing directives (2008a: 7). I return to the applicability of Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2000) framework for capturing speech acts other than insults in my discussions of individual speech-act categories. Before doing so, however, I will trace the European “roots” of English speech-act research. 2.2.

Tracing the European roots of English speech-act research

The study of speech acts in their historical context is older than one might imagine if we include non-English studies. For example, Schlieben-Lange and Weydt began investigating the historicity of Romance speech acts in the 1970s (see, e.g., Schlieben-Lange 1976, 1979; Schlieben-Lange and Weydt 1979), and SchliebenLange and Lebsanft continued that work in the following decade: Lebsanft (1988) undertook a close analysis of greetings in Old French dialogues and SchliebenLange (1983) explored the “traditions of talking” during the French Revolution (Bach 1992: 419). This “methodological essay on a pragmatic history of speaking”, as Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft (1999a: 8) describe it, developed SchliebenLange’s earlier (1979) study of “Flamenca, using the framework of Gricean conversational principles”. Since the 1980s, studies have been undertaken that explore: (i) questions in Old French and Old Spanish, using the texts Jeu d’Adam (Schrott 1999) and Cantar de mio Cid (Schrott 2000), (ii) (conditional) commissives in Medieval and Early Modern French, drawing from the “courtly amorous interaction” found within extant poetry (Honegger 2000), and (iii) performatives (specifically, advice) in Middle Scots, primarily using a narrative poem about William Wallace, the hero of the War of Scottish Independence against the English (see, e.g., Milfull 2004). The period from the 1980s to the present day has also proved to be fruitful in respect to the study of speech acts within German linguistics. Several of these studies share a common theme – that of medieval “verbal aggression/duelling”: see, for example, Fritz and Muckenhaupt’s (1981) exploration of accusations (and reactions to those accusations) in legal literature, Weigand’s (1988) study of quarrelling sequences, and

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Bax’s (1991) exploration of ritual challenges. Bax also explores the representation of verbal duelling within sixteenth-century Dutch drama (Bax 1999), Old Icelandic verbal duelling (Bax and Padmos 1983), and the link between ritual interaction and the emergence of indirect language (Bax 2002). Beetz’s (1999) work on “polite dialogue” around 1700 offers an interesting contrast to the above (see, in particular, his discussion of return compliments, polite refusals and apologies; see also Beetz 1990). Of the aforementioned researchers, Schlieben-Lange (1976, 1979, 1983) has been credited with producing the most groundbreaking methodological approach to enable the recovery and scrutiny of the force of historical utterances (Arnovick 1999: 12). That approach involves attending to both “diachronic process” and “historical contrast”: that is, gleaning evidence of verbal activity from texts through the identification of performative speech-act verbs, and then confirming the historical appropriacy of the speech-act labels utilised via historical dictionaries and additional contextual information and evidence (histories of institutions, law treatises, etc.). As Arnovick (1999) goes on to explain, Schlieben-Lange believes that speech acts are (and always have been) “culturally differentiated”: that is, the “shape” of speech acts is determined at least to some extent by the time in which they are uttered, by the people who utter them and the role they attribute to themselves, by the cultural expectations of what constitutes the speech acts they assume they are performing, and by the activity in which they believe they are engaged.2 2.3.

Speech-act research focusing on English

Schlieben-Lange’s form-based approach has been particularly influential for English speech-act studies, the bulk of which date from the 1990s onwards and focus on: – directives such as requests and orders: that is, verbal acts whereby S attempts to get H to do something (see, e.g., Rudanko 1993; Kohnen 2000b, 2002, 2004b; Busse 2002, 2008; Culpeper and Archer 2008; Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008); – commissives such as promises: that is, verbal acts whereby S commits to do some future act(s) for H (see, e.g., Arnovick 1994, 1999; Alonso-Almeida and Cabrera-Abreu 2002; Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008; Pakkala-Weckström 2008; Valkonen 2008); – expressives (and acknowledgements) such as insults, compliments, curses, thanks, greetings, congratulations and apologies: that is, verbal acts whereby S expresses a psychological state towards H in respect to a proposition (see, e.g., Culpeper and Semino 2000; Jucker 2000; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Jacobsson 2002; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2007, 2008b; Chapman 2008) and/or expresses his/her intention to fulfil his/her face obligations (see, e.g., Arnovick 1999; Grzega 2005); and – rogatives (i.e. questions): that is, verbal acts whereby S seeks information from H (see, e.g., Archer 2005; Claridge 2005).

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The remainder of this chapter focuses on English speech acts over time, and is devoted to a discussion of the methodologies and theoretical approaches utilised by speech-act researchers when studying English speech acts in a historical context. For example, I explore form-based approaches that engage in “structured eclecticism” and form-based approaches that engage in “illustrative eclecticism” (Kohnen 2004a: 241). Illustrative eclecticism is closest to Schlieben-Lange’s approach; it involves the researchers picking out relevant examples of a given speech act in the respective periods covered by their particular study on the basis of their reading of the data and of the relevant literature (see, e.g., the discussion of Busse’s (2008) study of directives in section 3.1 below). In contrast, structured eclecticism involves “a [more] deliberate [and systematic] selection of typical patterns which [researchers] trace by way of a representative analysis throughout the history of English” (Kohnen 2004a: 238). As one might expect, given the emphasis on “typical patterns”, structured eclecticism (i) tends to be adopted when studying speech acts that occur in routinised forms, and (ii) is the suggested or favoured approach when engaging in computerised searches for specific speech acts (Kohnen 2002; see also the discussion of Valkonen’s (2008) study of promises in section 4.2 below). I will also highlight approaches – such as the one adopted by Culpeper and Archer (2008: 58) as a means of exploring requests in the Early Modern English period – that advocate a “multi-feature view of speech acts”; by this I mean, approaches that seek to capture speech-act “functions” as well as “form” (see sections 3.1 and 3.2). I begin with directives, specifically, commands and requests: for detailed discussions of questions in a historical context, the reader is directed to Archer (2005) and Claridge (2005).3

3.

Tracing the history of English directives

It is commonly assumed that, when used in a modern (Westernised) communicative context, directives constitute a face threat to the addressee’s negative face: The directive – with varying degrees of force – is intended to get the addressee to do something that [s/]he might not have done otherwise, and thus it limits, in a relevant way, his[/her] freedom of action and freedom from imposition, in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987) (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a: 11).

As the comment, “varying degrees of force” intimates, directives can suggest, permit/prohibit, (dis)allow, beg, plead, supplicate, invite, recommend or order/command, depending on their level of manipulative strength (Givón 1993: 264; see also Busse 2008: 88–93). In a modern context, we tend to use modals, conditionals, questions and irrealis markers to make our directives “less direct, less forceful, less authoritarian, more polite” and therefore less explicitly manipulative (Givón 1993: 268). Indeed, Blum-Kulka (1989) has found that modern speakers of British/

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American/Australian English, Hebrew, Danish, German, Russian, Canadian French and Argentinean Spanish appear to prefer a strategy involving “conventional indirectness” in a range of contexts. Conventionally indirect directives contain “suggestory formulae” or are “query preparatory”, according to Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), and, as such, represent a trade-off between (i) the indirectness required or assumed to be required so that S adheres to societal/contextual (or politeness) norms, and (ii) S’s desire not to overload the target (T) with inferential work (Blum-Kulka 1987). Compare, for example, the “mood derivable” (“bald-on-record”) impositive Clean up that mess (said by S to T whilst pointing in the general direction of the kitchen), with the interrogative constructions How about cleaning up? and Could you clear up the kitchen, please?, which – on the surface – provide T with some leeway for non-compliance (and, as such, recognise his/her desire to be able to act freely) whilst also clearly stipulating S’s desired outcome. The interrogative constructions are therefore considered to be more transparent (but potentially more face-threatening) than non-conventionally indirect hints such as The kitchen’s a mess.4 This type of negative (i.e. indirect) politeness was not a feature of Anglo-Saxon communication. Indeed, Kohnen (2008b) suggests that indirect directives have developed fairly recently in the history of English, further adding that “clear cases of interrogative manifestations of directives are difficult to find before the Early Modern English period” (Kohnen 2008b: 27). Instead, our ancestors of the Old English period tended to use “directive performatives” (Kohnen 2000b), with the “typical pattern […] direct speech-act verb (in the first person singular or plural indicative active), an object (usually referring to the addressee) and the requested act (often expressed by a subordinate clause introduced by ¢æt)” (Kohnen 2008b: 30). In addition, the performative verbs utilised in the Helsinki Corpus data that Kohnen analysed did not denote suggestion or advice: that is to say, they did not utilise the face-saving strategies that we might expect today. Moreover, the constructions that were utilised reveal genre-specific patterns: the very direct, addressee-specific scealt/sculun constructions were prominent in secular and Germanic contexts, for example, whilst the less coercive uton and impersonal (neod)¢earf constructions were more common in religious texts. 3.1.

Assessing the (in)directness of directives over time

It would seem, then, that directives are less sensitive to cultural and historical variation than speech acts such as apologies, complaints and compliments (Kohnen 2002). But this does not prevent them from displaying an interesting direct-to(more)-indirect evolution, which appears to be linked with the documented change from a positively oriented politeness culture (historically) to a negatively oriented politeness culture (today) (see, e.g., Kopytko 1993, 1995). (In)directness, as I use the term here, means “illocutionary transparency” (Blum-Kulka and House 1989:

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133): that is, it relates to the explicitness with which the illocutionary point is signalled by the utterance (Culpeper and Archer 2008: 56) and is not merely a nonmapping of form and function (cf. Searle 1975 and Busse 2008). As Culpeper and Archer highlight, the potential explicitness of a given speech act will depend on “complex processes of conventionalization or standardization” operating at any given time (2008: 56). In the Middle English period, for example, directives were often constructed so as to indicate speaker desire (Kohnen 2002). However, this changed over time so that, by the end of the Middle English period, the “wishes of the speaker alone were no longer seen as sufficient justification for a request” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a: 8). Indeed, the cooperation of the addressee had become a prominent factor by the Early Modern English period, “giving rise to indirect requests indicating negative politeness, i.e. a consideration for, or at least a token acknowledgement of, the addressee’s wish not to be imposed upon” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008a: 8). Kopytko (1995: 522) provides us with an example, taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1.1.33–34; which the character, Horatio, directs to Barnardo and Marcellus): “Well, sit we down, And let us hear Barnardo speak of this”. The latter constitutes a jussive, according to Busse (2008): like adhortatives with let, jussives suggest “a joint course of action” and have “less sense of [a] command” than other directives (Blake 2002: 94). By way of illustration, Kopytko (1995) suggests Horatio’s jussive was meant to signal his desire to maintain a good, cooperative relationship between himself and Barnardo and Marcellus. The aim of Busse’s (2008: 85) Shakespearean study is “to arrive at an ideally complete inventory of the linguistic forms which were available […] for carrying out directive speech acts” at that time. However, most of his examples are taken from King Lear: in fact, Busse’s study could be seen as an analysis of the main character’s transformation from “a self-assured person, free of doubt, to somebody who has very painfully learnt to pay consideration to other persons’ feelings, and to ‘see better’ (Kent to Lear, 1.1.158)” (Busse 2008: 113), as demonstrated by Shakespeare’s manipulation of Lear’s directives. For example, Busse (2008: 111) is able to confirm that, “at the beginning of the play, Lear issues [imperatives] and expects everybody to execute his will without exception”. However, as his circumstances change for the worse, his empathy for others grows. Linguistically, directive speech acts become less frequent as the play progresses “and more questions occur in-between” (2008: 112). Moreover, when Lear’s directives are analysed more closely, “their form and, even more so, their communicative function changes from commanding and ordering to inviting, offering and pleading” (2008: 112; see also Mack 1966; Berlin 1981). A number of researchers – most notably Givón (1993: 268) and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 74, 92) – have emphasised that some speech-act types exhibit gradience within a specified pragmatic space. For Culpeper and Archer (2008: 78), however, “merely claiming that speech acts have prototypical structures is not enough”. They therefore offer a corpus-based methodology, which (because of the

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application of sociopragmatic annotation) can enable the identification of directives according to a number of features: – formal features: such as particular conventionalised pragmalinguistic strategies or illocutionary force indicating devices; (see, e.g., Searle 1975; Aijmer 1996); – contextual beliefs: such as Searle’s (1969) observation that it is not obvious that the desired future action will be performed by the target in the normal course of events; – interpersonal beliefs: such as Edmondson and House’s (1981: 56) observation that the future action represents benefit for the source but cost for the target; (see also Goffman 1971: 145; Leech 1983: 104; Brown and Levinson 1987); – co-textual features: such as pre-requests; (see, e.g., Edmondson and House 1981; Levinson 1983: 356–364; Tsui 1994: 110–111); – outcomes: such as the target performing the action specified in the earlier speech act; (see, e.g., Austin 1962); and – explicitness: i.e. whether they are direct, conventionally indirect or non-conventionally indirect directives; (see, e.g, Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). (Adapted from Culpeper and Archer 2008: 47–48, 78–79) As such, the method allows users to track the forms, functions and social contexts of directives, but in a way that encourages them to be sensitive to “pragmatic false friends, i.e. constructions which, against a contemporary background, suggest a wrong pragmatic interpretation” (Kohnen 2004a: 239).5 After applying their method to drama and trial data representative of the period 1640–1760,6 Culpeper and Archer find that three features of directives seem to be “highly prototypical”: (1) the imperative [form] […], (2) volition (a contextual belief, relating to the willingness of the target to perform the action or the desire of the speaker of the speech act that the action be performed), and (3) obligation (a contextual belief, relating to the obligations of the producer or target of the request). (2008: 78–79)

In fact, impositives accounted for 704 (that is, 73.33 per cent) of the directives in Culpeper and Archer’s drama data, and for 368 (that is, 72.87 per cent) of the directives in their courtroom data. Moreover, the vast majority of these (351 and 120 respectively) employed the most direct requestive strategy – the mood derivable (e.g. Take away her sword!) – and were used by the powerful and subordinates alike. This finding contrasts greatly with the modern idea that, as far as English is concerned, indirectness equates to politeness (cf. Searle 1975: 74; Leech 1983: 80; Brown and Levinson 1987: 17–21). It also suggests that late Early Modern English society was still oriented towards a “positive politeness culture” (cf. Kopytko 1995). That is to say, it did not yet value distance as “a positive cultural value, as-

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sociated with respect for the autonomy of the individual” (Wierzbicka 2003: 37). There are modern European examples that do “fit” the Early Modern English pattern, however: Sifianou (1992) highlights the Greek tendency to use unmitigated direct speech acts as a means of displaying warmth and friendliness, and Wierzbicka (2003: 36), the Polish tendency to regard the “flat imperative” as “one of the milder, softer options in issuing directives”. The apparent preference for volition and/or obligation in the Early Modern English period (see (2) and (3) in the quote above) also contrasts starkly with a key feature of present-day conventionally indirect requests: modern-day (British) users are said to orient their requests to the preparatory condition of ability, that is, a contextual belief relating to T’s ability to perform a future action (cf. the widely discussed request Can you pass the salt?). As previously established, modern-day users are also thought to correlate a lack of power with a need for greater indirectness (see, e.g., Brown and Levinson 1987; Blum-Kulka and House 1989). Yet, Culpeper and Archer (2008: 77) found that the conventionally indirect requests within their Early Modern English data (i.e. 127 let-requests and 58 “others” of the patterns you may VERB, will you VERB or [If] [you/he] [will] please [to] [VERB/ that]) tended to be used “by relatively powerful people (whether in terms of role, status or both) or intimates of high status”.7 3.2.

Assessing the historical applicability of Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) categories

Culpeper and Archer (2008) are careful to stress that, whilst Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) categories are broadly applicable in an Early Modern English context, they are difficult to apply to Early Modern English data without modification or elaboration. One problem they encountered in respect to the more direct requests, for example, related to the “head act”. Culpeper and Archer (2008: 73) opted for “a narrow view”, which amounted to “the subject and predicator associated with the request. This left very few examples, such as I humbly beg leave to be excused, which could be considered to have internal modification”.8 This example constitutes a “hedged performative”, according to Culpeper and Archer (2008: 72), because the choice of performative verb (beg) serves to semantically modify the requestive force, which is then further modified by humbly (cf. Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989: 279, who suggest that the performative verb of a hedged performative is usually within a subordinate clause; for arguments that are supportive of Culpeper and Archer’s approach, see Fraser 1975: 197 and Brown and Gilman 1989: 181).9 The external modification of head acts – in the form of support moves10 – was also uncommon in the Early Modern English period, according to Culpeper and Archer’s datasets. Indeed, they found that 290 (that is, 46.5 per cent) of the impositive requests they identified had no support move at all. They reason that the infre-

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quency of support moves may be due to the relatively well-defined and widely known status hierarchies of Early Modern England. By this they mean, “participants could have assumed certain rights to make a request and thus did not [feel it necessary to] undertake politeness work” as a means of redressing (potential) “infringements of social norms” (2008: 74). Such an explanation is convincing, especially given the courtroom context of some of their data. Yet, they did find some evidence of politeness work within both the courtroom and drama texts: impositive requests utilised vocatives such as madam and good doctor as both pre-support moves (on 25 and 47 occasions respectively) and post-support moves (on 1 and 32 occasions respectively). Pray and prithee were also used relatively frequently as pre-support moves (on 15 and 34 occasions respectively). The politeness markers pray and prithee are often linked with the more modern please, of course. But their restricted usage here (i.e. to pre-support moves only) suggests they had not yet undergone full grammaticalisation (cf. present-day please, which can occur in a variety of positions; see Aijmer 1996: 166–168 for examples). The third most frequent support move in the sociopragmatic data was that of the grounder, the majority of cases occurring in the post-position: Culpeper and Archer (2008: 75) provide the example “make haste. He’ll overtake us before we get in”. That said, grounders were scarce in the courtroom texts when compared with the drama texts (i.e. 6 compared with 60). This is possibly because, in the institutional context of the courtroom, the status of participants and their rights and obligations are partly common knowledge and, as such, there is no need to explicitly establish them. Culpeper and Archer (2008: 71–72) also identify two new categories: (i) a speaker-focused “locution derivable or obligation-statement”, which, in orienting towards the speaker represented “a less direct (i.e. more implicit) way of conveying the illocutionary point” (cf. Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989, whose examples always place the obligation on T and are considered to be direct), and (ii) a “prediction/intention” category, which “captures cases where the speaker orientates towards the futurity of the propositional content of the request” (cf. Busse 2008). 3.3.

Directive constructions – genre specific?

The extra categories highlighted by Culpeper and Archer may have as much to do with the type of naturally occurring data they analyse as they do the age of that data. For example, they found distinct genre differences in respect to the use of speaker-oriented want-statements: these were “relatively infrequent in trials”, presumably because the “institutional context did not necessarily accommodate the ‘wants’ of all the participants” (2008: 72). In fact, this strategy was mostly used by defendants who were seeking to negotiate speaking rights. In the drama texts they analysed, the negotiation was of a different order: that of asserting and negotiating rights and obligations. As such, locution derivable or hearer-oriented obligationstatements (such as “you’ll entertain Bellamar”, “you must not be angry”) were

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relatively frequent in the drama texts. According to Culpeper and Archer (2008: 73), the latter are “a good way of producing dynamic dramatic dialogue, and of providing information to the audience about the social constraints that compel, vex or appease characters”. Studies undertaken using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (1418–1680) also point to differences in politeness preferences that are dependent as much on genre as they are historical period: for example, address terms in private letters demonstrate a move from negatively polite honorifics to positively polite nicknames and terms of endearment during the Early Modern English period (see, e.g., Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1995; Raumolin-Brunberg 1996; Nevala 2004). Jucker (2008) suggests that this may be because of the growing privacy of personal letters in the centuries under investigation (cf. also Jacobsson 2002: 72, 74, 78). Yet, Del Lungo Camiciotti (2008) also finds a tendency towards positive politeness in public letters representative of a nineteenth-century traders’ community. Drawing from seven letters that relate to a misunderstanding, for example, she shows how requests tended to “consist of an explicit core whose illocutionary force [wa]s modulated through strategies linked to contemporary conceptions of polite business intercourse”, that is, to the valuing of “agreement more than conflict avoidance and face saving” (2008: 129). Modulating strategies ranged from the inclusion of adverbials to the addition of complex constructions, with many of the latter making use of politeness markers: Del Lungo Camiciotti found that please was the most common device used to mitigate an obligation imposed on the addressee in her corpus of letters, and was used in conventionalised constructions such as You will please + verb, Be pleased + verb, and, to a lesser extent, (You will) be so good as + verb. The performative verbs request and advise were also used on occasion, but their illocutionary force tended to be mitigated by the “formulaicity” of the expression, according to Del Lungo Camiciotti (2008: 123). In one letter, for example, advice was presented as being in the customer’s best interest: “It is highly probable that prices may still rise therefore we would advise you to give in your orders without delay” (letter 224).

4.

Tracing the history of English commissives

Del Lungo Camiciotti’s (2008) corpus of business correspondence also allows the exploration of the nineteenth-century traders’ use of commissives. This dual speech-act focus (i.e. commissives and directives) is predictable, to some extent: business letters were an important means by which nineteenth-century businessmen balanced their requests with some form of commitment to provide X for their clients (cf. Vergaro 2005: 110). Evidence of contemporary notions of politeness or ritualised courtesy in the traders’ promissory formulations is also somewhat predictable, given Del Lungo Camiciotti’s (2008: 128–129) earlier findings:

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traders tended (i) to favour I/we will and to a lesser extent I/we shall over performative verbs such as undertake and intend, and (ii) to utilise modulating expressions that included positive adjectives (glad, happy, ready) or adverbials (with pleasure) as a means of upgrading their level of commitment. This “appropriate way of interacting” was “far from being inexpressive because conventional” for the nineteenth-century business community represented in Del Lungo Camiciotti’s (2008: 128) corpus. Rather, it served to create “a sort of formal cordiality, sometimes bordering on familiarity”. The conventionality of the direct (but mitigated) constructions and the opening and closing formulae point, in turn, to “the active role played by the addressee” in processing both the force of the speech act and the degree of strength exhibited by the mitigation or reinforcement devices (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008: 127; see also Sbisà 2001). This leads Del Lungo Camiciotti (2008: 129) to conclude that “the modulation approach proposed by Caffi [(1999)] and Sbisà [(2001)]” offers a better means of accounting “for the fuzziness of [historical] speech acts” than, for example, Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (in)directness approach. The crucial role played by the target of a promise is most evident in the binding promise of the Old English and Middle English periods, of course. As such, the binding promise will be the focus of the next subsection. 4.1.

The binding promise

The Old English and Middle English promise appears to have had not only a different form but a different perlocutionary effect than its modern (Western) equivalent; for the latter, once uttered, creates an obligation from the promiser to the promisee to do the thing promised only if the promiser intends to undertake X (see Searle’s 1969: 60 “essential condition”). Historically, however, insincerity on the part of S did not always render promises infelicitous: Pakkala-Weckström (2008: 137) cites the literary example of Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, in which a promise made “in pley” by Dorigen (to make love to Aurelius, a man who is not her husband) counts as a real promise that even her husband feels must be honoured, because Aurelius opted to take it seriously (V (F) 1339–1). The idea that one is bound by what one says is also evident in Old English extant poetry; Arnovick (1999: 58) provides the example of Hrothgar’s promise to Beowulf after the young warrior slays Grendel (see, e.g., the adoption speech, where Hrothgar declares Beowulf “as a son” whom he “will love in mind and heart” [Hill 2008: 47] thereby making him his heir apparent). In terms of form, Old English promises tended to be no longer than sentence-length, and often contained sculan and willan – modal verbs that, at the time, unambiguously signalled the speaker’s intention. By the medieval period, binding promises tended to follow more overt formulaic patterns, with the illocutionary force indicating devices bihighten, plighten, sweren and wedden being utilised prior to the emergence of the verb to promise (c. 1400). Although Searle (1969) only highlights verbs when discussing illocutionary force indicating de-

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vices, Pakkala-Weckström (2008) finds that the noun trouthe was sometimes utilised to create a medieval binding promise; for example, Dorigen “committed” herself to loving Aurelius by uttering the words, “have heer my trouthe, in al that evere I kan” (V (F) 998) [accept my word in truth for all it’s worth]. Aurelius also referred to trouthe when releasing Dorigen from her promise: “My trouthe I plighte, I shal yow never repreve, / Of no biheste, and here I take my leve” (V (F) 1,537–1,538) [I give my word never to chide or grieve you / For any promise given, and so I leave you]. The fact that promissory statements could have a vow-like quality at this time (cf. the modern I will, stated by bride and groom at an official wedding) motivates Pakkala-Weckström (2008: 159) to criticise Searle’s apparent lack of consideration for “the promisee and a possible audience” when explaining the conditions for a modern promise. Although aware that literature is a “representation of life” as opposed to “real life”, she further suggests that we must appreciate the “role” that literature has played when seeking to understand the development of the promise over time, “since the concept of the binding promise is most often encountered within a chivalric context” (2008: 159). Indeed, Jost (2004: 270) goes as far as to suggest that “the language of promises – their making, breaking, and dispensing, is a reverberating chord running through almost all [the Canterbury Tales]”. The centrality of the concept of honour in courtly or chivalric society is also evident in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Pakkala-Weckström 2008: 138). By way of illustration, Troilus’s absolute commitment to Criseyde is said to epitomise “the essence of chivalric virtue” (Fisher 2000: 158): explaining that commitment, the character states “I have trouthe hire hight, / I wol nat ben untrewe for no wight” (IV 445–446) [I have sworn truth to her and this is done / I will not be untrue for anyone]. Yet, by the time of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English portrayal of Troilus and Cressida, the idea of being true relates to fidelity rather than to keeping binding promises (for further detail, see Pakkala-Weckström 2008: 150–154). The concept of the binding oral promise also existed in the “real world” during the Old English and Middle English periods. By way of illustration, legally binding marriages could be entered into by “two individuals speaking words of present consent” (Kittel 1980: 125; cf. today’s Western need for witnesses, officials, consummation, etc.). Moreover, as honour was involved, one could suffer public and private shame if such oral promises were broken (Pulham 1996: 77; see also Leyser 1995). Pakkala-Weckström (2008: 159) suggests that two factors – the growth of literacy and the increasing importance of written deeds in everyday life – helped to ensure that making oral commitments, i.e. “giving one’s word”, although still an accepted practice today, is not as central as it was in the Old English and Middle English periods. Indeed, a modern promiser often finds s/he must explicitly “declare his or her intention” – by, for example, using the illocutionary force indicating device I promise (Searle 1969: 58; Searle and Vanderveken 1985) – and/or engage in more confirmatory verbal work as a means of convincing his or her interlocutor that the

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promise is real. Arnovick (1999: 57, 60–61, 64) links today’s need for such pragmatically expanded promises to the grammaticalisation of will and shall, which have undergone a metonymic transformation from being deontic modals (dealing with S’s obligation to carry out a course of action that would realise his or her proposition) in the Old English period to being epistemic tense markers (dealing with the speaker’s belief in the truth of proposition X) in Modern English (cf. Lyons 1977: 823). As such, although will can still function in a similar way to a promise today, it lacks the “perlocutionary effect successful promises generate” (cf. Searle 1969: 30): put simply, it is no longer an illocutionary force indicating device in its own right. Shall, on the other hand, has not only completely lost its sense of obligation, but has been displaced by will in the majority of future constructions. 4.2.

Searching for commissives in a diachronic context – manual or automatic?

Pakkala-Weckström’s (2008) approach to the identification of promises in the Middle English period is “largely manual”: she concentrates on the occurrences of certain words or utterances and their collocations in specific, mainly literary, contexts (2008: 135). This is not without its problems, of course, as these “magic words” (as Pakkala-Weckström describes them) did not always constitute promises that were considered binding in the Middle English period (see, e.g., the monk’s “small talk” in the Shipman’s Tale). In addition, Pakkala-Weckström identifies examples of characters making binding promises using different words or utterances (see, e.g., Aurelius’s promise to the Clerk of Orleans). She is therefore careful to point out that any results that she reports “are qualitative and suggestive rather than comprehensive” (2008: 135). Although Valkonen (2008) opts for a computerised method for identifying and retrieving truncated “stems” of commissive speech acts in an eighteenth-century corpus, using WordSmith Tools and his own pattern-based retrieval program (PatternExtractor), his approach shares some similarities with Pakkala-Weckström: (i) he uses literature as his test data (specifically, the Chadwyck-Healey Eighteenth Century Fiction database), (ii) his search strings are based on a list of performative verbs (initially identified by Wierzbicka 1987), which were found to have occurred in eighteenth-century data taken from the ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) corpus (i.e. promis*, pledg*, vow*, swear*, vouch* and guarantee*) and, as such, (iii) his results are also qualitative and suggestive. That said, Valkonen (2008: 255–256) was able to show that the relative frequencies of these performative verbs varied considerably in his fiction corpus; promise, swear and vow were the most frequent, having totals of 334, 135 and 81 instances respectively, and vouch and pledge were the least frequent, with only 9 and 4 matches respectively. There were also noticeable differences that could be related to specific authors: “Henry Fielding, for instance, seems to favour promise” (Valkonen 2008: 257), but Sarah Robinson Scott and Jonathan Swift do not utilise the

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aforementioned verbs performatively at all. It is difficult to know whether such differences are actually indicative of “differences between the plots of the narratives themselves, […] without in-depth textual analysis”, of course (2008: 257). Valkonen is also aware that his automatic “pattern-based” approach suffered from poor recall (due to “a number of systematic tagging errors related to certain performative constructions” and to the test data containing “a set of previously unseen patterns not present in the [ARCHER] training data” he utilised (2008: 269). This last factor is particularly problematic, as “it is generally impossible for the analyst to know what has been missed without analysing the entire corpus by hand” (Ball 1994: 295). Even so, Valkonen (2008: 269) suggests that his results are sufficiently robust to verify his initial hypothesis that explicit performatives were “realised by a finite set of manifestations” in the eighteenth century. Indeed, he argues that 83.3 per cent of the performatives identified were matched by two prototypical patterns composed on the basis of his ARCHER training corpus; specifically, the first person personal pronoun + present-tense verb (PRP+VBP) pattern, which proved to be the most common means of constructing a promise, a pledge and a vow, and the first person personal pronoun + auxiliary verb + first person, present-tense verb (PRP+MD/VBP+VB/VBP) pattern (2008: 257–258). As Valkonen’s (2008: 248) study reveals, “the automated identification and retrieval of speech acts from linguistically unannotated corpora” is not only possible but can also prove to be extremely fruitful when findings are scrutinised diligently. Any automatic procedures can be improved, in turn, by including some level of manual intervention. The penultimate section of this chapter discusses one such study by Jucker et al. (2008). The study initially involved translating compliment patterns (originally identified by Manes and Wolfson 1981, using ethnographic methods) into CQP query language (see Hoffmann and Evert 2006 for further details), as a means of creating search strings that could automatically identify compliments in the British National Corpus (BNC). A qualitative, manual analysis of a random sample of the findings was then undertaken, using two annotators. Section 5 also outlines a more historically oriented study of compliments (by Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b), the results of which inspired the above, more technical approach (Taavitsainen, personal correspondence), as well as studies relating to insults and curses.

5.

Tracing the history of English expressives

The (world-to-words) direction of fit of expressives provides an interesting contrast with the (words-to-world) direction of fit of directives and commissives (but see section 5.2). In the case of compliments, they are usually face enhancing (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b) or face flattering (Kerbrat-Oreccioni 2005) as opposed to face threatening (but see section 5.3). Indeed, compliments represent the

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positive end of a pragmatic space relating to S’s evaluation of the addressee, and insults, the negative end (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b; see also Arnovick 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). This shared pragmatic/“evaluative” space helps to explain why compliments can function as insults in context and/or be labelled according to their degree of prototypicality/ sincerity. For example, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003: 145) distinguish “routine” compliments from “sarcastic” and “deceptive” (or insincere) compliments, both of the latter type involving a negatively evaluative (rather than a positively evaluative) intent on the part of S, but differing in respect to whether that negative intent is made transparent to the target. Indeed, modern deceptive compliments function in a similar way to Kopytko’s (1995: 518, 520) “cunning” politeness variable: designed with Shakespearean data in mind, the cunning variable signals instances when Shakespeare allowed his characters to use politeness strategically to induce other characters to satisfy their wants (cf. S using politeness purely as a means of attending to the target’s positive face).11 Similarly, African-American sounds (a modern form of ritualistic “verbal duelling”) are designed so that S can insult T without T feeling that his face has been seriously threatened, because each knows that the insult does not really represent an “accurate statement of reality” (Smitherman 1977: 133–134). Indeed, the sounding competition has more to do with eloquence and social maintenance than dispensing face damage, according to Arnovick (1999: 24–25; cf. Leech’s 1983: 142–144 definition of banter as something that, being obviously untrue and obviously impolite, can be used for purposes of solidarity or social bonding; see also section 5.1 below). Sounding has also been described as a mechanism through which young African-American males, in particular, learn to exercise or express “coolness” (see Morgan 1998: 253). In the following subsections, I discuss the development of insults (section 5.1) and compliments (section 5.3) over time in more detail, paying particular attention to (im)politeness and cultural issues. I also briefly touch upon “cursing” (section 5.2), a particular kind of verbally aggressive behaviour, which is thought to have had magical properties. 5.1.

Insults over time: The ritualised and the creative

As the title of this subsection suggests, insults (past and present) can be ritualised and thus highly stylised, or creative and highly original and thus completely context-dependent. The former are often described as “agonistic insults”: the oldest of these, the practice of flyting, dates from Viking times. However, flyting was, in fact, a multi-speech-act event consisting of boasts, threats, curses and/or vows, in addition to insults, all of which were delivered as part of a “claim”, “defense” or “counterclaim” (Clover 1980: 452). As lines 499–610 of Beowulf reveal, the insulting aspect of a flyting event typically included insinuations of cowardice, failure and irresponsible behaviour. For example, Unferth insinuated that Beowulf

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foolishly risked his life over a contest with Breca (that he went on to lose), and that (his past failure suggested) he would not be able to defeat the monster, Grendel. It should be noted that flyting events tended to operate within a larger heroic context: put simply, a flyting hero had to determine a course of action that would avert violence, resolve animosity or lead to further engagement with an opponent. In this particular episode, Beowulf opted to avert violence by (i) encouraging others to join him in celebrating his victory over a sea-beast (whilst competing against Breca), and (ii) assuring his audience that he would be victorious over Grendel as he had been over the sea-beast – but not before he had accused Unferth of being drunk (for an extended discussion of the Unferth episode, see Clover 1980: 453; Arnovick 1995: 608–609; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 77–78).12 According to Hughes (1991: viii), the flyting phenomenon suffered a decline in the medieval period before enjoying a brief revival in the Renaissance period (thanks, largely, to Scots literature). Nevertheless, Bax (1981, 1999) has found evidence of ritual challenges between medieval knights, and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 80) identify a name-calling practice involving medieval saints (and their “evil” adversary), which usually resulted in martyrdom (for an albeit creative as opposed to ritualistic example of this particular phenomenon, see Chaucer’s treatment of Cecile in The Second Nun’s Tale). Mention of Chaucer’s work is appropriate at this juncture, for much of our evidence in respect to the genre of flyting comes from literary accounts. This strong literary element helps to explain Arnovick’s (1999) observation that flyting practices had become a “hybrid” of oral and written practices by the later medieval period.13 The modern period then witnessed a further change (which Arnovick links to cultural change): the “death of flyting” and its replacement by a different type of verbal duel: sounding. Although the practice of sounding is distinct from flyting in that the latter was meant to be taken seriously and thus could lead to actual violence, Arnovick (1999: 36) suggests they have much in common when viewed as “overlapping illocutionary realms [which] create a pragmatic entity characterised by an agonistic mode of performance”. Note the similarity here with Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2000: 70) claim that a “precise description of a speech act cannot be achieved without reference to neighboring speech acts (semantic field theory here conceptualized as pragmatic space)”. Indeed, Jucker and Taavitsainen insist that any description “of insults must also take into account such neighboring speech acts as slanders and slurs, oaths, swearing, disparaging remarks about non-present third parties and of course agonistic or ritual insults” (2000: 70). Their approach, in turn, seems to have been inspired by Hill and Öttchen’s (1995: 22) observation (based on Shakespearean data) that insults vary in their degree of conformity to a prototype: some insults “sit smug at the centre of the definition, clearly intended to cast aspersion” whilst “others come from around the edges – like […] cynical observations”. As highlighted in section 2.1 above, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 74) go on to outline the different dimensions captured by the pragmatic space of insults: at

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the formal level, for example, they distinguish between agonistic insults that are ritual (and thus rule governed and typified) and insults that are creative and ad hoc. At the level of context dependence, they also “distinguish between conventionalized insults and particularized insults (on the analogy of conventionalized and particularized implicatures)” (2000: 76). In the Canterbury Tales, the Host’s allusion to the possibility of food poisoning when describing the Cook’s culinary skills provides us with an extended example of an insult that is both creative and conventional (“For many a paste hastow laten blood, / And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow sold / That hath been twies hoot and twies coold”, lines 4,347–4,348). The Host, in turn, receives a “particularised” insult from the Pardoner, who wants him to kiss his bogus relics (“com forth, sire Hoost, and offer first anon, / And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon”, VI 943–944). As Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 82) explain, we can classify this as an insult only because of its perlocutionary effect (i.e. the Host’s reaction). It should be noted here that Jucker and Taavitsainen concur with Arnovick’s (1999: 21–22) view that “a ritual insult requires a response in kind, [and] a personal insult demands a formal denial or mitigating excuse” (see also Labov 1972: 335), whilst also allowing for the possibility that interactants may respond violently or remain silent. As the Pardoner’s request to the Host (above) cannot be said to be true or false, Jucker and Taavitsainen also describe the resulting insult as being “non-truth conditional or performative” (see semantics level). In addition, the insult could be seen as being unintentional on the Pardoner’s part. The (un)intentionality of insults is addressed as part of speaker attitude, by Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 74). Additional characteristics addressed here include ludic/aggressive and ironic/sincere. To explain the ludic component, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 75) point to the modern practice of sounding (as “a mere contest of verbal prowess”) and banter (“as a form of playful insults between intimates”), which, for them, are very different behavioural practices to that exhibited by the Lord Chief Justice when questioning the witness, Dunne, in the treason trial of Lady Alice Lisle (1685). Dunne, a baker by trade, gave a very confused account of events surrounding his activities as messenger for the accused. Growing increasingly impatient, the Lord Chief Justice began “to intimidate Dunne” as a means of getting him to “tell the truth”: i.e. to tell “events in a way that correspond[ed] more closely and in a more plausible way with the events told by Lady Lisle and by the other witnesses” (2000: 88). The judge’s strategy involved name-calling and mocking, aggressive questioning, admonishing Dunne to tell the truth, and accusing him of lying (“thou vile Wretch […] How durst you offer to tell such horrid Lyes in the presence of God and of a Court of Justice? […] Thou art a strange prevaricating, shuffling, snivelling, lying Rascal” [114–115]). Recent work by Bousfield (2007) and Mills (2003), however, may point to the possibility of potential movement between the ludic–aggressive/(un)intended/ ironic–sincere components of Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2000: 74) speaker atti-

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tude domain. Bousfield (2007) explores a “conversation” between two of the main characters of Henry IV, Part I, where Hal and Falstaff take on the “identities” of the characters of Hal’s father (King Henry IV) and Hal respectively (see Act II, scene IV). Using Leech’s (1983: 142–144) definition of banter as his starting point (i.e. saying something which is obviously untrue and obviously impolite as a means of achieving solidarity or social bonding with one’s interlocutor), Bousfield shows how Shakespeare intersperses the dialogue of Hal-as-King with not only banter – that is, comments about Falstaff that are obviously untrue – but also comments that are actually true and, moreover, extremely offensive. Thus, Falstaff (who is known to be diseased) is described by Hal-as-King as being “a trunk of humours” and a “swollen parcel of dropsies”. Of course, this is a stylistic device utilised by Shakespeare to signal Hal’s, as yet unrecognised, linguistic prowess (cf. sounding) and, according to Bousfield, developing king-like qualities (which will ultimately lead him to part company with his ne’er-do-well “friend”, Falstaff). Nevertheless, Bousfield (2007: 216) is careful to remind readers of Mills’ (2003: 14) observation: namely, we can manipulate banter in a modern (and, it would seem, a historical) context so that, although what we say is superficially non-serious, it is actually closer to our “true feelings than perceived to be by H” and, as such, becomes “surreptitiously face damaging” (my italics). Smitherman (1977), Arnovick (1999) and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) seem to be aware of the existence of a “thin line” between banter and insult when it comes to sounding. Smitherman (1977: 199, 120–121) argues that, “while [sounds] are not supposed to be taken seriously, the point nevertheless can be to ‘put somebody in check’ and to make that person think about (and possibly correct) the behaviour signified”. Similarly, Arnovick (1999: 21) identifies “a tension between truth and falsity within the [sounding] competition”, but insists that, in order to stay within the rules of the game, interlocutors must “edge toward an accurate reflection of reality without exceeding the safe veneer of fiction”. As Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 90) highlight, denials (as opposed to reactions in kind) are often a sign that the rules of the game have been broken and that the “insult” has thus become “personal”. Characteristics that suggest this personal element within the “Falstaff-Hal burlesque” (Humphrey 1960) include: (i)

(ii)

the use of existential presuppositions (as opposed to assertions). For example, Hal-as-King asks Falstaff-as-Hal “why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies […] that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian”, thereby presupposing that Falstaff is “a diseased, beastly, foul, roguish, aging leader of vile scoundrels” (Bousfield 2007: 216); Falstaff wanting to stay around to “defend his own face” even though – at the time – he is meant to be adopting the role of Hal and, significantly, the sheriff “is at the door”, thus making it unsafe for him (Bousfield 2007: 218).

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Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 89–92) also highlight a very recent phenomenon – flaming – that is akin to online sounding in some cases (see, e.g., the newsgroup alt.flame). Alt.flame promotes a ludic interpretation of flaming: this effectively means that users continually attempt to offend others whilst appearing indifferent to attempts to offend them. Users that seem to take offence are deemed to have been “spanked”, and, as such, lose a great deal of status within the group. Equally, users “grow” in status by successfully “spanking” another (Hardaker, personal correspondence; cf. Smitherman 1977; Arnovick 1999). Flaming activities need not be ludic, of course. Indeed, well-known social network sites have deemed such behaviour disruptive and unacceptable because it contravenes normal and accepted practices for their given communities (Lave and Wenger 1991). Studies that investigate the face-threatening potential of flaming include Baym (1996), Herring et al. (2002), Vrooman (2002), O’Sullivan and Flanagin (2003) and Graham (2007). 5.2.

Cursing

Another modern verbal activity that displays both ludic and face-damaging characteristics is that of cursing. Indeed, cursing is associated with the “expression of anger or frustration”, whether or not that anger or frustration is directed at a specific target (Danet and Bogoch 1992: 135; Culpeper and Semino 2000: 103) and with “jest” (Danet and Bogoch 1992: 135). The anger or frustration component often ensures that swearing – in the sense of bad language – is involved (indeed, cursing and swearing are often synonymous today). Swearing, cursing and, indeed, oath-making are also linked historically (see, e.g., Montagu 1967; Hughes 1991; Arnovick 1999): swearing overlaps with oath-making when it is “assertive” or “adjurative”, according to Montagu (1967). Expletive, ejaculatory and exclamatory swearing are all expressive in function (i.e. capture the kinds of swearing that display anger or frustration); and execratory swearing “takes the form and force of a [maleficent] curse” (i.e. is a deontic speech act). The specific focus of this subsection is that of the deontic harm-causing curse, as it appears to have a different direction of fit to the (modern) exclamatory/ludic curse. These “serious” curses (as Danet and Bogoch 1992 label them) are evident in extant legal data especially (see, e.g., Danet and Bogoch’s 1992 study of AngloSaxon legal documents and Culpeper and Semino’s 2000 study of Early Modern English courtroom transcripts and treatises containing narratives of witchcraft events). But they are difficult to capture without modifying existing speech-act categories (e.g. Austin’s 1962: 160 behabitive; Searle’s 1979: 16–17 declaration; Bach and Harnish’s 1979: 109, 117 conventional acknowledgement) so that they allow for the influence of shared community beliefs – for example, the belief that, because of a supernatural alliance, a person’s “words” could cause X to occur (where X = a harmful event). By way of illustration, Culpeper and Semino (2000: 109) suggest the maleficent curse and the ludic curse could share the same prop-

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ositional act (relating a future event to H) and one preparatory condition (that the future event is not in H’s interest). But the maleficent curse would require an additional preparatory condition in most cases (that S has a pact with the devil, or some other supernatural power, and is able to use his/her power; cf. Searle 1969). The maleficent curse would also have a sincerity condition not present in the ludic curse (that S wants the future event to happen; cf. Wierzbicka’s 1987: 164 definition of modern cursing, which is more to do with S expressing his/her feelings than with causing actual, intentional harm). Culpeper and Semino (2000: 111) go on to draw from Levinson’s (1992) notion of “activity type” as a means of demonstrating how deontic cursing was historically a culturally recognised activity, with important pre-events (namely, a “pact” with the devil and a “falling out” of T and the curser), and, in the case of extant legal data, a post-event – a trial. Speech acts other than maleficent curses can also be identified: for example, the curser usually “begs” and “asks” something of T prior to the actual cursing event, but curses T when s/he “denies” his/her request for assistance (cf. section 5.1). Culpeper and Semino (2000: 100) provide the following illustrative example, drawn from witness depositions relating to the trials of the Pendle Witches (1612: 157): […] the said Isabel Robey [accused] asked her [the victim for] milk, and shee denied to giue her any: […] the next day after this Examinate […] was suddenly pinched on her Thigh as she thought, with foure fingers & a Thumbe twice together, and thereupon was sicke […] shee could not get home but on horse-backe […]

Culpeper and Semino (2000: 113–114) further suggest that so powerful was the “witchcraft activity type” they outline that “the original intention of the producer of the utterance” was not the final determiner in interpreting the use of “curse and wish (that)” in the Early Modern English courtroom. Indeed, exclamatory swearing, insults and ludic curses – i.e. verbal activities meant to be expressive in function (Montagu 1967) – were frequently “reinterpreted” as serious or maleficent curses by the judges (see also Archer 2002). 5.3.

Compliments: Enhancing face in a historical context

As the title of this subsection intimates, compliments are social moves that are designed to “make the target feel good”, and that share the same evaluative space as “flattering, praise, admiration, commendation, recommendation, accolade and words of appreciation” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b: 198, 224). Indeed, Holmes (1988: 446) classifies compliments as a type of “speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some ‘good’ (possession, characteristic, skills, etc.) which is positively valued” by both. That said, compliments can concern a third person and not the addressee directly, when “a direct link between the positively evaluated person

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and the addressee” exists or can be established (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b: 198). Compliments are also interesting because – like greetings, thanks and apologies – they require a second component (Pomertanz 1978). However, in contrast to the aforementioned speech acts, compliments simultaneously enhance and threaten the face of their recipients (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b). As such, recipients must decide what to do with them in politeness terms: i.e. “agree to the compliment in some way or other” by thanking the giver, and risk “violat[ing] the modesty maxim”, or disagree, and “violate the maxim of agreement” (2008b: 195; cf. Leech 1983). Additional second parts identified by researchers include rejecting the compliment (which threatens the giver’s face), “credit transfer” to somebody else, ignoring the compliment or paying back in kind (see, e.g., Chen 1993; Schneider 1999; Golato 2002, 2005). Two of the best-known modern studies of compliments were conducted by Manes and Wolfson (1981) and Holmes (1988), using ethnographic, field-collected material. Length constraints prevent a detailed discussion of these studies, here. Suffice it to say, both studies suggest that compliments in American and New Zealand English tend to be “remarkably formulaic” today, with “a very small number of lexical items and syntactic patterns account[ing] for the great majority” of occurrences (Manes and Wolfson 1981: 115; Holmes 1988: 452). As established above (section 4.2), Jucker et al. (2008) have utilised modified versions of some of the patterns identified by Manes and Wolfson as a means of undertaking a (semi-)automatic analysis of compliments in the British National Corpus. Although the Manes and Wolfson-inspired patterns over-generated hits (leading to precision errors) and under-generated hits (leading to recall errors), Jucker et al. were able to demonstrate the wide use of formulaic compliments in modern British English. In addition, some of the “mistakes” that were generated by their search algorithms proved to be quite illuminating: for example, they found that, rather than functioning as compliments, conventionalised phrases such as you’re very kind often introduced “a request or kindly reject[ed] an offer or indeed a compliment” in context (Jucker et al. 2008: 284). The (dis)counting of ironical and playful compliments was also dependent on an “assess[ment] […] of the unfolding discourse”. Jucker et al. (2008: 283) cite the example of a character from a novel stating “you’re so brave”, the irony of which is intimated by the author in the very next sentence: “She poured out her scorn, and with it her jealousy and frustrated rage” (BNC GIS 2961–2966). To counter such problems, Jucker et al. (2008) sought inter-annotator agreement for any compliments found automatically by their algorithms. Yet, playful compliments still proved difficult: indeed, they provided many of the cases in which the two annotators had differing opinions. Jucker et al. (2008: 283) highlight the example of a character (the queen-dowager) murmuring “My precious White Rose! […] You are so young, so tender – you know not the wickedness of the world, of devious and ambitious rascals. How could you know!” (BNC CCD 1401).

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In spite of these difficulties, Jucker et al. believe their (semi-)automatic approach to speech-act identification has potential – if further studies seek to improve the individual search algorithms by applying them to different corpora (historical and modern). Two of the authors – Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008b) – have also shown how a different, yet related,14 type of computer-aided (i.e. “ethnographic”) analysis can be utilised to study English compliments in a historical context: they searched for the speech-act label compliment in conjunction with lexical items likely to indicate positive evaluation (e.g. beautiful, (really) nice, (really) great, lovely, well done, like/love your, what a, you look/’re looking). Historically (i.e. as recently as the Early Modern English period), compliment also encompassed “greetings and farewells, congratulations and condolences, and even requests and thanks”, making the English compliment similar to the Old German compliment (see Beetz 1999: 142). Taavitsainen and Jucker’s (2008b) study captures this restriction of compliments from a more general usage to their more specific and evaluative usage today. In the remainder of this subsection, however, I will focus on Taavitsainen and Jucker’s (2008b: 224) claim that historical compliments – like compliments today – “are gendered speech acts, connected with positive politeness” (cf. Holmes 1988). Indeed, they argue that the social “strokes” evident in, for example, a fictional Dialogue Between Two Young Ladies Lately Married, Concerning Management of Husbands (1696) is “remarkabl[y] […] similar” to (if not a parody of) how women, today, are said to (re-)establish solidarity and attend to one another’s face needs: “The tone is light at first and deals with looks and fashions” (2008b: 225–226). Thus each greet the other with compliments: “you seem more beautiful than ever […] perhaps my new Mantua adds to my little Beauty: You like the Fashion then?”. However, “as the discourse unfolds the discussion becomes serious and confidential with negative aspects of women’s lives in the forefront” (2008b: 225). For example, Lucy laments how her “good Man, tho’ he be so very penurious to his Wife, is other ways sufficiently profuse in wasting that fair Estate which [she] brought him”. This occasions Amy to offer advice to Lucy “on how to improve her situation” (2008b: 225). The sum of this advice is that she should follow Amy’s example: “to appear to [her] Husband always in a good humour”. Taavitsainen and Jucker’s fictional data reflect another modern practice: that women gave and received more compliments than men and commented upon different topics. They found, for example, that both female and male authors focused on looks, when targeting women characters, and that the women characters tended to “interpret” looks-based compliments as “flattery” (2008b: 215): thus, one character (Lady C) responded “no one can flatter so prettily as you do” when congratulated on her “excellent looks” (Moonshine 1843: 35–36). In the few instances when male authors allowed male characters to be complimented on their looks, they responded by bowing – something which, at the time, was “typically male” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b: 216). Male characters who complimented other male characters tended to comment on nationality, the English language or patriotism as

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opposed to looks: for example, one character reported that another character had commented that “He [spoke] peculiarly good English, and the compliment of addressing [him] in that language was therefore as judicious as delicate” (Pelham 1828: 251–252). Such topics were not utilised by female authors.

6.

Conclusion and future possibilities

This chapter has sketched the histories of several speech acts in English and, in the process of so doing, highlighted a recent trend amongst speech-act analysts: the utilisation of (im)politeness approaches, a prototype approach and/or the idea of a shared pragmatic space to explain speech acts and their development over time (see, e.g., Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Busse 2002, 2008; Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008; Kohnen 2008a; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b).15 That speech acts and facework should overlap is not surprising, of course, given speech acts primarily help us to “do” things with language and when we “do” those things we impact upon our interlocutors’ and/or our own actions or environment in some way. The idea of a multidimensional pragmatic space is especially useful when seeking to trace the historical development of speech acts, as the theoretical framework (as devised by Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000) seeks to allow for diachronic as well as synchronic variation. In addition, the inclusion of “context-specific” and “culture-specific” coordinates (Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 64) encourages us to be sensitive to ways of “doing” facework that may exhibit cultural and historical biases. Yet, I would argue that more detailed work is required if we are to fully appreciate the relationship between the realisations of speech acts and our understanding of (im)politeness in various contexts, both historical and modern. For example, we might undertake further research as a means of determining whether: – as is the case in Westernised contexts today, “experiential norms”, that is, norms that have their basis in each individual’s total experiences (Culpeper 2008: 29) affected the historic realisation of speech acts at all; or – as seems to be believed, speech acts of times past were solely determined by the interlocutors’ understanding of shared norms for their given activity or context-of-situation (see, e.g., Taavitsainen and Jucker’s 2008b: 225 comments in respect to speech acts being “firmly embedded in social practices”; see also Watts 2003). Literary works, both historical and modern, probably provide us with the best means of determining the existence (if any) of experiential norms, as authors tend to develop their characters in ways that make them distinctive from one another.

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A call for genre-specific speech-act studies

A number of the studies cited in this chapter have already begun to utilise fictional data to study speech-act phenomena of times past. They tend to do so on the understanding that “fictional data cannot be taken as a substitute for spontaneous faceto-face conversations” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008b: 211). Rather, fictional representations are said to reflect “what was going on in real life, but […] in a somewhat different and more focussed form” (2008b: 212). As Taavitsainen and Jucker (2008b) and Pakkala-Weckström (2008) note, fictional works have proved to be a particularly rich source of data when tracing and explaining the development of both the compliment and the binding promise. Yet, the final sentence of PakkalaWeckström’s study also highlights the importance of utilising non-fictional datasets – for example, court records relating to “clandestine marriages and precontracts” (2008: 160) – if we are to fully appreciate how binding promises operated and were constituted ‘in the “real world’ as well” (2008: 159). It is worth reiterating at this juncture that Culpeper and Archer’s (2008) study of Early Modern English directives (i) does utilise both of the datasets highlighted above, fiction (specifically, comedies) and court records, and (ii) suggests interesting genre differences in respect to the use of some directive manifestations (e.g. speakeroriented want-statements; see section 3.3). Kohnen (2008a: 309) has also documented “ample evidence of [the] genre-specific use of directives in [sermons, letters and prayers] and even genre-specific manifestations”. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prayers, for example, contained “a far larger proportion of secondperson imperatives” than sermons and letters (2008: 305). In contrast, sixteenthand seventeenth-century letters were “characterised by a large proportion of indirect manifestations”, making “them similar to sermons in the late twentieth century” (2008a: 306). I highlight the above as a means of encouraging speech-act researchers (historical and modern, diachronic and synchronic) to engage in: –

–

genre-specific investigations (that are non-fictional as well as fictional) in the future, which can account for the given norms of a community of practice and any changes to those practices over time (see, e.g., Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008); and comparative analyses of these genre-specific investigations as a means of identifying the (non-)prototypical characteristics of speech acts within and across specific genres.

6.2.

Corpus-based investigations of speech acts – where next?

The (non-)prototypical characteristics of particular speech acts are also worthy of consideration from a computational perspective. Indeed, researchers face two main problems when engaging in corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis:

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We do not know (and thus cannot access in a corpus) all the manifestations of a particular speech act in a past period (for example, the different ways of making a request in Old English). If we trace the development of one particular manifestation (for example, imperatives or constructions with let’s), we cannot tell whether a decrease or increase in that manifestation applies to all the other manifestations as well (Kohnen 2008a: 295)

As this chapter reveals, speech-act analysts are currently attending to these problems in different ways. For example, Archer (2005) and Culpeper and Archer (2008) advocate using annotation that, because it is applied manually, can account for the various forms and, importantly, functions of particular speech acts. Yet, they are amongst the first to concede that the manual application of pragmatic annotation is extremely labour-intensive and, as such, difficult to undertake in respect to large corpora. Valkonen (2008) and Jucker et al.’s (2008) approach, in contrast, is to undertake speech-act identification automatically. However, as speech acts are “defined through their illocutionary force or, more rarely, through their perlocutionary effect”, neither of which “can be searched for directly” (Jucker et al. 2008: 273), this equates to using standard illocutionary force indicating devices or routinised forms to automatically search corpora. As Valkonen and Jucker et al. have demonstrated, this approach can produce some meaningful results when searching for routinised speech acts, such as compliments and promises. But it does mean that the more creative manifestations of a given speech act are likely to be missed, in both a diachronic and synchronic context. Jucker et al. (2008: 292) therefore propose two potential solutions, which – although still labour-intensive and by no means foolproof – at least ensure future speech-act studies will not be solely reliant on the precision and recall of computerised searches: the manual searching of a substantial part of a given corpus, and a reliance upon inter-annotator agreement. Of course, any annotators will have to be familiar with not only the likely manifestations of a given speech act, linguistically speaking, at a given point in time, but also the historical, social, cultural (and cognitively derived?) practices that may have given those manifestations their “shape” (cf. Arnovick 1999; see also section 6.3). 6.3.

(Re)considering context: A need for an explicit discussion/definition?

As this chapter reveals, many scholars have sought to answer Bertuccelli Papi’s (2000: 62) call for historically based studies that take account of the “social role of speakers and hearers, their social relationship, their modal roles (Sbisà 1995), the values attached to their reciprocal actions [and] the social effects they bring about”. Some (see, e.g., Culpeper and Semino 2000; Archer 2005) have also sought to evaluate the development of particular speech acts by drawing on Levinson’s (1992) concept of activity type (cf. Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 62). But Bertuccelli Papi’s (2000) call for historically based studies that attend to the “cognitive

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context” (i.e. the intentions and mental attitudes of participants), has been ignored, by and large. This is understandable to some extent, given our lack of access to the “states of mind” (van Dijk 2006: 161) of our ancestors. Indeed, the identification of “the inferences a hearer may draw from a speaker’s utterance” (Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 62–63) can prove problematic enough in a modern context. It’s worth noting, then, that a number of discourse analysts working with contemporary data are increasingly seeking to better define what they mean by “context” and to develop explicit theories that better account for both the sociocultural and cognitive aspects of context. Van Dijk (2006, 2008), for example, has proposed a socio-cognitive approach that seeks to understand context not in respect to objective or deterministic social variables such as gender or age but, rather, as an intersubjective construct that participants design and update (locally/dynamically) during their interactions. In so doing, his approach “allow[s] for speakers in the ‘same’ situation to speak in different ways, that is, allow[s] for individual variation” (van Dijk 2006: 162; cf. Culpeper’s 2008: 29 “experiential norms”) whilst also allowing for the fact that speakers who share the same cultural or historical background may nevertheless have access to – and utilise (albeit it to different degrees) – shared schemata (i.e. ways of doing activity X). My closing call, then, is for a theoretical debate that considers the appropriacy of a multidisciplinary view of context within the historical context: that is, an approach that combines the cognitive with the sociocultural, and, in so doing, promotes more explicit attempts to define context (in relation to the questions initially posed by Bertuccelli Papi almost a decade ago).16 As part of that debate, we might question whether, and how best, we can capture participants’ mental representations (i.e. their constructions, interpretations or definitions of the constraints of their social environment at a given point in time) – put simply, how they see the world, a given activity or social situation – especially given van Dijk’s (2006: 163) claim that “in many situations” such mental representations influence without being “expressed or formulated in discourse”.

Notes 1 cf. the Uniformitarian Principle, which holds that “the linguistic forces which operate today and are observable around us are not unlike those which have operated in the past” (Romaine 1982: 122; see also Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 22; Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 16). 2 In contrast to Schlieben-Lange, Weydt proposed a universalist approach to the diachronic study of speech acts (i.e. the idea that speech acts are, by nature, universal and conventional and, as such, their realisation may transcend social and historical variation: for further detail, see Schlieben-Lange and Weydt 1979). 3 Speech-act theorists such as Searle (1969, 1976) and Bach and Harnish (1979) classify questions as a type of directive because they can share the same directional “fit” (i.e.

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words-to-world). However, I adopt Leech’s (1983: 206) stance here: that questions are better classified as rogatives because they often request information as opposed to an action, and, as such, the words uttered do not serve to change the world of the participant(s) involved. The categories are those used as part of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns (CCSARP) project, for further details of which see Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989: 18). In so doing, it avoids a problem with corpora previously highlighted by Myers (in a 1991 talk given at the Corpus Linguistics Research Group at Lancaster University, UK): that representative corpora tend to strip away much of the original social and textual contexts because of their practice of choosing texts of specific lengths. Culpeper and Archer’s (2008) data are drawn from the Sociopragmatic Corpus, an annotated section of the 1.3 million-word Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, covering the period 1640–1760 and totalling 219,780 words. Culpeper and Archer (2008: 64) categorise let-requests as a “query preparatory” form of conventionally indirect requests (see also Kohnen 2004: 164, 172). Their motivation for so doing is that let still had the sense of ‘allow/cause’ in the Early Modern English period, which meant that let-requests often operated in a similar way to can you / would you / could I indirect requests; that is to say, they “invoke[d] a strategy of approval”. For an alternative, more direct, categorisation of the let-directive, see Busse (2008). Interestingly, even when Culpeper and Archer (2008) more closely adhered to BlumKulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) view of a head act (i.e. included optional elements such as the negation of a preparatory condition, the subjunctive, the conditional, politeness markers, downtoners, appealers and so on), they still end up with very few instances of internal modification. According to Brown and Gilman (cited in Busse 2008: 95), “syntactically, [imperative] constructions involving speech act verbs such as beseech, entreat and pray […] are more polite than a bare imperative because they call attention to a felicity condition by asserting it: ‘Speaker sincerely wants hearer to do X’”. Similarly, Fraser (1975: 197) stresses that such verbs “share the inherent property that the speaker is ‘requesting’ from a position of powerlessness, relative to the hearer”. Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) highlight two subcategories, alerters and support moves, which are distinguishable by their (pre and post) positioning in relation to the head act. Culpeper and Archer (2008) prefer to use the terms pre-support move and post-support move to capture similar phenomena. Kopytko (1995) provides the example of Goneril, who exaggerates her love for her father to gain a share in his kingdom (1.1.34–266), but refuses to provide shelter for the homeless Lear some three scenes later. Beowulf’s contrasting interpretation of events typifies flyting episodes, which, as Clover (1980: 458) maintains, involved “argu[ing] interpretations, not facts”. That said, civil and judicial records of sixteenth-century Scotland also make frequent reference to flyting, describing it as a socially disruptive behaviour (see Arnovick 1999: 28 for further detail). The results achieved from using lexical pattern searches exhibiting positive evaluation in their historical study inspired Taavitsainen and Jucker to go on, with Schneider and Breustedt, to develop automatic search algorithms that could be manually verified.

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15 The idea of linguistic behaviour sharing a pragmatic or conceptual space is also to be found in recent (im)politeness literature: see, e.g., Locher and Bousfield (2008: 4) and Locher and Watts (2008: 79) for discussions of negatively marked behaviour / face-aggravating linguistic behaviour (which encompasses rudeness, aggressiveness, insults and sarcasm). 16 My thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for raising this important issue.

References Aijmer, Karin 1996 Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. Harlow: Longman. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco, and Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu 2002 The formulation of promise in Medieval English medical recipes: A relevancetheoretic approach. Neophilologus 86.1: 137–154. Archer, Dawn 2002 “Can innocent people be guilty?”. A sociopragmatic analysis of examination transcripts from the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.1: 1–30. Archer, Dawn 2005 Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760). (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 135.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arnovick, Leslie K. 1994 The expanding discourse of promises in Present-Day English: A case study in historical pragmatics. Folia Linguistica Historica 15.1/2: 175–191. Arnovick, Leslie K. 1995 Sounding and flyting the English agonistic insult: Writing pragmatic history in a cross-cultural context. In: Mava Jo Powell (ed.), The Twenty-First LACUS Forum 1994, 600–619. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999 Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 68.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bach, Ulrich 1992 From private writing to public oration: The case of puritan wills. Cognitive discourse analysis applied to the study of genre change. In: Dieter Stein (ed.), Cooperating with Written Texts. The Pragmatics and Comprehension of Written Texts, 417–436. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bach, Kent, and Robert Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

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Ball, Catherine N. 1994 Automated text analysis: Cautionary tales. Literary and Linguistic Computing 9.4: 295–302. Bax, Marcel M. H. 1981 Rules for ritual challenges: A speech convention among medieval knights. Journal of Pragmatics 5: 423–444. Bax, Marcel M. H. 1991 Historische Pragmatik: Eine Herausforderung für die Zukunft. Diachrone Untersuchungen zu pragmatischen Aspekten ritueller Herausforderungen in Texten mittelalterlicher Literatur. In: Dietrich Busse (ed.), Diachrone Semantik und Pragmatik, 197–215. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bax, Marcel M. H. 1999 Ritual levelling: The balance between the eristic and the contractual motive in hostile verbal encounters in medieval romance and early modern drama. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 35–80. Bax, Marcel M. H. 2002 Rites of rivalry. Ritual interaction and the emergence of indirect language use. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.1: 61–105. Bax, Marcel M. H., and Tineke Padmos 1983 Two types of verbal dueling in old Icelandic: The interactional structure of the senna and the mannjafnaðr in Ha’rbarðsljo’ð. Scandinavian Studies 55: 149–174. Baym, Nancy K. 1996 Agreements and disagreements in a computer-mediated discussion. Research on Language and Social Interaction 29.4: 315–345. Beetz, Manfred 1990 Frühmoderne Höflichkeit. Komplimentierkunst und Gesellschaftsrituale im altdeutschen Sprachraum. (Germanistische Abhandlungen 67.) Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Beetz, Manfred 1999 The polite answer in pre-modern German conversation culture. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 139–166. Berlin, Normand 1981 The Secret Cause. A Discussion of Tragedy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella 2000 Is a diachronic speech act theory possible? Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 57–66. Blake, Norman F. 2002 A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Houndmills: Palgrave. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131–146. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1989 Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in indirectness. In: Shoshana BlumKulka, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), 37–70.

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Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Juliane House 1989 Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behavior. In: Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), 123–154. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper (eds.) 1989 Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Vol. XXXI. (Advances in Discourse Processes.) Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Bousfield, Derek 2007 “Never a truer word said in jest”: A pragmastylistic analysis of impoliteness as banter in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. In: Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell (eds.), Contemporary Stylistics, 210–220. London: Continuum. Bousfield, Derek, and Miriam A. Locher (eds.) 2008 Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1989 Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Language in Society 18: 159–212. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Busse, Ulrich 2002 Changing politeness strategies in English requests: A diachronic investigation. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi, 17–35. Bern: Peter Lang. Busse, Ulrich 2008 An inventory of directives in Shakespeare’s King Lear. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 85–114. Caffi, Claudia 1999 On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 881–909. Chapman, Don 2008 “You belly-guilty bag”: Insulting epithets in Old English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9.1: 1–19. Chen, Rong 1993 Responding to compliments. A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 20: 49–75. Claridge, Claudia 2005 Questions in Early Modern English pamphlets. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.1: 133–168. Clover, Carol J. 1980 The Germanic context of the Unferþ episode. Speculum 55.3: 444–468. Culpeper, Jonathan 2008 Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), 17–44. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Dawn Archer 2008 Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640–1760. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 45–84.

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Culpeper, Jonathan, and Elena Semino 2000 Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and activity types in Early Modern England. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 97–116. Danet, Brenda, and Bryna Bogoch 1992 From oral ceremony to written document: The transitional language of AngloSaxon Wills. Language & Communication 12.2: 95–122. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella 2008 Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 115–131. Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet 2003 Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edmondson, Willis J., and Juliane House 1981 Let’s Talk and Talk About it: A Pedagogic Interactional Grammar of English. München: Urban and Schwarzenberg. Fisher, Sheila 2000 Women and men in late medieval English romance. In: Roberta L. Krueger (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, 150–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzmaurice, Susan, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2007 Methods in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fraser, Bruce 1975 Hedged performatives. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III: Speech Acts, 187–210. New York: Academic Press. Fritz, Gerd, and Manfred Muckenhaupt 1981 Beweisen – Kommunikationsformen und ihre Geschichte. In: Gerd Fritz and Manfred Muckenhaupt (eds.), Kommunikation und Grammatik, 196–207. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Givón, Talmy 1993 English Grammar. A Function-based Introduction. Vol. II. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goffman, Erving 1971 Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. London: Penguin. Golato, Andrea 2002 German compliment responses. Journal of Pragmatics 34.5: 547–571. Golato, Andrea 2005 Compliments and Compliment Responses: Grammatical Structure and Sequential Organization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Graham, Sage Lambert 2007 Disagreeing to agree: Conflict, (im)politeness and identity in a computer-mediated community. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 742–759. Grzega, Joachim 2005 Adieu, bye-bye, cherio: The ABC of leave-taking terms in English language history. Onomasiology Online 6: 56–64. Hasund, Ingrid Kristine, and Anna-Brita Stenström 1997 Conflict talk: A comparison of the verbal disputes between adolescent females in two corpora. In: Magnus Ljung (ed.), Corpus-based Studies in English:

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Papers from the Seventeenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17). Stockholm, May 15–19, 1996, 119–133. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Herring, Susan, Kirk Job-Sluder, Rebecca Sheckler and Shasha Barab 2002 Searching for safety online: Managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. The Information Society 18: 371–384. Hill, John M. 2008 The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hill, Wane F., and Cynthia J. Öttchen 1995 Shakespeare’s Insults. Educating Your Wit. New York: Crown Trade. Hoffmann, Sebastian, and Stefan Evert 2006 BNCweb (CQP-Edition): The marriage of two corpus tools. In: Sabine Braun, Kurt Kohn and Joybrato Mukherjee (eds.), Corpus Technology and Language Pedagogy: New Resources, New Tools, New Methods, 177–195. Bern: Peter Lang. Holmes, Janet 1988 Paying compliments: A sex preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12.4: 445–465. Honegger, Thomas 2000 “But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe”: Towards a typology of opening moves in courtly amorous interaction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 117–150. Hughes, Geoffrey 1991 Swearing. A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Oxford: Blackwell. Humphrey, A. R. 1960 The First Part of King Henry IV. (The Arden Shakespeare.) London: Methuen. Jacobsson, Mattias 2002 Thank you and thanks in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 26: 63–80. Jost, Jean 2004 Chaucer’s vows and how they break: Transgression in The Manicple’s Tale. In: Albrecht Classen (ed.), Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, 267–287. (Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies 278.) Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000 Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury. Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Navalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 369–389. (Topics in English Linguistics 35.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Politeness in the history of English. In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossena (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006. Volume II: Lexical and Semantic Change. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (14 ICEHL), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006, 3–29. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008 Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft 1999a Historical dialogue analysis: Roots and traditions in the study of the Romance languages, German and English. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 1–34. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.) 1999b Historical Dialogue Analysis. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 66.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen and Barb Breustedt 2008 Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 273–294. Kerbrat-Oreccioni, Catherine 2005 Politeness in France: How to buy bread politely. In: Leo Hickey and Miranda Steward (eds.), Politeness in Europe, 29–44. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kittel, Ruth 1980 Women under the law in medieval England 1066–1485. In: Barbara Kanner (ed.), The Women of England. Interpretative Bibliographical Essays, 124–137. London: Mansell. Kohnen, Thomas 2000a Corpora and speech acts: The study of performatives. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.), Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 20). Freiburg im Breisgau 1999, 177–186. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kohnen, Thomas 2000b Explicit performatives in Old English: A corpus-based study of directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 301–321. Kohnen, Thomas 2002 Towards a history of English directives. In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.), Text Types and Corpora: Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, 165–175. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Kohnen, Thomas 2004a Methodological problems in corpus-based historical pragmatics. The case of English directives. In: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg (eds.), Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23) Göteborg 22–26 May 2002, 237–247. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kohnen, Thomas 2004b “Let me bee so bold to request you to tell mee”: Constructions with “let me” and the history of English directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1: 159–173.

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Kohnen, Thomas 2008a Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of a corpusbased diachronic speech-act analysis. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 295–310. Kohnen, Thomas 2008b Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 27–44. Kopytko, Roman 1993 Polite Discourse in Shakespeare’s English. (Seria Filologia Angielska 24.) Poznan´: Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Kopytko, Roman 1995 Linguistic politeness strategies in Shakespeare’s plays. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 515–540. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Labov, William 1972 Language in the Inner City. Studies in Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lebsanft, Franz 1988 Studien zu einer Linguistik des Grußes. Sprache und Funktion der altfranzösischen Grußformeln. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Leech, Geoffrey 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Levinson, Stephen C. 1979 Activity types and language. Linguistics 17: 365–399. [Reprinted in: Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds.), 1992, Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.] Levinson, Stephen C. 1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leyser, Henrietta 1995 Medieval Women. A Social History of Women in England 450–1500. London: Phoenix Giant. Locher, Miriam A., and Derek Bousfield 2008 Impoliteness and power in language. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), 1–13. Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts 2008 Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), 77–100. Lyons, John 1977 Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mack, Maynard 1966 King Lear in our Time. London: Methuen. [Reprinted 2005 by Routledge.] Manes, Joan, and Nessa Wolfson 1981 The compliment formula. In: Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routines. Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, 115–132. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Milfull, Inge B. 2004 Advice: Performative expression in Middle Scots. In: Christoph Bode, Sebastian Domsch and Hans Sauer (eds.), Anglistentag 2003. Proceedings, 57–70. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Mills, Sara 2003 Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moik, Christopher 2007 Verbal duelling: A battle of words from Beowulf to cyberspace. VIEWS 16.1: 66–94. Montagu, Ashley 1967 The Anatomy of Swearing. New York: Macmillan. Morgan, Marcyliena 1998 More than a mood or an attitude: Discourse and verbal genres in AfricanAmerican culture. In: Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (eds.), African-American English: Structure, History and Use, 251–281. London: Routledge. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence. Its Forms and Sociopragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 84.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1995 Constraints on politeness: The pragmatics of address formulae in Early English correspondence. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 541–601. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. O’Sullivan, Patrick B., and Andrew J. Flanagin 2003 Reconceptualizing “flaming” and other problematic messages. New Media and Society 5.1: 69–94. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2008 “No botmeles bihestes” Various ways of making binding promises in Middle English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 133–162. Pomerantz, Anita 1978 Compliment responses: Notes on the co-operation of multiple constraints. In: Jim Schenkein (ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, 79–112. New York: Academic Press. Pulham, Carol 1996 Promises, promises: Dorigen’s dilemma revisited. The Chaucer Review 31: 76–86. Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 1996 Forms of address in Early English correspondence. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 167–181. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Romaine, Susanne 1982 Socio-historical Linguistics. Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudanko, Juhani 1993 Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare. Essays on Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Lanham: University Press of America. Sbisà, Marina 1995 Speech act theory. In: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 495–506. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sbisà, Marina 2001 Illocutionary force and degrees of strength in language use. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1,791–1,814. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 1976 Für eine historische Analyse von Sprechakten. In: Heinrich Weber and Harald Weydt (eds.), Sprachtheorie und Pragmatik, 113–119. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 1979 Ai las – Que planhs? Ein Versuch der historischen Gesprächsanalyse am Flamenca-Roman. Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3: 1–30. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 1983 Traditionen des Sprechens. Elemente einer pragmatischen Sprachgeschichtsschreibung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte, and Harald Weydt 1979 Streitgespräch zur Historizität von Sprechakten. Linguistische Berichte 60: 65–78. Schneider, Klaus P. 1999 Compliment response across cultures. In: Maria Wysocka (ed.), On Language Theory and Practice: In Honour of Janusz Arabski on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, 162–172. (Vol. I: Language Theory and Language Use.) Katowice: Wydanictwo Uniwersytetu S´la˛skiego. Schrott, Angela 1999 Que fais, Adam?: Questions and seduction in the Jeu d’Adam. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 331–370. Schrott, Angela 2000 “¿Quí los podrié contar?”: Interrogative acts in the Cantar de mio Cid. Some examples from Old Spanish on asking questions. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 263–299. Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1975 Indirect speech acts. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. III: Speech Acts, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. Searle, John R. 1976 The classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5: 1–24. Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Searle, John R., and Daniel Vanderveken 1985 Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sifianou, Maria 1992 Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smitherman, Geneva 1977 Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stetter, Cornelius 1991 Text und Textur. Hat die Sprechakttheorie eine historische Dimension? In: Dietrich Busse (ed.), Diachrone Semantik und Pragmatik. Untersuchungen zur Erklärung und Beschreibung des Sprachwandels, 68–81. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2007 Speech acts and speech act verbs in the history of English. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 107–138. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2008a Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 1–23. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker 2008b “Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 195–228. Tsui, Amy B. M. 1994 English Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valkonen, Petteri 2008 Showing a little promise: Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of written prose. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 247–272. van Dijk, Teun A. 2006 Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Studies 8.1: 159–177. van Dijk, Teun A. 2008 Discourse and Context. A Socio-cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vergaro, Carla 2005 “Dear Sirs, I hope you will find this information useful”: Discourse strategies in Italian and English “For Your Information” (FYI) letters. Discourse Studies 7.1: 109–135. Vrooman, Steven S. 2002 The art of invective: Performing identity in cyberspace. New Media and Society 4.1: 51–70. Watts, Richard J. 2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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14.

Politeness Minna Nevala

1.

Introduction

Verbal interaction can be analysed in terms of social attributes. When such interaction is studied as a strategic phenomenon, it may be taken to be influenced by various pragmatic factors. Politeness is an essential part of social relations: not only the way in which the speaker approaches the hearer but even more so the hearer’s evaluation of the speaker’s words has an effect on the rest of their interaction. Politeness, or the lack of it, may show either in the mood or contents of the whole utterance or it may manifest itself in separate markers like address forms and modal expressions. This chapter will present an overview of how both politeness and impoliteness have been studied as factors underlying historical language use, mainly in Middle and Early Modern English data. The discussion on (im)politeness here largely relates to the micropragmatics of address terms introduced in the chapter by Mazzon (this volume), as well as to the overview of interactive characteristics of speech acts in the chapter by Archer (this volume). This only goes to show how deeply different linguistic concepts, elements and methods are interrelated and partly overlapping, particularly in sociopragmatics, which is, in turn, discussed in more depth in the chapter by Culpeper (this volume). Most of the studies in the historical field have taken modern politeness theories as a point of departure: the most commonly tested ideas on polite language come from Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) theory. The concepts of face, power, distance and positive/negative politeness have all been increasingly attested also in historical material, such as personal or business letters, courtroom discourse, drama, literature and didactic dialogues. Another central aspect of politeness studies has been the interactional status, or role, which the speaker establishes in a discourse situation. Whereas the social status of the speaker is a relatively fixed characteristic, the interactional role is more flexible and usually relates to the nature of the relationship between the interactants, as well as to temporary shifts in intentionality and power.1 The role also concerns the nature of (im)politeness as a whole: the debate on how much our understanding of language use as polite or impolite is influenced by the speaker, and how much by the hearer response. The functional approach is particularly applicable to address terms, which often show variation even within the same person’s speech or writing, and in similar contexts. Fluctuation in the polite use of thou and you has mostly been studied in dialogic material, such as court records and plays, which seem better suited for

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looking at reasons for changes in reciprocal politeness than, for example, fiction and letters (e.g. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak 1992; Bruti 2000; Nevala 2004; Kohnen 2008a and 2008b). In particular, studies that compare court language with dramatic dialogue have revealed differing patterns in the written and spoken forms of polite language use. In addition to address terms, there have also been studies on power and solidarity (e.g. Brown and Gilman 1960, 1989; Calvo 1991; Hart 2000), deference (Fitzmaurice 2001), politeness strategies (Kopytko 1993, 1995; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1999; Martino 2000) and gender-specific use of politeness (PakkalaWeckström 2002, 2003). The few studies on impoliteness in historical material have, on the other hand, concentrated on insulting speech acts and aggressive language use, hostility and verbal “duelling” (e.g. Culpeper 1996, 1998; Bax 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Kryk-Kastovsky 2006; Rudanko 2006; Chapman 2008). The material for these studies has mainly been taken from drama as well as authentic courtroom discourse. One of the reasons for the dominance of studies on polite language use over linguistic impoliteness concerns the prevalent interest in first-order normative approaches to politeness in general. The situation is gradually improving, since models such as those in Culpeper (1996) and Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) are being increasingly used and modified, and also significantly revised by the original authors themselves, to suit the analyses of different modern and historical data (see e.g. Culpeper 2005, 2008; Archer 2008; Bousfield 2008a, 2008b; Bousfield and Culpeper 2008; Locher and Bousfield 2008). The same recurrent themes are taken up in the context of both politeness and impoliteness theories and their applications: the principles of (im)polite language use and its universal features have been a hotbed of modern politeness research for several decades, and, as my following synthesis will show, have recently started to emerge in the field of historical pragmatics as well.

2.

What is politeness? On the contemporary theoretical background

As studies on premodern data show, historical (im)politeness research has been relatively successfully built on modern politeness models and theories. Instead of an in-depth examination of well-known theories, like Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) or Watts’s (2003) models, I will discuss here some of the basic politeness issues that have been the cause of debate over the past two decades. Since issues concerning polite language use, power, distance and positive/negative politeness are increasingly recurrent themes in historical pragmatics as well, I will concentrate more closely on some facts about these topics in this section.

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Definition of politeness

The discussion around the concept of politeness itself has been going on for more than two decades. One of the most debated definitions of what constitutes polite language use is, of course, that discussed in Brown and Levinson’s theory. But, as Meier (1995), for one, notes, although Brown and Levinson have formulated a theory of politeness, the term is never actually defined in their book. Instead, they focus on describing politeness via accounts of negative and positive politeness strategies. To them, understanding how people use language in a strategic, meaningful way requires reconstructing speakers’ communicative intentions and the logic behind their linguistic choices (Brown and Levinson 1987: 8). This strategicness of politeness to redress face threats has been opposed by a number of scholars, mainly because it is said to describe politeness as a “linguistic gambit” instead of seeing politeness as the basis for all interaction and language use (Sell 1992: 114; Diamond 1996: 146). Therefore, there have been claims that we should abandon the word “politeness” altogether, since it connotates politeness as a moral or psychological element (e.g. Thomas 1995: 178–179). One possible alternative term suggested is “indirectness”, which, in fact, is exactly the concept that Held (1992: 141) accuses Brown and Levinson of overly emphasising (see also section 3.2 below on a historical view of the relationship between indirectness and politeness). Moral interpretations of politeness may also concern the cultural and ideological conceptions of the word (for the relationship between language and the ideology of politeness, see e.g. Watts 1999). Terminology not connected with the speaker’s psychological disposition is increasingly preferred. In Meier’s (1995: 351) view, we do not need to describe different types of politeness, but rather focus on socially appropriate language behaviour (which, according to him, is not often done when following Brown and Levinson’s concepts). Watts (1992, 2003: 47–49, 254; see also Janney and Arndt 1992: 23 for social politeness vs. tact) distinguishes polite behaviour from politic behaviour, and argues that when politeness is treated as a theoretical concept, it is separated from its social context and the individuals who use it. Politeness in general concerns behaviour that goes “beyond” politic behaviour, i.e. the linguistic or non-linguistic behaviour that is evaluated by the participants as appropriate to the ongoing situation (Watts 2003: 21, also 1989: 135).2 Interactants are central also to Fraser (1990: 233) who equates politeness with speakers of a language, not with any linguistic means. The view of politeness as a deeply social phenomenon is shared by many scholars. For one, Eelen (2001: 246, 248, 252) accuses “traditional contentoriented descriptions” as being like the “etiquette books they so often dismiss as ‘popular’ and ‘unscientific’”, and calls for politeness studies based on everyday politeness (see Eelen 1999 for a more comprehensive account of the “commonsense” vs. “linguistic” studies on politeness). Speech communities may then show

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varying interpretations, or folk-notions, of politeness. According to House and Kasper (1981: 157), politeness is a specifically urbane form of emotional control.3 It can also be separated from what is considered “normal” behaviour: it includes the kind of language used “beyond” what is expected in a communicative situation. Watts (1992: 65–67, 2003: 19, 21, 133, 156, 169; see also Thomas 1995: 152) also sees this normal behaviour as politic and argues that, for example, forms of address do not represent politeness at all, unless they are used “in excess” of what is necessary, in which case they become a conscious choice of the speaker. We should, of course, remember that when we start talking about any conscious choices made in a communicative situation, it is, as Watts argues, the interactants themselves who define the “norm” for each encounter, not the researcher (see section 5 below for further discussion; also Jucker 2008: 23–24). As one of the latest discussants on politeness theory, Haugh argues that “the postmodern approach” employed by, for example, Watts (2003, 2005) and Locher and Watts (2005) abandons not only a predictive and a descriptive theory of politeness, but also “any attempts to develop a universal, cross-culturally valid theory of politeness” (Haugh 2007: 297). This results in a situation in which a theory of politeness is not seen as a necessary element, and thus the focus of politeness researchers easily shifts to broader issues of interpersonal interaction or “relational work” (Locher and Watts 2005). Whether it is possible to formulate a universal politeness theory an issue that has been, and no doubt will continue to be, at the centre of attention in the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis, very much so because of the great differences between polite language use in the western and eastern hemispheres.4 2.2.

Power and distance

Like the preceding aspect of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the sociological variables of power and distance have been criticised from both a functional and a structural point of view. In general, Brown and Levinson are said to represent a traditional approach, in which variables are related to politeness as external factors that work more closely for socially hierarchical, rather than functional, purposes (Werkhofer 1992: 174; for a discussion of power in both traditional and social approaches, see Eelen 2001: 224; also Bousfield and Locher 2008). The modern view, on the other hand, takes the variables as dynamic forces affecting social language use, and affecting not only politeness strategies, but also the structure of discourse itself and the negotiation of participant roles (Diamond 1996: 149; Blum-Kulka 1997: 53). It has also been argued that Brown and Levinson’s definition of power and distance is vague, simplistic and incomplete, particularly in the historical studies of Kopytko (1993) and Brown and Gilman (1989).5 It must be noted, however, that

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the concepts are considered difficult to define, both from the historical and the modern perspective. According to Thomas (1995: 129), power and distance are often confused with each other, since people tend to be socially distant from those superior in power. Also Wetzel (1993: 402) describes power as a “slippery concept at best, and ineffective at worst”, and concludes that it is extremely difficult to find a neutral term that would cover the meaning of power in most cultures (for a more complete discussion of power and distance as pragmatic concepts, see SpencerOatey 1996). The variability of power can be seen either as intentional or unintentional, or as negotiable and interactive (Diamond 1996: 156; Hart 2000: 210). Moreover, it can be thought of both in terms of a capacity to reach a goal and in terms of relational power over the other person.6 Distance usually correlates with negative politeness, and many studies have shown that relational closeness induces explicit speech and directness, since informality is something that is expected of the interactants (Dillard et al. 1997: 318). Similarly, intentional hostility or rudeness can cause deference to be ignored or discounted (Janney and Arndt 1992: 40; see also Kasper’s notion of “motivated rudeness”, 1990: 209). Jary (1998), therefore, refuses to draw any conclusions as to the nature of the relation between a linguistic form or a pragmatic strategy and the values of the variables. Culpeper (1996: 354), on the other hand, reminds us that there is evidence of the occurrence of impoliteness in situations where there is “an imbalance of power”, or in situations between extremely close participants.7 2.3.

Positive and negative politeness

In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, positive politeness mainly means emphasising what people have in common by minimising the distance between them, whereas negative politeness means the avoidance of invading a person’s privacy by increasing the distance between the speaker and the hearer. Criticism of the concepts of positive and negative politeness strategies can be divided into two main categories. There are both those studies that doubt the mutual exclusiveness or unidirectional ordering of the strategies, and those studies that question whether Brown and Levinson’s strategies represent politeness in the first place. One of those who object to the use of politeness strategies being mutually exclusive is Blum-Kulka (1992), who shows that, for example, requests may show variation between negative and positive politeness, both of which can be applied to minimising imposition and distance between the interactants on an expressional level. Chen (2001) also suggests that politeness should be studied considering the complexity of social interaction and the multifacetedness of utterances, since a single utterance can be used to perform many acts, and a single speech act can threaten both positive and negative face (see also Thomas 1995: 176). In fact,

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Manes and Wolfson (1981: 130–131) have found that some strategies that have been considered by Brown and Levinson as threatening negative face can be used to create or affirm solidarity, i.e. to attend to positive face. Such is the case with complimenting, for example (see Brown and Levinson 1987: 66 for their interpretation). Negative face cannot thus always be redressed by negative politeness strategies, nor positive face with positive strategies, since politeness “stretches over more than one speech event” (Watts 2003: 93–95; for a discussion of the applicability of negative politeness in historical research, see Held 2010 in section 5 below). Those theories that criticise the overall existence of politeness in the strategies include Watts (2003: 95, 97) who, as already mentioned in the previous section, argues that what Brown and Levinson call positive and negative strategies are more strategies of facework than politeness.8 According to Watts, it is arguable whether all utterances, or linguistic structures, represent linguistic politeness. Sell (1992: 115–116) argues that politeness on the whole “is neither here nor there”, and that sometimes politeness can be achieved, in fact, by being impolite. Diamond (1996: 49) links social “group preservation” and “self assertion” with people’s use of negative and positive politeness, although she prefers to call the strategies “deference” and “solidarity”.9 In Ide’s (1989: 239) opinion, Brown and Levinson mix behavioural strategies with linguistic strategies, and do not properly allow the existence of formal elements that are not always volitional, such as honorifics (for further discussion see Matsumoto 1989; concerning historical research, see also Kádár 2007). Brown and Levinson (1987: 230) do, however, also discuss cases of mixing elements of both strategies, and admit that, for example, in some utterances, negatively polite techniques, such as using tag-questions, may still end up being interpreted as positively polite. They call this kind of strategy a hybrid strategy. They (1987: 18) also admit that they may have been in error in setting aside two mutually exclusive strategies, although they persist that confusion in the interpretation of which strategy is used may be due to the fact that the use of linguistic elements like address forms can be subject to dualistic evaluation. Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory has been shown by many to be useful and flexible, particularly in the study of address use. Reasons for this include that the differentiation between negative and positive politeness fits the complexity of different formulae, and the fact that the model includes the variables of power and distance helps the analysis of the social, interpersonal and hierarchical factors in the choice of address. Furthermore, the theory is considered broad enough to allow not only the analysis of the use of politeness in many contemporary societies, but also in historical ones. On the formal level, the notions of positive and negative politeness can be used to describe how and why the forms are constructed as they appear in various data. The strategies have allowed the study of not only variation in the overall use of different linguistic items and the diachronic change occurring

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in time, but also of variation that occurs within the items themselves. These factors will be explained in more detail in the following sections on historical politeness and impoliteness research.

3.

Politeness in historical data

Using historical material means making compromises at many different levels. In a linguistic analysis, applying modern tools can be challenging and rewarding, but sometimes also frustrating, since present-day models and theories often originate from studies of language forms and communicative situations that greatly differ from those of the past. There are, however, also models of politeness that may be, and have in fact been, developed and applied with historical material in mind. In this section, I will first go through the seminal studies by Brown and Gilman (1960, 1989), then discuss historical politeness from both a social and a functional perspective, and finally concentrate more closely on politeness research conducted on early letters and literature. 3.1.

Brown and Gilman

In one of the most central models for the diachronic study of address pronouns in Germanic and Romance languages, Brown and Gilman (1960) look at how shifts in power and solidarity in the relationship between the speaker and the hearer are shown in the use of pronominal forms (T[u] and V[ous]). Power involves “a relationship between at least two persons, and it is nonreciprocal in the sense that both cannot have power in the same area of behavior” (255). Solidarity, on the other hand, concerns the “general relationship”, and it is a symmetrical phenomenon (258). The analysis is mostly based on the social perspective in that they see the primary reason for the different use of address pronouns being status related. Respectful V forms are used from an inferior to a superior, while T forms are used either by superiors in return, or between equals. The relationship between interactants is also marked in terms of the solidarity semantic, scaling from mutual familiarity to distance. In addition to being constrained by purely social factors, the way in which power and solidarity manifest themselves in language use can also be affected by group normativity and individual attitude. The results have been corroborated by a later study (Brown and Gilman 1989), which shows that the use of address pronouns and indirect requests in Shakespeare’s plays also reflect the social and contextual positions of the speaker and the addressee. Solidarity affects address usage, which means that the pronoun you is commonly used between equals, such as spouses, adult brothers and sisters, parents and their adult children, and gentle-born friends. The use of thou is, on the other hand, largely restricted to interaction between members of ungentle ranks.

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Plays were chosen because they provide good information on colloquial speech of the Shakespeare era. The basis for the study is the notions of power, distance and ranking of a face-threatening act, which are the dimensions of contrast in the minimally contrasted dyads Brown and Gilman set out to search for in the plays. When such a pair is found, the two speeches are scored for politeness. Brown and Gilman (1989: 166) also oppose mutual exclusiveness and present a modified version of the strategies, in which both are subsumed under a single strategy of redress where they may or may not be mixed. This means that politeness strategies work on the “few-many” scale, which suggests that when a face-threatening act is redressed, the amount of redress will increase as the risk of face loss of weightiness (Wx) increases. Brown and Gilman discuss deference in the tragedies by dividing names and titles, for example, into separate categories and scoring them on a scale from –1 to +2. The categories include names with honorific adjectives (e.g. valiant Othello), unadorned titles (e.g. sir, madam) and adorned titles (e.g. gentle lady). The first and second are scored with one point, and the third with two points. Christian names alone form a neutral category, and therefore score no points for deference (except for royalty). Points are then added, which means that positively polite and negatively polite terms are combined to make up a total score. The method makes it difficult to differentiate between mixed forms of address, and it can be argued that the detailed model complicates, for example, the classification of such formulae as my respectful Lord and my dear Lord by giving them the same number of points. Furthermore, Brown and Gilman argue that politeness in Shakespeare is “governed by feeling”, and that an additional parameter of “relationship affect” should be added to Brown and Levinson’s variables. Instead of talking about power, distance and ranking of imposition, we should be talking about power, affection and extremity of face threat (1989: 168, 196, 199). How Brown and Gilman’s interpretation differs from that of Brown and Levinson is not exhaustively explained in the study, since variation in the degree of politeness within the material itself cannot be explained by genre characteristics alone.10 Brown and Gilman’s controversial, and in part vague, article has given cause to many later studies, mainly on the use of address terms and pronouns. As one of the later researchers on the subject, Busse (2003; see also Mazzon 2003) looks at address in Shakespeare’s plays. His aim is to study whether Brown and Gilman’s claim that the address pronouns follow the status rule in a predictable manner can be validated, by focusing on both the pronominal and the nominal forms. His results show that their model is too rigid, mainly because “for meaningful pronoun choices there is an overlap and often also a clash of permanent, or relatively stable social factors, temporary attitudes, shifts in feeling, etc.” (Busse 2003: 215). He also emphasises the fact that the literary genre alone affects pronoun use to a significant degree, although in his opinion there is no reason to doubt that Shakes-

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peare presented authentic language in his plays. However, some pronoun choices may have been made, for example, for the sake of rhyme and metre, or dramatic effect. Studies of the pronouns of address in a literary, constructed dialogue have indeed led to questions about the validity of the data as a proper indicator of historical pronoun usage. Although Brown and Gilman (1989: 179) claim that, in their research on Shakespeare’s plays, thou and you are not “very important in scoring speech for politeness”, one cannot deny the central role address pronouns have, especially in authentic spoken and written material. Mazzon (2003: 227) points out, contrary to Brown and Gilman, that the politeness value of the address pronouns cannot be overlooked even in a constructed dialogue, because the pronouns are an unavoidable part of address. In her opinion, pronouns “contribute, at least on the same level as nominal address and perhaps even more powerfully, to the ‘face-dynamics’ of several exchanges” (Mazzon 2003: 228). On the other hand, Braun (1988: 36, 260) points out that the tendency for T forms to be associated with inferiority and V forms with superiority should not be considered in any way universal, as suggested by Brown and Gilman, although she admits that the solidarity dichotomy prevails in many languages and societies (see also Mazzon 2000; Stein 2003). In Wales’s (1983: 108, 114–115) view, Brown and Gilman are too vague in attributing pronoun shifts to changes in terms of solidarity, since this approach cannot explain, for example, the diachronic change, i.e. why thou disappeared and you prevailed. Not all fluctuation can be explained as emotional and social; instead, there might well be a semantic overlap that would better explain variation in terms of politeness (for further criticism on Brown and Gilman, see Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990; Calvo 1992). 3.2.

Social and functional perspectives to historical politeness

Both nominal forms of address and personal pronouns have been tackled in other studies on early English as well. Research questions have varied both according to available material, i.e. written vs. spoken, and according to the type of approach. I will here list some previous studies from a social as well as functional perspective. By the social approach I mean those studies on politeness that focus more on the descriptive aspects of the social identity of the speaker and the addressee, i.e. social status, as well as on the implications of power and solidarity in the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. The functional approach, on the other hand, comprises research that concentrates on the more pragmatic or discourse analytic side of address use, and that goes deeper into the micro-level of emotive and situational aspects. In most cases, however, analyses on the use of politeness employ both the social and the functional approach. The implications of social status and distance have been looked at in many studies of authentic and fictive address use in early English (e.g. Kiełkiewicz-Ja-

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nowiak 1992; Calvo 1992; Nevalainen 1994; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1995; Raumolin-Brunberg 1996; Magnusson 1999; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1999; Mazzon 2000; Blake 2002; Fitzmaurice 2002; Nevala 2002, 2003).11 Social distance, in particular, has been considered an influential factor in the development of both nominal and pronominal forms of address. In some cases, social constraints and norms have been found to outweigh interpersonal or interactional factors. Such is the case, for example, in relationships or situations that involve social mobility (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1995; Nevala 2002). The choice between different polite forms can, on the other hand, be considered a highly conscious one, and therefore different approaches on address use often involve not only the social and conventional, but also the functional factors concerning the attitudinal and situational background of the interaction (see e.g. Pakkala-Weckström 2002, 2003; Burnley 2003). The more functional approach goes deeply into the contextual level of the text. It has been used in studies by Hope (1993, 1994), Jucker (2000), Bruti (2000) and Honegger (2003), to mention a few. Here, the social status of the writer/speaker is not the primary point of departure; instead, differences in the use of address are seen as momentary shifts that derive from the context of the utterance. According to Bruti (2000: 28; also Bentivoglio 2003: 188), for example, fluctuation in the use of address terms is not necessarily triggered by shifts in social status but caused by variation in register and style or changes in emotional and affective attitudes of the speaker. The more central aspect in analysing politeness is, then, the interactional status that the speaker establishes in a discourse situation. The social status of the interactants is considered a relatively fixed characteristic, while their social roles are seen as more flexible and dependent on the nature of interpersonal relationships and temporary shifts in power (Jucker 2000; see also Calvo 1992). The choice between address forms is not governed by rigid conventions, and so situational changes have a strong influence on, for example, which pronoun of address is chosen. In her study of Shakespeare’s language, Calvo (1991: 16–17) sees any shifts between the two pronouns as triggered by speech acts, so that, for example, thou is usually used in insults, apostrophes, promises and expressions of gratitude. Shifts also seem to correlate with a change of topic as well as with the beginning and ending of sections in dialogue. In general, changing the pronoun of address can be analysed as a textual marker that indicates that the interaction “is taking a new direction” (Calvo 1991: 17). Fluctuation in the use of thou and you has mostly been studied in dialogic material, such as court records and plays, which seem better suited for looking at reasons for changes in reciprocal address usage than, for example, fiction and letters. Particularly studies that compare court language with dramatic dialogue have revealed differing patterns in the written and spoken use of address.12 In one such study, Hope (1993: 97) contrasts court records with, for example, Shakespeare’s

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plays, and his results show that by the middle of the sixteenth century, the use of thou and you was already different in speech and writing (see also Mazzon 2003: 239; Bergs 2004). In his later study, Hope (1994: 147) distinguishes between social status and situational fluctuation, and concludes that the micropragmatic shifting from one address pronoun to another is mostly restricted to “exchanges”, i.e. conversations in which both participants use address pronouns, instead of “addresses”, i.e. discourse where only one participant uses address. Hope (1994: 144–145) illustrates an emotive use of thou in an exchange from the Durham depositions by the following excerpt (1) (italics original): (1) Bullman’s wife [to Styllynge]: “Noughtie pak” Styllynge [to Bullman’s wife]: “What nowtynes know you by me? I am neyther goossteler nor steg [gander] steiler, I would you knew ytt” Bullman’s wife [to Styllynge]: “What, noughty hoore, caull thou me goose steiler?” Styllynge [to Bullman’s wife]: “Nay, mayry, I know thee for no such, but I thank you for your good reporte, whills you and I talk futher”13 Here an opening insult is followed by a more subtle counter-insult, which implies that Bullman’s wife herself is a goosestealer. This provokes Bullman’s wife to a further attack and the use of thou, to which Styllynge then answers first using thou, but then changing back to you. This, in Hope’s opinion, “retains for Styllynge the high moral ground of restraint, and implies a superiority in keeping with the formal tone” (1994: 145). Walker (2000, 2003) makes a comparison similar to Hope’s between drama texts and authentic speech from court records. She notes that thou used in the depositions is heavily marked, mostly to express either emotion or the inferiority of the addressee, whereas you is used as the neutral form. Not surprisingly, she finds that in drama the choice between the two pronouns seems to be based more on artistic means than on contemporary usage. In her later work, Walker (2007) points out certain difficulties in applying politeness theory to the use of thou and you: the use of the pronouns does not only relate to facework, which leads to another problem, namely, that if thou and you are used to redress or mitigate a face-threatening act, they may not be effective enough in doing so. Both pronouns can also be used to reach the same communicative goal, for example, in insults. Hence, she concludes that “the selection of thou and you cannot be predicted on the basis of politeness theory, and neither does the theory explain all pronoun usage” (Walker 2007: 46).14 Modern politeness theory has also proved somewhat inadequate in studies that employ the functional perspective on the diachronic development of linguistic features other than address terms. Since the social and functional perspectives are increasingly considered intertwined, as we have already seen in this section, it is practically impossible to claim that the choice of different forms would be gov-

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erned purely by either social, societal, personal, interpersonal or interactional factors. For example, Arnovick (2000: 117–118) talks about the relationship between negative politeness and discursisation, i.e. the process of illocutionary “smoothing” of the discourse function of a linguistic item, such as goodbye. She argues that the term was discursised partly because there was a need for something to mark the closure of an interactional sequence. Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Faya Cerqueiro (2007: 440) also suggest that the word please was developed as a negative politeness marker in encounters between servants and their social superiors mainly because of the need for more or new politeness terms in power-related discourse during the Late Modern English period. Similarly, the problematic relationship between distance, indirectness and politeness is taken up by Del Lungo Camiciotti (2008) whose study on directives and commissives in early English business correspondence touches on the issue of ritualised language use and conventionalisation. She (2008: 119) reminds us that in past politeness research the notion of politeness has been partly linked to how direct or indirect a person is, for example, in requesting someone to do something or committing oneself to a course of action.15 Indirectness has sometimes been considered a correlative to politeness. Recently, Culpeper and Archer (2008: 76) have argued, however, that indirectness and politeness cannot be taken as necessary correlates, and therefore we must be careful not to make any definite conclusions, for example, on early cultures being “less polite” than present-day ones (see also discussion in section 5 below). 3.3.

Early letters and literature: Politeness, facework or discernment?

Brown and Levinson’s concepts of positive politeness and negative politeness have been the basis mostly for analyses of address formulae in literary as well as in nonliterary texts. In addition to studies of address used in drama and courtroom discourse (e.g. Hope 1993; Nevalainen 1994; Walker 2007), private letters have yielded fruitful material for this purpose. In their article on salutational forms of address in personal early English correspondence, Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg (1995) make a thorough pragmatic survey of both diachronic trends and social differences, studying the increase in positive politeness strategies. They acknowledge the method introduced by Brown and Gilman (1989), but conclude, however, that because of the structure of the address formulae in letters, using quantitative methods like scoring causes problems in the analysis. In their opinion, the additive models introduced by previous scholars could only show “shifts in the structural complexity of address form noun phrases” (Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg 1995: 590). Therefore, they suggest that a qualitative approach should be used instead. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s (also Raumolin-Brunberg 1996) basic solution to the problem is an idea of a scale of politeness – a politeness continuum –

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Figure 1. The politeness continuum (adapted from Raumolin-Brunberg 1996: 171)

which can be seen in Figure 1. The scale ranges from markers of negative politeness, i.e. honorifics and titles, to markers of positive politeness, such as nicknames and terms of endearment. Occupational titles and kinship terms are placed in the middle of the scale, since they often appear within the same context as the forms at either end of the scale (i.e. Captain Johnson and Brother John). Nevala (2003) has made even finer distinctions within Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s scalar politeness model in her study on address forms in Early Modern English family correspondence. Her analysis shows that, on the whole, the positive end of the scale is better represented than the negative end, and there is a general movement towards the positive end from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Terms showing positive politeness increase in letters between spouses, in particular. The address forms also become simpler, but this does not seem to have a noticeable effect on the degree of positive politeness. Instead, it seems that power is a weightier factor in the diachronic increase in positive politeness at least: it spreads more slowly in letters written from a family member of less relative power to a member of more power, at least in the case of a child writing to his/her parent. Similarly, the use of positive politeness does not necessarily extend as far in their letters as it does in those written by family members of more power. So, the writer’s social role and thus the power characteristics seem to affect the use of address forms to a certain degree. Nevala (2002) also comes to similar conclusions when looking at address pronouns: early English letter writers tend to use thou to their inferiors and you to their superiors. The seventeenth century appears to have been decisive in this respect as well, since there seems to have been “a breach” of the power rule. This means that wives, mostly considered as having inferior status, begin to address their husbands with thou. Example (2), from a letter by a seventeenth-century wife, Maria Thynne, to her husband, uses both a term of endearment and the pronoun thou (Nevala 2003: 147):

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(2) Mine own sweet Thomken, I have no longer ago than the last night written such a large volume in praise of thy kindness to me […]16 This development may be seen as the result of the increase in the more positive and encouraging attitude towards the expression of intimacy and closeness between friends and family. The use of address pronouns also seems to be influenced to a certain degree by the situational level of intimacy and affection between members of a family and close friends, yet mostly the choice between thou and you cannot be explained in terms of shifts in politeness strategies or situational context (see also Busse 2002; Walker in the previous section). These studies indicate that the need to show group membership appears to be one of the central factors that affect the use and understanding of politeness in a language. Particularly in-group membership is influential in endorsing the use of such markers of politeness as terms of address and qualifying attributes (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1995: 588; Nevala 2003: 160 and 2004: 2,131). Group dynamics and shared knowledge become even more crucial when we look at terms used to refer to people. In her contrastive study of address forms and referential terms, Nevala (2004: 2,150) has found that, in reference, the need to identify the referent “neutralises” the forms which could be considered most positively polite in direct address (e.g. first names), and, in this respect, the politeness scale loses some of its importance. In her forthcoming study, Nevala therefore proposes that what we should actually talk about in the context of reference is facework rather than politeness as such. Sell (1985: 501), studying Chaucer, proposes an alternative to facework in the form of ritual equilibrium, which basically means one’s need to preserve group solidarity and, at the same time, to mitigate disagreement. Yet, on the meta-level, he talks about selectional politeness (i.e. the writer’s choice of never offending readers or challenging their tastes, dignity or importance) and presentational politeness (i.e. the writer tells everything that is happening or what is meant). In a way, we can draw some similarities between what Sell calls selectional politeness and what, for example, Fitzmaurice (2002: 258) calls humiliative discourse: in both cases, the writer puts his/her addressee or audience in a favourable position in order to win their acceptance. But, as Fitzmaurice adds, there is always the danger that the writer may risk his/her own negative face by attending to the addressee’s positive face. This pragmatic risk is not, of course, as high in drama or literature as in the more personal and interactive genre of correspondence (see also Fitzmaurice 2006). Genre and register variation is, of course, not the only kind of variation we can find influencing our understanding of politeness in early interaction. Kohnen (2004, 2008a and 2008b) tackles diachronic variation in his studies on speech acts from Old to Early Modern English. He (2004: 172) has found that it was not until the late middle and early modern periods that what researchers today

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call politeness and facework started to show in language use. Directive speech acts were, for example, considered more face threatening than before, which resulted in people developing additional politeness strategies (also Kohnen 2008b: 39–40). The situation thus seems rather different if we look at the earliest periods in the history of English. In his study on Old English directives, Kohnen (2008a: 155) does not refer to politeness and facework, but rather talks about “the sense of discernment”, or politic behaviour, that was triggered by the rigid social structure of the time. Particularly in religious instruction, the Christian models of humilitas and oboedientia were considered factors uniting people. The choice of directives was not necessarily determined by facework, but served other purposes of urgency or necessity (Kohnen 2008b: 41). This kind of discernment (politeness) refers to behaviour that is socially adequate and relates to the social constraints of maintaining relationships. Basically, it does not contradict facework-based politeness; rather, as Jucker argues, both types of politeness are only “different aspects of verbal interaction” (2010). The main difference lies in how much weight is lent to each type in different societies and time periods.

4.

Impoliteness in historical data

Studies on how impoliteness is revealed in historical language use have begun to gain more ground during the past decade. New links have been drawn not only between impoliteness and insulting language, but also in reference to hostility, aggravation and verbal duelling. In this section, I will firstly discuss some of the issues that have been raised in present studies on the concept of impoliteness in general, and then move on to give examples of impoliteness in historical drama and courtroom discourse. 4.1.

Identifying impoliteness in historical interaction

Culpeper’s (1996) seminal article on impoliteness strategies has given rise to various studies on the use of impoliteness in both contemporary and historical material. In his study, impoliteness is seen as a series of communicative strategies designed to attack face, and thus to cause social conflict and disharmony (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003: 1,546). Face attack may be either intentional, perceived as intentional, or both; or else, not intentional but perceived as such. The 1996 article addresses a historical aspect as Culpeper shows how, in Shakespeare’s work, impoliteness can be used as a strategic, multipurpose tool: in Macbeth, for example, Lady Macbeth attacks her husband’s face with impoliteness, which is meant not only to function as an insult but also as an incentive for him to get back into his masculine role after a momentary relapse (1996: 365). In example (3), the

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opening, “Are you a man?”, serves as an implication of Macbeth lacking the characteristics of a man, and escalates into a further attack on his masculinity (“A woman’s story at a winter’s fire, Authoris’d by her grandam”). (3) Lady Macbeth Are you a man? Macbeth Ay, and a bold one that dare look on that Which might appal the Devil. Lady Macbeth O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said, Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts – Impostors to true fear – would well become A woman’s story at a winter’s fire, Authoris’d by her grandam. Shame itself! Why do you make such faces? When all’s done, You look but on a stool.17 Also in his later studies, Culpeper (1998) touches on the more general question of how important this kind of conflict is in the furthering of plot and characterisation in drama texts. One particular issue that Culpeper raises in his later discussion of the strategic use of impoliteness relates to the intentionality of face-threatening acts. Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) argue that earlier theories of politeness, such as Brown and Levinson’s, have concentrated on speaker intention while failing to adhere to hearer perception on what is polite or impolite. Knowing the discoursal background of an utterance is crucial, but, even more importantly, we should concentrate on how the utterance is interpreted and acted upon. If intention is a factor that distinguishes impoliteness from politeness, as we argue, then we need a richer understanding of an interactant’s behaviour, including their prosody, and of the discoursal context, in order to infer intentions […] It is the response to an utterance, and indeed the construction of the whole speech activity, that may determine how that utterance is to be taken, including whether it be polite, impolite or something in between (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003: 1,576).18

This is, of course, one of the points that is increasingly attended to in historical studies of impoliteness as well. Jucker (2000), for one, has taken up the issue in his study of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s language. He (2000: 375) argues that it is only because insults are strongly related to the perlocutionary effect that they have on the addressee that they can be produced unintentionally. The same utterance may be insulting for one but not for another. This also has to do with what Jucker calls ritual vs. real insults: the insult can be either playful or serious, and the ultimate interpretation depends on how the target of the insult reacts to it or whether (s)he knows how (s)he is expected to react to it in its situational and cultural context.

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Similarly, Kryk-Kastovsky (2006) discusses the “semantic/pragmatic dimension” of “overt impoliteness” and “covert impoliteness” in historical courtroom discourse. She draws similarities to Culpeper’s concepts of inherent vs. mock impoliteness, but also makes other distinctions concerning context and speaker intentions. She concentrates on whether an utterance can be judged as impolite on the basis of its surface representations or whether impoliteness is in some way inferred. She (2006: 225) finds, for example, that, in a courtroom setting, covert impoliteness is often used when judges, by confusing or intimidating witnesses, try to make them ultimately change their given deposition. A more overt type of impoliteness occurs in cases where the judge openly claims that the witness is somehow incapable of giving a reliable address. The unequal power relation between the two interactants influences which impoliteness strategies are used and by whom: namecalling, aggressive questioning, irony and mocking are only some of the many possible insult strategies open to judges (see also Culpeper and Kytö 2000; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000). In his study on insulting epithets in Old English, Chapman (2008: 6) also talks about how the force of an insult lies in the fact that it labels the target as undesirable and in some way defective. But, as earlier studies also concur, this undesirability must be recognised as such, both by the addressee and by anyone else present in the situation. As with the case of undermining the witness’s credibility either overtly or covertly in a courtroom, in Chapman’s examples insults are also used to demean the addressee in some way. Old English insults, although highly conventional, derive from socially deviant behaviour or characteristics, such as sexual taboos, bodily defecation or sickness, and thus mark the grave difference between the target and the members of respectable society. The sociopsychological fact that nobody wants to be labelled as defective or undesirable can, of course, be taken as universal. What has been found as cultureand context-specific, however, is the actual realisation of impoliteness in language. Instead of concentrating on speaker intentions or hearer perceptions, Jucker and Taavitsainen talk about how the understanding of what constitutes polite behaviour, or its violation, differs not only synchronically but also diachronically. Thus, the meaning of how politeness worked in past societies may sometimes “be lost to a modern reader” (2000: 85). Recognising the “nature” of (im)politeness is one of the factors that has recently begun to emerge in the studies on historical data, alongside the intentionality of its actual manifestation in language use. Since the two aspects are interrelated, I will discuss these issues in more depth in the latter part of this section by concentrating more closely on Archer’s (2008) and Rudanko’s (2006) recent studies.

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Historical drama and courtroom discourse: Impoliteness, aggravated impoliteness or verbal aggression?

In one of the latest studies on historical courtroom discourse, Archer (2008) aims to explore the extent to which impoliteness can be understood in relation to “legally sanctioned” verbal aggression in the Corpus of English Dialogues. She argues that using the term “impoliteness” in a context where certain participants, (for example judges) have the right to use abusive language towards others is not necessarily an ideal way of referring to conflictive talk in that particular setting. Her basic research questions concern the way in which impoliteness is interpreted and understood by different interactants because of, or regardless of, contextual constraints. Archer primarily sets out to test Culpeper’s (1996; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003) model, but admits that the notion of “systematic” impoliteness has proved ambiguous, mainly because systematic language use can be associated with normative language in general and what is considered politic behaviour in particular (cf. Watts 2003). Archer (2008: 183) argues that prototypical impoliteness is relatively uncommon in historical courtroom discourse; therefore, one should, instead, distinguish impoliteness from verbal aggression on the basis on Goffman’s (1967) concepts of intentional, incidental and unintended face damage. Rather than making a sharp distinction between the two concepts, Archer understands impoliteness as a subcategory of verbal aggression. She argues that in such historical settings as those of institutional courtroom discourse, verbal aggression cannot primarily be considered deviant behaviour. It only becomes marked when it is either intended or interpreted as such, in order to intentionally threaten face or take offence. In her opinion, defendants, for example, come to court “expecting to have their behaviour questioned and, as such, frequently anticipate accusations before they are made” (2008: 192). In other words, they are already tuned-in to a defensive and submissive mode. Judges, on the other hand, are the ones who control the setting and are “the final arbiters” on the manifestations of impoliteness, allowing other interactants to use different verbal aggression techniques (2008: 203). What Archer also finds is that the judges interfere with the defendants’ own assessments of the gravity of face damage inflicted on them, which clearly relates to the matter of asymmetrical power. Defendants do not, in many cases, have a say in the matter: they cannot complain or receive compensation for their face loss. Example (4) is a typical example from English historical courtroom discourse, in which a judge states his superior position in relation to the defence lawyer (Archer 2008: 202): (4) Ld. Ch. Jus. Sure never any Thing was like this! It is our Province to give Directions, and we think it not proper to interrupt the King’s Counsel, but that they should proceed in their own Method: You shall be heard as long as you please, when you come to make your Observations.19

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On the basis of her analysis, Archer (2008: 204) proposes what she calls an “intentionality scale” of verbal aggression, which would range from a strong to a weak intent to harm. Similarly, Rudanko (2006) talks about different grades of impoliteness and how “aggravated impoliteness” can be placed at the high end of the scale. His study of impoliteness and speaker intention in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens aims to look at verbal behaviour that can be considered “beyond lack of manners and discourtesy” (2006: 837). He argues that the main reason for his use of the term “aggravated impoliteness” is that “impoliteness” is not a sufficient term on its own to describe all the different strategies that may be used to attack face or cause conflict and disharmony in general. Aggravated face attack happens when the speaker deliberately and intentionally aims to harm the hearer’s face, but does not want the hearer to recognise his/her deceptive intentions. The ultimate goal of both “ordinary” impoliteness and aggravated impoliteness is thus the same. The only difference between the two is the degree to which the speaker intends to harm the hearer. Aggravated impoliteness can be considered “a more serious manifestation of ill will or malice than mere impoliteness”; the latter, in Rudanko’s opinion, mostly concerns using taboo words or being rude when polite behaviour would be expected (Rudanko 2006: 838). Moreover, an act of aggravated impoliteness is prototypically gratuitous, meaning that the speaker performs it first and foremost to offend the hearer. It is also fundamentally one-sided, since, according to Rudanko, reciprocal impoliteness represents “mere” impoliteness, and it is, most importantly, deliberately planned and premeditated by the speaker as opposed to ordinary impoliteness, which can also happen unintentionally and by accident. It is interesting to see how the scalar approach familiar to politeness research has been gradually introduced in recent impoliteness studies. Past and present analyses have already shown the complexity of the concepts of politeness and impoliteness in historical material, and future work will, no doubt, reveal more about how we understand these phenomena. I will discuss some of the current trends in forthcoming politeness research in the following section.

5.

On future developments of historical politeness research

Earlier historical studies have relied rather heavily on the existing modern theories of how politeness is manifested in everyday language use. However, as can be seen in earlier sections of this chapter, it seems that the focus of historical research on politeness and impoliteness is gradually shifting from the description of how politeness works in the use of micro-level linguistic features to the context-driven macro-level analysis of how (im)politeness as such was understood in past societies. This development has become possible largely because of growing access to various types of data, such as letters, authentic courtroom discourse, writing manuals and didactic dialogues, from different languages.

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More attention has thus been paid to the notion of politeness itself. In most of the earlier historical studies, Brown and Gilman’s or Brown and Levinson’s ideas have been taken for granted, so to say, mostly because these theories have been thought more flexible and easily applicable to almost any kind of material without greater difficulties. It is only recently that researchers in the field have started to focus more beyond the contemporary views on politeness and to construct their own, data-driven models, or, alternatively, to apply later modern theoretical bases to historical material such as the Wattsian (2003) politic behaviour vs. linguistic politeness dichotomy (see e.g. Kryk-Kastovsky 2009). An increasing number of studies on historical interaction have tackled the parallel relationships between politeness and social normativity, politeness and politic behaviour, and politeness and ritual language use. Historical politeness research is thus steadily following the recent footsteps of present-day politeness research, which, as Haugh puts it, has placed the concept of politeness itself “under threat” (2007: 296). One of those who has studied the concepts of ritual language behaviour and politeness is Bax (2003 and 2010)20 who agrees with Kohnen (2008a) in that, in general, facework and politeness were more peripheral concepts in premodern societies than they are in the modern world. As Kohnen (2008a: 155) states, facethreatening acts were not, for example, felt as “a menace” but rather as “an accomplishment”. Just like, for example, self-praise, ritual language behaviour was, according to Bax, “a prime semiotic resource for modelling and defining interpersonal relationships” (2010). One of the problems that arises when people are trying to interpret these past – and present – relationships is the lack of what Bax calls “communicative competence”: A researcher meets with serious difficulties, though, as soon as s/he wants to tackle facework and politeness in unfamiliar or unknown cultural contexts. That the ways of looking at (in)appropriate behaviour differ culturally is a point made time and again in the spate of literature on the cultural relativity of linguistic politeness (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Gu 1990; Sifianou 1992), and already present in Goffman who claims that “ritual concerns are patently dependent on cultural definition and can be expected to vary quite markedly from society to society” (Bax 1981: 17).

Watts’s (2003: 262) suggestion in response to this problem is to make use of historical data that contains enough meta-comment (i.e. open criticism or private evaluation) for the reader to be able to deduce conclusions about the understanding of politeness at a certain point in time. Although Bax does not see anything wrong with this kind of approach in general, he thinks that it is “like searching for a needle in a haystack, with researchers being more or less left to chance hits, not to say the contingencies of the accident of reading” (2010). Bax himself uses printed letter-writing manuals as a point of departure for his comparative study of early Dutch letters. What he has found is that the “ritual order” of seventeenth-century Dutch society constrained people of the lower ranks to use a formal approach to their superiors, and that doing anything less than what

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was required would have resulted in a serious breach of epistolary etiquette. Bax compares the nature of early modern epistolary facework to Goffman’s (1967) notion of an appropriate mask that is put on during interaction. One of the central prerequisites for maintaining smooth relationships and establishing discursive equilibria is the ability to hide one’s true feelings, and, hence, Bax claims that early modern politeness is not only “primarily a device for self-presentation and self-assertion”, but that “there is every appearance that earlier on, during the medieval millennium, minding one’s manners was also generally moved by ‘selfish’ reasons” (2010). Similarly, Held (2010) talks about the social conventionality of ritual politeness in her study of medieval petitions. She has found that supplications are “legalised iconic acts” between two unequal communicating partners, one of which is humbling and abasing himself, while the other is being praised. The process of requesting itself consists of various argumentative steps that turn the face-threatening act into “a face-flattering act”. In Held’s opinion, there is no need to use the term “negative politeness” at all, because “explicit performatives, the repetitive overuse of prerogatives, direct expressions, syntactic prolipsy and an accumulated decorum personae are necessary visible signs of worthy subjection on the threshold of orality to literacy and from old to new social settings” (2010). How does the overall conceptualisation and understanding of what we in modern society call (im)politeness then change in the course of time? This is a question to which, for example, Jucker (2010) aims to offer an answer in his study on Middle English texts. In his opinion, there is a change from the Anglo-Saxon sense of obligation, which is derived from what we already saw Kohnen (2008a, 2008b) calling the Christian values of caritas and humilitas in section 3.3, to the early modern face-induced politeness system. In order to bridge this gap, medieval society adopted what Jucker calls curteisie ‘courteous behaviour’, which acted as “a form of discernment politeness”. Even in later periods, politeness can partly be seen as a synonym for socially acceptable behaviour (see e.g. Watts 1999). Fitzmaurice, in her study on eighteenth-century English, calls politeness a term which, although “a keyword with a meaning and implications that open doors into the mentality of a period”, carries along a range of context-dependent connotations (2010). Politeness becomes over time less associated with the manner in which interaction is conducted, with the reciprocity of accommodative conversation, and with the sense of consideration for one’s interlocutor. At the same time, politeness is increasingly connected with “superficial forms of polite discourse”, such as, for example, forms of address, ritual greetings and salutations. According to Fitzmaurice, politeness changes from a mode of interaction marked by politic behaviour, which is otheroriented, to a formal style that is more self-oriented.21 She sees politeness and impoliteness as parallel concepts that are juxtaposed by the notion of politic discourse.

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The question of whether we are dealing with politeness, impoliteness, politic behaviour, discernment or ritual language use raises, and has already raised, another point of whether politeness can be studied in historical material in the first place. As could be seen in the previous section, Archer (2008), for one, emphasises how important it is to relate (im)politeness in language to its sociocultural and sociopsychological context. As historical linguists, we are very much at the mercy of our data: as Kasper (2007) reminds us, we can make only “educated guesses” on what was interpreted as polite and impolite in the past (see also Nevala 2010). We cannot get into the heads of our historical informants to find out what they were thinking at a certain point in time; nor can we do so with our present-day informants. Naturally, knowing the sociohistorical background is a great help in itself, and we will be able to do much more than just guess when the study of historical politeness is further diversified via the expansion of reliable material. In the near future, educated guesses on how (im)politeness works in historical data will no doubt become established knowledge on its functions in early interaction.

Notes 1 By the term “social status” I mean one’s position or rank in the social stratification system. 2 Jary (1998: 18) argues that relevance theory covers not only Brown and Levinson’s notion of politeness, but also Watts’s and Meier’s views, as it also offers an alternative to the view that polite behaviour is motivated by the desire to communicate politeness. 3 See also Arndt and Janney (1985: 286) and Holmes (1995: 4) for “concern for the feelings of others”. 4 This approach stresses the fact that the norms applied by the interactants should be studied in their historical context. 5 One might also argue whether the variables work for politeness at all. For example, Watts (1989: 137, n. 3), although recognising the existence of different degrees of power and status, claims that the variables exist within politic behaviour rather than within politeness. 6 Spencer-Oatey and Jiang (2003: 1,645) suggest that people’s use of language is not only influenced by immediate contextual factors, such as sociological variables, but also by underlying sociopragmatic interactional principles called SIPs. These include fundamental, universal SIPs, as well as limited SIPs, such as a face SIP, a rights and obligations SIP and a task SIP. 7 See also Ide et al.’s (1992) scale of politeness; Culpeper (1996) and Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) for the superstrategies of impoliteness, and Sell (1992). 8 In general, Watts (2003) distinguishes between the so-called emic (first-order) and etic (second-order) views on politeness, a tendency also prevalent in other current politeness research (see also e.g. Mills 2003, and Locher and Watts 2005). 9 Thomas (1995: 150) sees deference as connected with politeness, but nevertheless a distinct phenomenon. For her, deference is the opposite of familiarity rather than of politeness.

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10 By this I mean the fact that Brown and Gilman (1989: 193, 195) repeatedly point out how “sudden”, “dramatic” and “extreme” these changes of feeling are in their material – a characteristic of dramatic dialogue that, in their opinion, leads to “feeling” becoming more crucial than “interactive intimacy”, which in turn prevents them applying the variable of distance, unless it be heavily modified. 11 As studies on different languages show, these politeness phenomena are by no means restricted to the English language. As, for example, Moreno’s (2002) study shows, the solidarity semantic started to work in the Spanish address system already in the sixteenth century, when it was strongly connected with the concepts of face, honour and class membership (see also Bentivoglio 2003). 12 By the terms “written” and “spoken”, I mean the difference between data that are composed for the purpose of oral presentation (dramatic dialogue) and that are originally uttered but then written down (court records). 13 Case 139: Deposition of “Agnes Wheitley […] of Segefield, aged 33”, Surtees Society 1845, 104. 14 In a similar vein, Fanego argues that the early use of address terms appears to have been “far from being as automatic and predictable as Kopytko and others claim” (2005: 29; see also Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1995: 547). 15 Del Lungo Camiciotti refers here to Blum-Kulka (1987), in particular. 16 The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC): THYNNE, 1604, 32. 17 Macbeth III.iv.57–67. 18 The concept of “intention” in general has been one of the most contested terms in both current politeness and impoliteness research (see e.g. Bousfield and Locher 2008). 19 The Corpus of English Dialogues: Trial of Christopher Layer (1722). 20 The articles by Bax, Fitzmaurice, Jucker and Nevala referred to in this section will appear in a 2010 volume, which is a compilation of the papers presented in a workshop on historical (im)politeness at the 4th International Symposium on Linguistic Politeness, Budapest, Hungary, in July 2008 (see References). 21 Stein (1994: 8) also talks about how politeness as a concept gradually changed from the seventeenth-century social ideal of pragmatic language behaviour to the eighteenthcentury “polite prescriptivism”, which was in general connected with the ideology of standardisation prevalent at the time (see also Fitzmaurice 1998; Watts 2000 and 2002; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2010).

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Ide, Sachiko, Beverly Hill, Yukiko M. Carnes, Tsunao Ogino and Akiko Kawasaki 1992 The concept of politeness: An empirical study of American English and Japanese. In: Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Erlich (eds.), 281–297. Janney, Richard W., and Horst Arndt 1992 Intracultural tact versus intercultural tact. In: Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Erlich (eds.), 21–41. Jary, Mark 1998 Relevance theory and the communication of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 1–19. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000 Slanders, slurs and insults on the road to Canterbury: Forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 369–389. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Politeness in the history of English. In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossena (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006. Vol. II: Lexical and Semantic Change, 3–29. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2010 ‘In curteisie was set ful muchel hir lest’: Politeness in Middle English. In: Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.), 175–200. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008 Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kádár, Dániel Z. 2007 On historical Chinese apology and its strategic application. Journal of Politeness Research 3: 125–150. Kasper, Gabriele 1990 Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 193–218. Kasper, Gabriele 2007 Politeness. In: Handbook of Pragmatics Online. Available at www.benjamins.com/online/hop. Kastovsky, Dieter, and Arthur Mettinger (eds.) 2000 The History of English in a Social Context: A Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Agnieszka 1992 A Socio-Historical Study of Address: Polish and English. Bern: Peter Lang. Kohnen, Thomas 2004 ‘Let mee bee so bold to request you to tell mee’: Constructions with let me and the history of English directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 159–173.

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Kohnen, Thomas 2008a Linguistic politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A study of Old English address terms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 140–158. Kohnen, Thomas 2008b Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 27–44. Kopytko, Roman 1993 Polite Discourse in Shakespeare’s English. Poznan´: Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Kopytko, Roman 1995 Linguistic politeness strategies in Shakespeare’s plays. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 515–539. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 2006 Impoliteness in Early Modern English courtroom discourse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7: 213–243. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 2009 Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 440–457. Locher, Miriam A., and Derek Bousfield 2008 Introduction: Impoliteness and power in language. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), 1–13. Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts 2005 Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–34. Magnusson, Lynne 1999 Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manes, Joan, and Nessa Wolfson 1981 The compliment formula. In: Florian Coulmas (ed.), 115–132. Martino, Gabriella di 2000 Politeness strategies in seventeenth-century didactic dialogues. In: Gabriella di Martino and Maria Lima (eds.), 227–246. Martino, Gabriella di, and Maria Lima (eds.) 2000 English Diachronic Pragmatics. Napoli: CUEN. Matsumoto, Yoshiko 1989 Politeness and conversational universals – observations from Japanese. Multilingua 8: 207–221. Mazzon, Gabriella 2000 Social relations and forms of address in the Canterbury Tales. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), 135–168. Mazzon, Gabriella 2003 Pronouns and nominal address in Shakespearean English: A socio-affective marking system in transition. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 223–250. Meier, A. J. 1995 Defining politeness: Universality in appropriateness. Language Sciences 17: 345–356.

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Mills, Sara 2003 Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreno, María Cristobalina 2002 The address system in the Spanish of the Golden Age. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 15–47. Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Rom Harré 1990 Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Nevala, Minna 2002 Youre moder send a letter to the: Pronouns of address in private correspondence from Late Middle to Late Modern English. In: Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Variation Past and Present: VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen, 135–159. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevala, Minna 2003 Family first: Address and subscription formulae in English family correspondence from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), 147–176. Nevala, Minna 2004 Accessing politeness axes: Forms of address and terms of reference in early English correspondence. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 2,125–2,160. Nevala, Minna 2010 Keeping up appearances: Facework in self- and addressee-oriented person reference. In: Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.), 147–174. Nevalainen, Terttu 1994 Ladies and gentlemen: The generalization of titles in Early Modern English. In: Francisco Fernández, Miguel Fuster and Juan José Calvo (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1992, 317–327. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1995 Constraints on politeness: The pragmatics of address formulae in early English correspondence. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 541–601. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2002 The discourse of seduction and intrigue: Linguistic strategies in three fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 151–173. Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 2003 Genre, gender and power: A study of address forms in seven Canterbury Tales. In: Karin Aijmer and Brita Olinder (eds.), Proceedings from the 8th Nordic Conference of English Studies, 121–136. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis. Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 1996 Forms of address in early English correspondence. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language History, 167–181. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rudanko, Juhani 2006 Aggravated impoliteness and two types of speaker intention in an episode in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Journal or Pragmatics 38: 829–841.

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15.

Controversies Gerd Fritz

1.

Introduction

Unfortunately, people do not always agree on what is true, what is good and what should be done. In the case of disagreement, there are various options for how to deal with conflict, including violence, negotiations, legal action, mediation and, last but not least, conflict management by discussion, both in private and in the public arena. This kind of verbal conflict management comes in many varieties, to which our everyday vocabulary bears witness with expressions like discussion, debate, dispute, controversy, argument, quarrel. These varieties constitute a family of forms of communication with complex relationships and varied historical affiliations. These forms of communication have long traditions in different cultures (e.g. China, India, western Europe; cf. Hamblin 1970; Collins 1998; Chang 2007; Lloyd 2007), and documents of these traditions have come down to us mainly from the domains of politics, religion, philosophy and the sciences. For Western culture, our knowledge of the history of argumentation in controversy mainly goes back to classical antiquity, especially to the early history of logic and dialectics (Plato, Aristotle and their followers), a tradition very much alive in modern theories of argumentation and informal logic. Looking back on the history of controversies, we find both long-lasting traditions, which make centuries-old arguments and argumentative strategies look quite familiar to us, and, on the other hand, remarkable changes in the practice of controversy, e.g. in respect to the textual form of contributions to controversies. Present-day complaints about the “agonism” of scientific discourse (cf. Tannen 2002) very much resemble seventeenth-century complaints about the acrimoniousness and futility of scholarly squabbles (cf. Waquet 2003). By contrast, looking at seventeenth-century pamphlets, we have a strong feeling of historical distance towards these types of text. As for the evolution of these forms of communication, it is often the advent of new media which opens up new vistas for the conduct of controversies, e.g. the invention of the printing press, the introduction of scholarly journals at the end of the seventeenth century, or the present-day use of the Internet. In all these cases we find an interesting combination of innovation and traditionalism, at least during early stages of the use of the new medium: at least partially, there is old wine in new wineskins. These are just a few topics in the history of controversy that could interest historical pragmaticists. Controversies make an attractive topic for historical pragmatics because polemical communications frequently show a characteristic pragmatic structure,

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where the opponents seem to follow certain fairly well-defined rules and principles and where they also often explicitly mention such rules and principles and reflect on them. These contemporary reflections form a valuable aid to the analysis of historical forms of controversy, supplying us with useful background knowledge concerning prevalent common-sense theories of controversy and thereby providing us with comparatively well-founded analytical categories for the history of this form of communication. Another attractive feature of working on the history of controversies is that, compared with some other fields of historical pragmatics, such as historical dialogue analysis, it is in the fortunate position of having access to a remarkable wealth of data, at least from the early modern period onward. This chapter will survey the state of the art of the historical pragmatics of controversies, concentrating on recent research on basic organising principles of controversies and their historical characteristics, with a special emphasis on text types and communication principles in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the “Golden Age” of controversies in Europe. It will, furthermore, show types of change in the history of controversies and relate them to factors favouring such changes. Finally, the chapter will list desiderata for further research and sketch the kind of research necessary for the development of a genuinely evolutionary perspective in the history of controversies.

2.

Research on the history of controversies

Within historical pragmatics, the history of controversies is a fairly young field of research. Starting with work in the 1980s (e.g. Schwitalla 1983; Dascal 1989), historical pragmatics of controversies has emerged as a field of study in its own right since the 1990s (e.g. Bach 1997; Gloning 1999; Schwitalla 1999; Dascal and Cremaschi 1999; Glüer 2000; Fritz 2003, 2005a, 2008a; Dieckmann 2005; Gloning 2005; Khorasani 2008). But, of course, historical pragmaticists were not the only ones, nor the first, to notice that the history of controversies is an interesting field of research for various reasons. In fact, controversies constitute both a very old topic of study and a highly productive present-day perspective in the self-reflection of various disciplines. I shall therefore give a short survey of some relevant work outside historical pragmatics, which provides useful background and data for work on controversies in historical pragmatics. This small selection is mainly intended to give a general idea of the kinds of secondary sources available to the historical pragmaticist. A first group of sources of useful information for the history of controversies consists in reflections on the proper form of philosophical debate, which were first brought into systematic form in Aristotle’s Topics and On Sophistical Refutations. Many of the patterns of argumentation mentioned and analysed in these works, and also the criticism of certain forms of argumentation, later called “fallacies” (cf.

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Hamblin 1970), became general knowledge among philosophers in Europe after the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works in the late Middle Ages, and this knowledge was part of academic education in Europe well into the nineteenth century. Originating from classical dialectics, different types of formal disputation developed, which were used in medieval and early modern universities for research and teaching purposes and which also provided a repository of strategies for the conducting of “real” controversies within the university and outside. This was a resource available to educated persons all over Europe and therefore could be relied on as a background of common knowledge for participants in controversies. Texts on the proper conduct of disputations in this tradition (e.g. Thomasius 1670; Leibniz in Dascal 2006) yield valuable information concerning the practice and the problems of disputation in early modern universities. (Further details in section 4.1) Reflections on controversies from an explicitly historical point of view can be found in various fields and disciplines already in the early modern period. Cases in point are historical surveys of religious controversies, which we find in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books on the history of religion (e.g. Arnold 1729). Turning now to recent work in various fields of study, research from the fields of the history of science, the history of ideas / intellectual history and social/historical epistemology is particularly stimulating for historical pragmatics. In consonance with the opinion of many members of the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury “Republic of Letters”, present-day scholars in the history of science mostly agree that controversy is a significant ingredient in the development of science: criticism is fundamental to the growth of knowledge (cf. the title of Lakatos and Musgrave 1970) and “intellectual life is first of all conflict and disagreement” (Collins 1998: 1). This is considered not just a contingent fact, but essential to the scientific enterprise: “Controversies are indispensable for the formation, evolution and evaluation of (scientific) theories, because it is through them that the essential role of criticism in engendering, improving, and controlling the ‘wellformedness’ and the ‘empirical content’ of scientific theories is performed” (Dascal 1998b: 147). The value of historical studies of controversies for the respective scientific disciplines lies mainly in the fact that “the analysis of historical cases of scientific controversies is also the key to detecting their theoretical structure” (Mamiani 2000: 143). The recent rise in interest in scientific controversies is documented by a wide range of publications, of which I shall mention only a few. For historical pragmatics, work in this field provides instructive material for the study of the historical spectrum of moves and strategies, topics, contexts, and the methods used for bringing about, clarifying, defending and refuting new ideas. In his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn (1962) emphasises the importance of scientific controversies for the development of science in various passages, without, however, giving detailed analyses of the actual dynamics of such controversies. One of his favourite examples is the famous phlogiston controversy in late eighteenth-century chemistry, which involved La-

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voisier, Kirwan, Priestley and many other chemists of the time. This controversy (and its various threads) had already been the object of detailed research before Kuhn and has been ever since (cf. Partingdon and McKie 1937–1939; Vopel 1972; Barrotta 2000; Fritz and Gloning forthcoming). Further important controversies which have been analysed in a way useful to historical pragmatics include Galileo’s debate with contemporary Aristotelians (cf. Biagioli 1993: chapter 3: “Anatomy of a court dispute”; cf. also Finocchiaro 1989; Wallace 2000), controversies on astronomy in the early days of the Royal Society (cf. Shapin 1994: 114–125, 266–291), the mathematical controversy between Thomas Hobbes and John Wallis (cf. Probst 1997), the great Devonian controversy in geology during the 1830s (cf. Rudwick 1985), early debates about the evolution of species (cf. Regner 2008), and controversies on the foundations of sociology and economics (cf. Morris-Reich 2007 on Simmel vs. Durkheim; Cremaschi and Dascal 1996 on Malthus vs. Ricardo). In the list of controversies mentioned so far there has been a preponderance of studies concerning the natural sciences. At least up to the eighteenth century, however, matters of science were often closely connected to matters of philosophy and theology, so that scientific controversy often shaded into philosophical and theological controversy, as, for example, in the case of Galileo mentioned above, in the Harvey-Descartes controversy about the cause of the heart’s motion (cf. Gorham 1994) and the Leibniz-Papin controversy on the measure of force (cf. Freudenthal 2002, Rey 2010). Of the many philosophical controversies which have been analysed and which could be fruitfully studied from the point of view of historical pragmatics, I shall just mention two: the controversy between Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche (1683–1694) on matters of epistemology (cf. Dascal 1990) and Kant’s controversy with Johann Eberhard (cf. Senderowicz 1998). There is also a considerable amount of relevant work on controversies in the humanities, e.g. in the fields of history, literary theory and literary history, where scholars have begun to analyse the history of their own discipline in terms of controversies. In the field of history, recent volumes of collected papers bear witness to this trend, e.g. Lamont (1998), Lehmann (2000) and Große Kracht (2005). The same can be said of recent publications in the field of literary studies, e.g. Bremer (2006), Klausnitzer and Spoerhase (2007) and Spoerhase (2007). Apart from these recent developments, the study of literary controversies has for a long time been part of traditional literary history, a well-known example being research on Gotthold Lessing’s polemical writings (e.g. Feinäugle 1969; Mauser and Saße 1993). A field which has always been rife with quarrels is the domain of religion and theology. It is therefore not surprising that religious or theological controversies should have also found much attention in recent research by theologians, philosophers, historians and literary scholars. One of the most important recent studies in religious controversies is the ground-breaking work on the late seventeenth-century Pietist controversy by the historian Gierl (Gierl 1997). Both with respect to its

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methodology and the wide coverage of data, this book is inspirational for historical pragmatics. Another useful recent book, with up-to-date case studies of inter-confessional debates in the Age of the Reformation, is Bremer (2005). As a survey of the state of the art of the study of religious polemics, the voluminous collection of papers by Hettema and van der Kooij (2004) is helpful. Its topics range from Zoroastrian and Jewish to Early Christian and Islamic controversies, and the volume contains 80 pages of annotated bibliography. In many cases, scientific, philosophical and religious controversies were, and still are, closely connected to political debates. This is true of debates as diverse as the Reformation controversies, the debate on vivisection in late nineteenth-century England (Mendelsohn 1987), the debates on nuclear power (MacLean 1987; Jung 1994) and the recent climate debate, just to mention a few. In all these cases, incidentally, mass media play(ed) an important role, from pamphlets in the sixteenth century to newspapers in the nineteenth century, radio and television in the twentieth century, and the recent use of the Internet in the climate debate. So, in addition to the intrinsic interest of political debates as a topic of historical pragmatics, the use of media in political controversies deserves special attention. A case in point is the development of political television debates in the context of elections (cf. Bucher 2006; Schroeder 2008). As for historical pragmatics proper, the following is a selection of topics which have been dealt with in the last 20 years: the dialogical structure of controversies (Dascal 1989; Fritz 2003; Ratia 2006), the structure and use of pamphlets (Schwitalla 1983, 1999, 2006; Bach 1997; Gloning 1999), historical theories of controversy (Gloning 2005; Leibniz in Dascal 2006), speech-act types in controversies (e.g. accusations, Fritz 2005a), communication principles in controversies (Dieckmann 2005; Fritz 2008a), the language of controversy (von Polenz 1988; Stötzel and Wengeler 1995; Musolff 2004; Fritz 2008b), religious controversies (Gloning 1999, 2010; Glüer 2000; Dascal 2004), controversies in Internet discussion forums (Khorasani 2008; Cook 2009) and controversies in cross-cultural perspectives (Salager-Meyer 2005).

3.

Theory and methodology in the historical pragmatics of controversies

3.1.

Controversies as a form of communication

Like any other communication, a particular controversy can be conceived as a solution to a communicative task in hand, e.g. a solution to the problem of coordinating two different standpoints and managing the disagreement. If certain types of problems have to be solved again and again, certain solutions or parts of solutions, i.e. a preference for certain moves and sequences of moves, can become routinised and taken over by other persons, thereby creating a tradition. Communicative rou-

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tines and traditions of this kind have been termed “types of communication”, “communicative genres” (cf. Luckmann 1986: “kommunikative Gattungen”) or “forms of communication”. In this chapter I shall be using the last of these terms. Controversies constitute a family of forms of communication with various relationships and with certain prototypes. Both the structure of the family in general and the respective prototypes in particular are historically variable. In the course of history, new preferences for certain moves and strategies emerge and sometimes become established as new forms of communication with various sub-types. As mentioned above, a type of controversy can be described as a characteristic selection of moves and sequences, which is guided by characteristic principles of communication. Speaking more precisely, a type of controversy is a characteristic practice of applying the organising principles of communications, i.e. speech-act types (including particular utterance forms), forms of local and global sequencing, turn-taking conventions, the organisation of topics, the building of knowledge structures, and the application of communication principles. More details concerning the aspects of controversies to be analysed in the framework of historical pragmatics will be given in section 4. 3.2.

Controversies as dialogues

A useful analytical tool for the study of controversies is the concept of dialogue (cf. Dascal 1989; Bach 1997: 133–167; Fritz 2003). An individual contribution to a controversy can be analysed as an extended turn in a dialogue, which consists of speech acts and sequences of speech acts, which are connected to earlier speech acts made by other participants of the controversy. This approach is quite natural, as participants in controversies themselves often view(ed) their texts as contributions to a dialogue, a fact shown by the many pamphlets titled “an answer to”, “a reply to”, “a replication to the rejoinder”, or “an apology against”. Methodologically, the concept of dialogue leads us to look for the connecting links between the contributions of different participants, their coherence, and the organisation of turns in an entire controversy. Within this framework we can bring to bear on the study of controversies all the conceptual tools developed within (historical) dialogue analysis concerning topics like coherence in speech-act sequences, dialogue strategies, global structures of dialogue, and the links between micro- and macrostructure (cf. Fritz 1995; Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft 1999). Useful instruments of dialogue analysis can also be found in recent publications in the theory of argumentation, especially the work of Walton (e.g. Walton 1998) and van Eemeren and his associates (e.g. van Eemeren, Grootendorst and Snoek Henkemans 2002). Further analytical resources for the analysis of controversies can be found in recent work in rhetoric (cf. Dascal and Gross 1999; van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2002).

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Text types in controversies

On the other hand, individual contributions to controversies are texts in their own right and can be analysed under the aspect of their textual organisation, including their topic structure, their rhetorical structure and their strategies of knowledge management. In controversies, various text types have been used in the course of history, and the history of such text types is an essential part of the historical pragmatics of controversies. A case in point is the history of the genre of critical review; the critical review was introduced in its modern form in the new scientific journals founded in the second half of the seventeenth century and often formed the starting point of a controversy. This function of critical reviews was favoured by the practice in various eighteenth-century scholarly journals of publishing not only reviews but also replies to reviews (cf. Ute Schneider 2005; Habel 2007: chapter 7). It is in this context that the well-known discussion arose of whether authors should respond to reviews or not. The genre of critical review and its (potential) function in controversies developed in various ways, up to its present-day manifestation in online review portals, open access peer reviews and reviews in mailing lists with accompanying discussion. Further details concerning text types and media are given in section 4.3. 3.4.

Specific features of a historico-pragmatical approach

In much of the earlier research mentioned above, there is a tendency to view a controversy not so much as a dynamic linguistic exchange but as an opposition of standpoints on a certain issue, including arguments for these standpoints. What is involved is essentially a confrontation of propositions. In the words of Mendelsohn (1987: 99): “In studying the histories of many debates, we find that their authors have reduced them to their abstract intellectual contents with at most some reference to human actors involved but more often focused wholly on the cognitive structures”. From the point of view of historical pragmatics we get a different picture, which diverges in at least two respects from the “propositional” view of controversies: (i)

(ii)

Historical pragmatics focuses not primarily on a particular disagreement as such, but on the pragmatic structure (or “pragmatic form”, Gloning 1999) of the exchange in the course of which proponents of the different views deal with this disagreement; Historical pragmatics focuses not primarily on the propositional structure of a disagreement, but on the dynamics of linguistic interaction, its contexts, text types, types of and sequencing of moves, topic management, strategies, principles of communication, etc.

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As for the historical perspective, there is a third specific area where historical pragmatics differs from a general historical approach or a history-of-science approach to the study of controversies: (iii)

Historical pragmatics focuses not primarily on the history of conflicts or the history of ideas, but, rather, on the history of a form of communication.

A historico-pragmatical approach does not exclude the non-primary aspects mentioned in (i) to (iii), in fact, there is reason to assume that studies applying a pragmatic methodology have much to contribute to the history of science or the history of ideas (cf. Dascal 1998a). The approach does, however, emphasise the aspect of pragmatic organisation (“dialectical form”, Dascal 2008: 53) and the history of the various aspects of this pragmatic organisation and it uses theoretical and methodical resources developed within various strands of pragmatics. 3.5.

Diachronic pragmatics and evolutionary pragmatics

At this point it might be useful to mention two different perspectives within historical pragmatics. The first is what, in analogy to structuralist “diachronic semantics”, one could call “diachronic pragmatics”. Within diachronic pragmatics in this sense one could, for example, describe typical forms of medical controversy in the seventeenth century and, maybe, contrast them with present-day medical controversies. The second perspective could be termed “developmental pragmatics” or “evolutionary pragmatics”. From this perspective one could ask, for example, how the introduction of scholarly journals at the end of the seventeenth century changed the practice of scholarly controversy and how elements of the old practice were taken over and adapted to the new medium. Research with such an evolutionary perspective is well-established in historical semantics, but is still in its beginnings in historical pragmatics (cf. Fritz 1995, 2000). The history of controversy could be an excellent testing ground for the application of such an evolutionary perspective. As for the theoretical background to such an evolutionary approach, more details are not given until the conclusion of this chapter (section 5), as the topic presupposes some of the concepts presented in section 4. 3.6.

Micro-perspective and macro-perspective

As mentioned above, controversies form a highly complex family of forms of communication, which depend heavily on a background of social organisation, of mutual knowledge, of routines, traditions and norms, on the use of media, and on other sociohistorical factors. As language games in Wittgenstein’s sense they are part of a form of life – e.g. of the life of scholars – and, again like Wittgenstein’s language games, they are also subject to historical change (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: section 23). In analysing the pragmatic form of controversies we can distinguish a micro-

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perspective and a macro-perspective. When adopting the micro-perspective, our analysis starts from the basic units of controversial interaction, i.e. the individual contributions to controversies and their internal organisation as contributions to a (quasi-)dialogue, and goes on to the sequencing of such contributions in the course of a polemical exchange. This narrowing of focus permits us to concentrate on the actual communicative process and the linguistic and pragmatic resources and procedures that are used in individual controversies. By taking a close look at these resources and procedures we gain a realistic picture of the actual management of disagreements, the negotiation of understanding, the uptake of new ideas and the growth of mutual knowledge. In many cases, however, this micro-perspective has to be supplemented by a macro-perspective that takes into account the background factors mentioned above. This is especially true if we are interested in the evolution of these forms of communication. The development of forms of communication is part of the wider development of the forms of life, and therefore developments in the practice of controversies must often be seen in the context of more general developments. Cases in point are the marked rise in number and acrimoniousness of public controversies during the Reformation period, the lively discussion of matters of politeness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century controversies, or the “invention of a public opinion” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rush of polemical pamphlets during the Reformation period was, of course, due to and part of growing religious and political dissension at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but it would have been impossible without the invention of the printing press and the consequent emergence of a wider reading public. As for the question of polite conduct, this became an important issue in European societies at large, from the late seventeenth century onwards (cf. Beetz 1990, 1999; Shapin 1994; Goldgar 1995), so it is not surprising that this question should also show up in the context of scholarly disputes. In Germany, it plays a continuous, if minor, role in sixteenthand early seventeenth-century controversies, but, by 1670, it became a serious topic of controversy in its own right, a topic which was intimately connected to questions concerning the status and function of scholarly work in general (cf. Gierl 1997: 543–574). Concerning the growth of popular political consciousness in England and Germany, recent research has argued that public controversies contributed essentially to the development of such a thing as “public opinion” (cf. Raymond 2003; Goldenbaum 2004a, 2004b).

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4.

Aspects of the pragmatic organisation of controversies and their history

4.1.

Types of controversies

Each controversy has its own form and dynamics, but it is obvious to participants and observers alike that it is possible to distinguish certain prototypes, e.g. quiet and serious discussions vs. confrontational polemics. In the European tradition, this type of distinction goes back at least to Plato and Aristotle, who distinguished, in slightly different ways, dialectic discussions, the aim of which was the search for truth, and eristic debates, where the participants merely aimed at winning the game and showing their cleverness (cf. Aristotle 1958: chapter 11). This kind of dichotomy, which has an obvious normative aspect, seems to be well-established not only in the classical tradition of dialectics but also in the common-sense views documented in the use of terms like discussion vs. quarrel. In this chapter, incidentally, I use the term controversy as a cover term for all types of polemical discourse. In order to overcome the limitations of the traditional dichotomy, Dascal (1998a: 21–28) developed a tripartite division of types of polemics, distinguishing “discussions”, “disputes”, and “controversies”. In this typology, he characterises types of polemics by specifying (i) the scope of the disagreement, (ii) the kind of content involved in it, (iii) the presumed means for solving the disagreement, and (iv) the ends pursued by the contenders. A discussion in this sense is a polemical exchange whose object is a well-described topic or problem. In the course of a discussion, the contenders acknowledge that the root of the problem is a conceptual or empirical mistake, which may be corrected by accepted procedures like proof or repetition of experiments, etc. Generally speaking, the most important tactical move in this ideal type is a proof of some kind. A dispute is a polemical exchange that also seems to have as its object a well-defined divergence, which is, however, not grounded in some mistake but, rather, in differences of attitude, feelings or preferences. A dispute, following a contest model, has no solution; at most it can be dissolved. Disputes are concerned with winning. The divergences involved in the dispute tend to recur on other occasions. At the tactical level, the central type of move in this type is the stratagem. Finally, a controversy occupies an intermediate position. It can begin with a specific problem, but it spreads quickly to other problems and reveals profound divergences. The central type of move is the argument. The contenders pile up arguments in order to increase the weight of their position and to finally persuade their opponent. Viewed procedurally, controversies, according to Dascal, follow a “deliberative” model. In many cases, the resolution of this type of polemic may consist in the mutual clarification of the positions involved. This model is much more sophisticated than the simple dichotomy, and its most attractive feature is the explanatory (functional) connection between the macro-

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level of basic types of conflict and the micro-level of typical moves. It is, in particular, Dascal’s ideal type of controversy that highlights a kind of polemical exchange, which is easily missed by a dichotomous view. As Dascal acknowledges, however, actual polemical exchanges are rarely “pure” examples of one of these ideal types, and, in addition, they often show a certain amount of dynamics, e.g. changes of topic, changes of strategy, and “dialectical shifts” from one type of dialogue to another (cf. Walton 1998: 198–217). For empirical research it might therefore be useful to employ a more bottom-up approach and define a type of controversy as a cluster of characteristic speech acts, sequencing patterns, topics, strategies and relevant communication principles, realised in a given medium. Such a constellation of features may embody a prototype, which, however, is characterised by gradual transitions to other clusters; so what we get is a network of related forms, connected by Wittgensteinian family resemblances. This kind of approach is particularly suited to an historical inquiry, as in the evolution of forms of controversy each of these features may change, thereby creating a variant of the original type. By studying these variants, their respective potential and restrictions, we can locate traditions and continuities as well as gradual transitions and fundamental changes. There is one type of controversy which deserves special attention, namely the formal disputation, which was used in universities as a method of teaching, examination and research from the Middle Ages until the first half of the eighteenth century, and which, at the same time, formed a general model for the structure of polemical exchanges. In the course of history, several varieties of disputation were practised, which will not be discussed here, but we can fairly confidently infer the standard rules of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ars disputatoria on the basis of textbooks written, for example, by Thomasius (Processus disputandi 1670), Lange (Genuina methodus disputandi, 1719) and others, although a general history of medieval and early modern disputatio is still a desideratum (cf. Marti 2005). A simplified version of these rules, based on Thomasius’ textbook, can be described as follows. There are three protagonists, the chairman (praeses), the respondent (respondens), and the opponent (opponens). The theses to be defended having been agreed upon beforehand, the opponent opens the first round (conflictus) by repeating the theses, i.e. stating the status controversiae, and then producing his objections with a backing of syllogisms. What is remarkable about this part of the rules is that it lays the burden of proof (onus probandi) on the opponent. Now the respondent answers by repeating the opponent’s attempted refutation and then he tries to rebut the refutation by giving counter-examples, by introducing a distinction (distinctio), or by otherwise weakening the probative force of the opponent’s arguments. In defending his theses, the respondent is not allowed to introduce new arguments, but may only answer the opponent’s objections. If the opponent has nothing more to answer to this, the procedure moves on to the next

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point (argumentum), otherwise the opponent can open up another round by repeating the respondent’s rebuttal and formulating objections against this rebuttal. The aim of the procedure is to defend a position by refuting criticism launched at this position. As for normative and strategic principles, the following are mentioned by Thomasius, among others: the antagonists are admonished to seek perspicuity and brevity and to avoid contentiousness, fallacies and claims without backing. They are advised to avoid unnecessary premises and to closely monitor the opponent’s formulation of the status controversiae and the validity of his syllogisms. Generally speaking, the rules of disputation were meant to ensure a well-organised procedure by which the “vices of confused disputes” (Leibniz in Dascal 2006: 1–6) should be avoided. That this was, in practice, not always the case seems obvious from the many critical remarks that have come down to us. It is also fairly clear that in many cases neither professors nor students enjoyed having to hold disputations. It is, however, a remarkable fact that although for centuries criticism of and even contempt for the practice of disputation were stereotypical attitudes towards this institution, at the same time basic patterns, strategies and normative rules of disputation played an important role in the contemporary practice of reallife controversy (cf. Gierl 1997: 125–145) and also as a basic structure for the writing of dissertations. Medieval forms of scholastic disputation were despised and ridiculed by the Humanists (cf. Rummel 1995), and also in the early modern period weaknesses of the contemporary practice of disputation in schools and universities were frequently criticised and satirised, some of the critics being prominent thinkers like Bacon, Locke and Lessing. But, at the same time, scholars like Thomasius and Leibniz gave much thought to the improvement of the art of controversy, which contained, as one component, the rules of disputation. The decline of the formal disputation in favour of other teaching methods is an interesting facet of eighteenth-century university history (cf. Paulsen 1919/1921, vol. II: 132–134). 4.2.

Stages of a controversy

In surveying the course of a controversy we can distinguish different stages of exchange. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall restrict myself to the differentiation of three stages, which one could term opening stage, mid-play, and concluding stage. As mid-play encompasses most of the moves and strategies mentioned in the following paragraphs, I shall confine myself here to the opening and concluding stages. In the present context, I describe the opening stage as the point where the opponents enter into a public controversy. As entering such an exchange may create far-reaching commitments and heavy risks, this is a critical phase, which has to be managed circumspectly. It is therefore not surprising that we find prominent cases where persons refused to be drawn into a public confrontation, as in the case of

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Locke, who avoided debate with Leibniz, in spite of the latter’s attempts to draw him in. In many cases of historical controversies we find a phase of private or semipublic discussion, either oral or in the form of private letters, preceding the public controversy (e.g. in the case of Galileo or in the Hobbes vs. Bramhall controversy), and the parties involved often refer to this background and also justify their decision to go public. In some cases private and public debates go on in parallel (e.g. Leibniz vs. Papin). The differences between private and public discussion and the transition from one to the other are themselves an interesting topic of historical enquiry. This is especially true of the types of reasons given for entering (or not entering) a controversy, as these are closely related to typical obligations incumbent on potential controversialists. For example, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characteristic justifications for entering into religious controversies included having to defend oneself against unjust accusations, to defend one’s own reputation or the reputation of the group to which one belongs, or to defend the truth against heretical views (cf. Gloning 1999; Schwitalla 1999). In some cases, a new combatant would join in an ongoing debate to reinforce his “team” (“Theologenstreit ist Teamwork”, Gierl 1997: 186). The actual opening move of a controversy is often a defensive move directed at actions or utterances that could cause disadvantage or damage to a person or a group of persons, but which were not explicitly directed at this person or group. It is therefore no coincidence that refutation texts constitute the prototype of a pamphlet. However, many controversies are also opened up by explicitly critical moves like negative evaluations in reviews or even aggressive moves like accusations or defamations (cf. Fritz 2005a). A systematic treatment of the historical practices of the management of the opening stage is one of the many desiderata in research on the history of controversies. A much-discussed aspect of controversies is the “resolution and closure of disputes” (cf. Engelhardt and Caplan 1987), which should ideally coincide with the concluding stage. The ideal types of endings include the persuasion of one of the parties, the reaching of consensus or the final attainment of truth. Remarkably, however, most controversies in the fields of philosophy, religion and politics do not, strictly speaking, find a resolution at all. They often go on and on, or they just peter out; sometimes the protagonists die or they are exhausted or just lose interest. Knowing this usual course of events, the contenders quite commonly use the strategy of (prematurely) proclaiming their own victory in the titles of their pamphlets (cf. Gloning 1999: 88–89). In some cases, closure was externally enforced, as in the case of Lessing, who was forbidden, in 1778, by the Duke of Brunswick to continue his controversy on biblical criticism; or in the case of Galileo, who, in 1633, was forced by the Inquisition to abjure his “errors and heresies” (cf. Finocchiaro 1989: 291). Of particular historical interest are documents showing the reasons for a protagonist to withdraw from a controversy. Gierl (1997: 181) mentions the theologian Spener, who, after having written dozens of refutations, upon being con-

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fronted with a 1,200 page polemical volume proclaimed, in a pamphlet written in 1697, that he had decided not to take on any more opponents as writing pamphlets interfered with his main tasks as a theologian. Spener’s situation is characteristic of seventeenth-century pamphleteering practice, with its obligation to refute all and every accusation one was confronted with in print. A fairly rare outcome of a controversy, more frequent in science than in other domains, is the conversion of one of the antagonists to the position of the other. This happened on various occasions in the chemical controversy on phlogiston, where, in the 1790s, prominent supporters of the phlogiston theory (e.g. Kirwan and Friedrich Gren) publicly converted to Lavoisier’s theory of oxidation. In these cases it is again interesting to study the reasons for the conversions. In a final type of outcome, the participants at some point agree that the exchange contributed to the clarification of the problems involved, even if there was no solution, as in the case of the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy: “Yet from our collision some light hath proceeded towards the elucidation of this question” (Bramhall 1658: 211). 4.3.

Text types and media

In the history of controversy, we find a wide array of text types and media used for making contributions to polemical exchanges, including letters, footnotes in books, sermons, poems, reviews, pamphlets and Internet postings. For reasons of brevity, I shall restrict myself to some short remarks on letters and pamphlets. For the other types of texts and media, detailed analyses from the point of view of historical pragmatics would be welcome. Before the invention of the printing press, letters had already been a medium of controversy. This form of contribution was, however, also later used in print. From the sixteenth century onwards, “open letters” contributed to controversies, and in the early scholarly journals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributions frequently took the form of letters. In some cases “private” letters were expressly written to be collected and printed later on, as in the case of the Leibniz vs. Clarke controversy (1715–1716). Letters usually conform to certain historical standards of style and politeness, therefore they can be used as useful evidence of these aspects of controversies. In early modern controversies the contribution par excellence is the pamphlet, so controversies typically take the form of lengthy exchanges of pamphlets, with each successive pamphlet being longer than the preceding one. As for the English word pamphlet, there is an ambiguity in its historical use that is worth mentioning (cf. Raymond 2003: 7–28). Pamphlet is used to refer both to a small printed booklet of normally 8–96 pages in quarto (German Flugschrift) and to a polemical type of text (German Streitschrift); the connection between the two being “the potential of cheap print as a vehicle for controversy” (Raymond 2003: 12). In this chapter, the word pamphlet always refers to the polemical text type.

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Pamphlets normally comprise a title page, a dedication, a preface, the body of the text organised into “points”, and a final section containing a summary, a conclusion or a pious wish (cf. Gloning 1999: 88). The titles of pamphlets are often quite complex and indicate the function, the topic, the opponent and the status in the sequence of pamphlets, e.g. A Defence of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsecal Necessity; Being an Answer to a late Book of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, entitled A Treatise of Liberty and Necessity. Written by the Right Reverend John Bramhall D. D. and Lord Bishop of Derry. London 1655. The dedication indicates a relation of patronage and thereby enhances the dignity of the pamphlet. The organisation of the body of the text into points follows the tradition of disputations and legal texts of this period and is intended to provide a well-organised treatment of topics and arguments. Once a certain number of points are introduced by one participant, the author of the following pamphlet is obliged to thoroughly refute each point individually in the given order, starting with the quotation of the opponent’s point and going on to refute this point. This point-by-point structure is characteristic of early modern pamphlets and explains why these texts get longer and longer as the controversy progresses. It also explains why modern readers, at least, find these texts hard to read and why it is difficult for an author to introduce new topics and arguments without resorting to digressions. The somewhat unwieldy character of this textual form is one of the reasons it lost its attractiveness in the course of the eighteenth century and came to be replaced by shorter and more flexible text types (cf. Fritz 2008a: 116–118). One aspect of pamphlets deserves special attention, i.e. the high degree of intertextuality. Not only do pamphlet authors by necessity refer to previous contributions in the respective controversy, but they also refer to and often explicitly quote from the Bible, from classical and contemporary authorities, as well as from their own earlier works. As a consequence, often a vast network of intertextuality emerges in the course of a controversy, which provides readers with a good survey of the general state of the discussion, transcending the scope of the actual controversy. An important recent development in the field of controversy is the use of online media (e.g. mailing lists, online discussion forums, blogs and open access, peer reviewed journals). These formats of digital media provide access to a wide international audience and permit an incredible increase in the speed at which a public controversy unfolds. This is true, for example, both for the political sphere and the domain of scientific discourse. From the point of view of historical pragmatics it is particularly interesting to see how traditional patterns of controversy are transferred to the digital media and stepwise modified to exploit the potential of the new formats. Although interactive digital media is still in its early days, there is already ample opportunity for historico-pragmatic observations. In the sphere of scientific discourse, a particularly striking development is the organisation of various interactive forms of the review process. Many interesting

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examples of controversies triggered by reviews can be found in mailing lists like the LINGUIST List or open peer review journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (cf. their “most commented papers”). Generally speaking, detailed analyses of computer-mediated controversies are still sparse. Recent work on controversies in digital media from a historico-pragmatic point of view includes an analysis of an online discussion forum compared to early modern controversies (Khorasani 2008) and an ongoing research project on the development of scientific controversies in digital media conducted by Fritz and Gloning at the University of Gießen (cf. http://www.zmi.uni-giessen.de/projekte/zmi-isteilbereich4.html). 4.4.

Moves and strategies

Many of the moves we find in historical controversies belong to familiar speechact types like statements, objections, criticism, accusations and insults, but we also find more specific moves like various types of arguments, concessions, retractions and reformulations, and more complex moves like stating the question (or the status controversiae), providing proof, giving examples, refuting an argument, reducing an argument into (syllogistic) form (ex discursu facere syllogismum formalem), introducing a conceptual distinction (distinctio), raising points of order, nailing a fallacy, and complaining of jargon. From a historical point of view, there are many questions concerning the intricate details of such moves, e.g. what are the characteristic contents of accusations, what counts as an insult, what counts as proof in certain historical periods, what types of claims and arguments are used and accepted by the opponents, and, finally, what are the details of the linguistic form of these moves in various periods of different languages. A type of argument much used and much discussed in the early modern period is the “argument from authority” (cf. Walton 1997). Whereas the “traditionalists”, e.g. the Aristotelians, systematically relied on this type of argument, referring both to classical and to biblical authority, the “modernists” criticised this practice, insisting on the use of reason (probatio ratione) and empirical methods alone. This did not, however, prevent them from quoting their own “modern” authorities and praising them. Or, to give another example, the centrifugal force argument was felt to be a very strong objection against Galileo’s heliocentric theory: if the Earth revolved at a very high rate of speed, which Galileo assumed, why did bodies not fly off the Earth’s surface? (cf. Finocchiaro 1989: 22). Apart from individual moves, we also find characteristic sequences of moves. “Stating the question”, for example, is a prerequisite for refuting the respective point, and claiming that a certain argument is a petitio principii is characteristically followed by a demonstration that this is the case. Dialectical and rhetorical strategies are further topics in historico-pragmatic analysis. Examples of strategies which are often used and commented upon are: repeating arguments, making small concessions, accumulating accusations, intro-

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ducing digressions, shifting the burden of proof, using reductio-ad-absurdum arguments, representing the opponent’s position in a way favourable to one’s own standpoint, using comparisons, using metaphor and irony, etc. A typical rhetorical move in seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific controversies, also not unknown in present-day science, is what could be called the “rhetoric of innovation”, where traditional views are contrasted with one’s own advanced views, like, for example, saying Aristotle says that p, but I say that q. This move is frequently used by Kepler, Hobbes and many others (cf. Fritz 2005b: 240–242). 4.5.

Topic management and the dynamics of knowledge

As there is always the danger of thematic chaos in argumentation, it is not surprising that reflections and admonitions concerning topical order are recurrent in writings on the technique of controversy as well as in actual controversies. Leibniz, for example, in his writings on the art of controversy, on various occasions emphasises the importance of controlling the order of topics and the topical relevance of utterances, e.g.: “the hearers of these disorganized repartees end up forgetting them [all] or becoming confused. In these ways it becomes hopeless both to convince the adversary – who can always jump from one topic to another, to elude the reasoner, and to pursue the matter ad infinitum – and to persuade an audience that has been confused or bored” (Leibniz in Dascal 2006: 3). A clear structure will ensure “that no party can say anything that is not at least pertinent to the matter at hand” (Leibniz in Dascal 2006: 156). Rules ensuring an orderly topic management in the tradition of disputation rules include the defendant’s obligation to explicitly formulate the topic of controversy, the quaestio controversiae or the status controversiae, and the opponent’s obligation to repeat it before he goes on to refute the defendant’s position. The main topic may be divided into several points or articles, which have to be addressed by the opponent point by point and in the given order. Essentially, the point-by-point principle is about topic management. The power of this principle lies in the fact that someone who fails to take up a topic that has been raised will be seen as having lost a point in the disputation game, and, of course, nobody wants to lose a point. This is not just true of refutation in formal disputations but of many real-life controversies. According to the strict rules of disputation, no “new” topics may be introduced and no digressions are allowed. As these restrictions imposed by the traditional disputation rules can be counter-productive in not allowing innovative topic material and the contrastive positive presentation of the opponent’s own position, it is an interesting historical question to see how authors dealt with these restrictions, how they used text types and textual devices where these rules applied less strictly and how they finally freed themselves from the influence of these strict rules altogether. There are, for example, interesting cases where authors partitioned their text into two, first refuting all the opponent’s arguments point by point and then going on to state their own doctrine (e.g. Hobbes

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[1654] 1962). Likewise, the ban on digressions is often violated, albeit with explicit excuses and justifications. August Hermann Francke, on one occasion, decided not to answer his opponent’s accusations point by point in a pamphlet but to write an open letter instead, in which he could marshal his arguments in an order favourable to his own cause (Francke [1706] 1981). As contributions to public controversies are essentially directed towards an audience, taking into consideration the knowledge of the average reader (“recipient design”) is an important factor of success. In well-organised pamphlets, for example, there are various places where background knowledge could be provided, of which I shall mention a few. As indicated above, the title of a pamphlet could be used as a reminder of what had gone before in the controversy. The dedication also often served as a summary of the state of the controversy and/or as a summary of the contribution to which it was attached. As such, dedications could be an important source of information for cursory reading. A further opportunity for reminding the audience of the earlier course of the controversy was the full quotation of the opponent’s point preceding one’s own refutation. Extra information for the readers could be considered necessary in the course of providing backing to a claim of one’s own or of refuting an opponent’s claim. At this point, authors could introduce textual elements of a mainly informational nature, including summaries of research, collections of empirical data or historiographical passages. Examples of this type of textual element are Kepler’s collection of meteorological data from 16 years of observation in his Tertivs Interveniens (Kepler [1610] 1941: 254–257), the chapter on the history of astronomy in his Apologia pro Tychone (Jardine 1984: 101–119) or Geuder’s little tract on the proper use of bloodletting (Geuder [1689] 1980: 47–56). As textual elements of this kind were sometimes rather long, they could present a problem to topic continuity. Therefore authors tended to mark such passages as special building blocks and to make explicit their connections to the surrounding text and the ongoing topic. Where this kind of textual element played a major role in a contribution, the flavour of the text could shift from the controversial to the pedagogical. There are also various types of paratextual elements which contributed to the surveyability, comprehensibility and usability of these texts, e.g. detailed tables of contents, sometimes including a summary (argument) of the subject matter, indices of topics, and marginalia. 4.6.

Communication principles

The history of controversies is full of complaints about dialectical malpractice. Controversialists tend to annoy their opponents by evading their arguments, by writing incomprehensibly, by intentionally misunderstanding them, by insulting them, and by committing all kinds of fallacies. A similar list of infringements of good discussion practice was already drawn up by Leibniz in 1687 (cf. Leibniz in

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Dascal 2006: 248–249). These complaints presuppose the acceptance of relevant communication principles that should guide the actions of the participants. Such principles form an important part of what could be called the implicit theory of controversy, which people apply in their practice. Most of the time, speakers and writers will follow these principles as a matter of routine without having to formulate them explicitly. Sometimes, however, occasion arises to make such principles explicit. This is the case, for example, when one complains or criticises. The importance of the participants’ critical remarks on ongoing discussions for a theory of dialectics was emphasised by Hamblin in his book on fallacies: “the development of a theory of charges, objections or points of order is a first essential” (Hamblin 1970: 303). It is therefore not surprising that for a historical analysis of communication principles the complaints and accusations concerning dialectical malpractice uttered in the course of historical controversies should form a prime source of data (cf. Fritz 2005a). A useful starting point for the analysis of communication principles is Grice’s formulation of maxims of conversation (cf. Grice 1989: 26–31) and his view, endorsed by other authors as well, that (many of) these maxims flow from a general principle of rationality. These formulations from the philosophical armchair constitute a useful body of principles for Grice’s analysis of problems in the theory of meaning. For the purposes of historical pragmatics it is, however, advisable to concentrate on the empirical study of communication principles in order to get a more vivid picture of how rationality is put into practice under varying historical conditions. Taken at a certain level, such principles seem to be fairly simple and universal, like, for example, the principle of relevance, but as soon as we go into empirical detail we realise that the principles people mention (and follow) are often much more fine-grained and that they form highly complex families which are differentiated according to social groups (e.g. scholars vs. courtiers) and text types (pamphlets vs. reviews) and which, for good reasons, are historically variable. If such principles are indeed derived from a general principle of rationality, then what counts as an application of this general principle is a rather complicated matter and can be assumed to be subject to historical change. In order to give an idea of the range of relevant principles, listed below (see (1) to (22)) is a number of principles that are frequently mentioned in early modern controversies. This is an open list and a rather mixed collection, partially ordered, which could be analysed into different groups, e.g. logical principles, dialectical principles, rhetorical principles, hermeneutical principles, principles of text production, linguistic principles and politeness principles (cf. Fritz 2008a). Similar lists of communication principles for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century controversies in Germany can be found in Goldenbaum (2004a: 111–112) and Dieckmann (2005: chapter 5). For some of these principles there are already historical accounts (cf. Hamblin 1970; van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1993).

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(1) Statements should be truthful. (2) Claims should be given adequate backing. (One should not make nudae assertiones, ‘naked assertions’.) (3) The critic carries the burden of proof (onus probandi). (4) Claims should be refuted completely point by point (principles of completeness and thoroughness). (5) One should state the main question (the status controversiae) clearly and correctly. (6) One should relate one’s arguments to the main question. (7) One should avoid unnecessary repetition of arguments. (8) One should be brief (the principle of brevity, amabilis brevitas). (9) One should write clearly and comprehensibly (the principle of perspicuity). (10) One should avoid formal fallacies (e.g. a particulari ad universale). (11) If considered necessary, one should set out the arguments “in form” (i.e. in the explicit form of a syllogism). (12) One should not rely (exclusively) on arguments from authority. (13) One should avoid personal attacks (ad hominem). (14) One may (or: one should not) retort in kind (retorsio). (15) One should give a reasonable interpretation to the utterances of the opponent (principle of charity). (16) One should take the perspective of the other party (la place d’autruy; cf. Leibniz 2006: 163–166). (17) One should not make fun of the opponent and should take his arguments seriously (principle of seriousness). (18) One should not use rhetorical devices like irony or sarcasm. (19) One should be polite towards the opponent (politeness principles). (20) One should approach the opponent in a spirit of Christian meekness. (21) One should proceed with moderation (cf. Leibniz 2006: 202). (22) One should be tolerant towards one’s opponents. When analysing the role of communication principles in their contexts of application from an historical point of view, we have to take into consideration a number of aspects, of which I shall only mention a few: (i) A first fact is that principles are just as often violated as they are observed and mentioned. It is important to know which principles tend to be violated and why this is so. (ii) A second point is that we often find a conflict of principles. It is, for example, often impossible to give a complete survey of a problem and to be brief at the same time. In some cases both a principle and its counter-principle tend to be invoked during a certain period, as in the case of retorsion, which was legally acceptable but was often criticised as unchristianlike. (iii) The application of principles is to a certain extent negotiable.

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(iv) Certain principles hold for some types of communication or text and not for others. As Jardine remarked in his book on the controversy between the astronomer Kepler and Ursus: “Whereas in a refutatio aggressive irony, ad hominem appeals, and even jocular facetiousness are quite proper, the tone of a confirmatio [i.e. a statement of one’s own position, G.F.] is supposed to be modest, confident and fully serious” (Jardine 1984: 78). (v) To understand the status of certain principles one has to know their context of justification. For example, some politeness principles can be justified on the basis of Christian ethics (e.g. the principle of meekness), others through rules of courtly conduct (cf. Fritz 2008a: 118–120). A thorough analysis of the role of communication principles in controversies of different historical periods and the reasons for changes in the observance of and emphasis on certain principles requires detailed study of a large corpus of historical texts. In this area, as in others, there is still a lot of work to do for the historical pragmatics of controversies. 4.7.

The language of controversy

An important aspect of the study of controversies within historical pragmatics is the history of the language of controversy. Let us assume we were back in the years around 1600 and we had to participate in a controversy on astronomy and astrology, a fashionable topic in Europe during this period. In this case we would not only have to know the special language of astronomy/astrology but also the everyday language of academic discussion. In most cases this would be Latin with its relevant vocabulary (like status controversiae, conclusio, replica or fallaciae) and formulaic expressions like non sequitur; argumentum ad verecundiam; dato, sed non concesso ‘accepted for the sake of argument’ etc. In controversies addressed to a wider public we would have to know how to present our arguments in the vernacular of English or German, for example. In these languages, the language of controversy has changed in many respects since 1600. To give a few examples of expressions now used differently or not at all in English: impertinent ‘irrelevant’, exception ‘objection’, inconvenience ‘inconsistency’, the state of the question ‘the main topic’, reducing an argument into form ‘putting an argument in the form of a syllogism’, etc. As far as German is concerned, recent studies have shown that the language of controversy also changed considerably during the last four hundred years (cf. von Polenz 1988; Fritz 2008b). Detailed historical studies for these and other languages are an important desideratum in this field of study, where historical pragmatics, semantics and lexicology overlap. A significant aspect of the language of controversy is domain-specific use and its history, e.g. the language of political discourse, which is characterised by the use of catchwords (cf. Stötzel and Wengeler 1995) and metaphor (cf. Musolff 2004).

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Conclusion

I shall conclude by sketching a few goals of future research, some of them quite realistically attainable in the short term, others more like visions of the future. A first aim would be to provide a better overview of the objects of study and the extant research. Although – or because – there is a vast amount of scholarly literature on the history of controversies, it is today difficult for the researcher to obtain a survey of relevant controversies and the relevant literature. So charting the field is a desideratum of high priority. A systematic survey by domains, periods, countries and authors would be a long-term goal to be pursued. Such a survey would permit many valuable studies comparing controversies in different domains (theology vs. science), longitudinal studies for certain domains (e.g. the history of medical controversies; cf. Salager-Meyer and Zambrano 2001; Salager-Meyer 2005), inter-language contrastive studies for given periods (French vs. German controversies), and the study of the development of individual authors as polemicists. Historical pragmatics of controversies is by nature corpus based. Researchers working in the field today tend to use fairly small corpora of their own, which are useful for the generation of research topics, for exploratory case studies, and for the development of theory and methodology. To put future research on a broader basis, it is, however, necessary to provide larger digital corpora of controversies for different domains and periods. Generally speaking, all aspects of the pragmatic organisation of controversies mentioned in section 4 should be studied in detail, providing in the long run (segments of) a detailed history of polemical communication. Such a history would include the description of characteristic types of development of the pragmatic organisation of controversies. Such types of development would include: changes in the stock of popular arguments, the existence of competing dialectical strategies and changes in the currency of certain strategies, the invention of new topics of debate, continuity and discontinuity in the acceptance of communication principles, the rise and decline of certain text types, the use of elements of one text type in texts of a different type (e.g. elements of sermons in theological pamphlets), the use and adaptation of established patterns of controversy in new media, the use of domain-specific models in new domains (e.g. the juridical model in theological debates), changes in the organisation of networks of debate and the “refutation management”, and changes in the status and the appreciation of polemical exchanges (e.g. their role in scientific innovation). One possible result of this kind of pragmatic history could be the discovery that during a given period developments of different aspects of pragmatic organisation were interrelated, as in the case of changes in the “scientific culture” around 1700, where the decline of the disputation and the pamphlet, the rise of scientific journals and text types like the critical review, the discussion of politeness in scholarly debates and an eclectic view of scientific progress could be considered to be elements of one major historical pro-

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cess (cf. Gierl 1997). It is, incidentally, not unlikely that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are in the middle of changes of comparable magnitude. A system of types of pragmatic innovation and change forms part of a general theory of the historical pragmatics of controversies. Besides dealing with questions of innovation and variation, such a theory would focus on questions of selection, i.e. the adoption of certain variants and the diffusion of innovations (e.g. the diffusion of certain politeness principles from courtiers to scholars). In the framework of such a theory one could also discuss the question of what counts as an explanation of a certain type of historical change. As in the related discipline of historical semantics, a functional type of explanation could be envisaged that should account for both stability and change in forms of communication like controversies. In the case of a successful innovation it would show this innovation to be a solution to a certain communicative task at hand. This functional view of innovation could be supplemented with an invisible-hand theory, which correlates individual communicative aims and means with the institutional results of an invisible-hand process (cf. Keller 1994). An interesting problem for such a functional explanation would be the conservative tendency, which is apparent in the longevity of the disputation model. Maybe this is a case of a type of historical development characterised by Toulmin (1972: 351) as follows: “Within any actual human community, the mere existence of any social institution, custom, or procedure will not be explicable in functional terms alone; since it may have survived a longer sequence of historical changes, only because no better-adapted alternative was available, or because the institutional selection process was unusually conservative – so that it kept its place in spite of having lost its original significance, or adaptive advantage”. In developing a theory of pragmatic change, historical pragmatics would finally catch up with theoretically more advanced neighbouring disciplines, like historical semantics.

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16.

Rituals Marcel Bax

1.

Making sense of ritual: Explaining a field

It is widely assumed that ritual is a pan-global (discursive) practice, both geographically and historically. From archaeological finds it has been deduced that ritual traces its origins back to prehistoric times. There is, for example, plentiful evidence that Upper Palaeolithic (wo)man performed elaborate burial rites; more than that, there is even evidence to suggest that particular currently practised rituals have homologues in animal behaviour. Despite the massive spread of ritual across the earth, its long history and intriguing evolutionary origins, the study of (verbal) ritual is still largely in its infancy, and replete with conceptual ambiguities and controversies. Still, as ritual performance is among the universals of human behaviour and interaction, there is every reason to review here some major approaches within the field of ritual studies. In the preface to a series of essays in Vedic ritual, philosopher and Sanskritist Frits Staal alleges that “[m]an is addicted to ritual activity, a fact that is true of modern society as much as it is true of ancient societies, and that applies to socalled primitive communities as much as it applies to the so-called civilized world” (1982: v). There is perhaps some exaggeration in the claim that humans are, and have at all times been, “addicted” to ritual. But the point stands that the salience of ritual as a behavioural as well as cognitive/psychological category – hence, the relevance of the study of ritual (inter)action – is easily underestimated. There is to date no academic discipline which has ritual for its object, and modern scholarship as a whole treats ritual in stepmotherly fashion; as Staal emphasises, “[t]he only three disciplines that are nowadays interested in ritual are anthropology, psychology, and the study of religion” (1982: v). But that was almost thirty years ago. In the meantime, there has been an increase of interest in ritual from anthropological linguists and students of discourse, notably including historical pragmatists. On the laudable assumption, possibly, that as far as this ubiquitous behavioural mode is concerned they “have an obligation to make sense of the past and to explain the origins of their world for the society in which they live” (Rabb 2006: xxii), a number of pragmatics researchers have, as this chapter will explain in due course, concentrated on historical textual sources that exemplify oral rituals in order to highlight, from a Searlean viewpoint, typically pragmatic aspects of ritual performance in times (long) past, such as the direction of fit and the illocutionary point of ritual speech acts, the psychological state expressed by ritual utterance acts, and the pragmatic constraints on the real-

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isation of historically earlier ritual speech events, ipso facto their contextual continuities and extralinguistic contingencies. From the more wide-ranging perspective of pragmatic discourse analysis, new light has been thrown on the interactional organisation of past ritual verbal exchanges, the functional meaning and culturalsocietal significance of bygone ritual practices and genres, and their development over time, if not their continuation, in adapted form, today. Moreover, and especially important from the linguistic-pragmatic perspective adopted here, the quote taken from Staal ignores linguist William Labov’s (1972) seminal work on “ritual insults” which paved the way for inquiries into several generic forms of ritualised verbal duelling, both of the present and the past. It also overlooks the groundbreaking 1955 essay from the pen of another brilliant academic, sociologist Erving Goffman, on “the ritual order” underlying everyday interaction, which has inspired a vast amount of sociopragmatic and cross-cultural research on face-work as “interpersonal ritual”. This chapter makes an attempt at outlining the field of ritual studies, and endeavours to elucidate its main features, basic assumptions, central research topics, methods of approach and general insights. But a caution is in order. As a transdisciplinary field, ritual studies is anything but unified. Quite the reverse, it reminds one of an archipelago inhabited by island dwellers who carry on quite independently. It is a large territory, too, so that it is impossible to call in at the port of each and every islet that might be worth visiting. But then again, there are, in the “Ritual Isles”, many quarters where (historical) pragmaticians have little business. Hence the caveat that my guided tour of the area is not exhaustive, is somewhat eclectic and bound to reflect my own discourse-linguistic preoccupations.

2.

The concept of ritual: Formal and functional approaches

Ritual defies clear definition. “In scholarly literature, there is no lack of definitions [yet] not two definitions are alike”, Indologist Ute Hüsken notes (2007: 337). In the spate of studies on ritual, it is frequently stressed that the concept is elusive. “Of the many varieties of human behaviour”, writes Ronald Grimes, “ritual is probably the most difficult to evaluate” (1990: 193). Another authority on (religious) ritual, Catherine Bell, observes “that there is no clear and widely shared explanation of what constitutes ritual or how to understand it” (1997: x). Staal positively hits the mark pronouncing that “[w]e have intuitions about what rituals are but we do not precisely know what they are” (1989: 62). Even so, from various studies it can be inferred that ritual (inter)action is characterised by two notable features. On the one hand, it involves modes of behaviour that are formally fixed, in that ritual performance amounts to “prescribed formal behavior” (Turner 1969: 19) or “appropriately patterned behaviour” (Rothenbuhler 1998: ix); from a pragmatic angle, ritual speech acts are governed by sufficiently

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strict formulation and/or sequencing rules (Bax 2004: 164). On the other hand, contrary to its formal fixity, the meaning of ritual is as often as not unfixed, as ritual (speech) acts usually mean more, if not something completely different, than appears on first sight. “Rituals”, concludes historian Edward Muir, “are inherently ambiguous in their function and meaning” (1997: 5). This view echoes a point made as early as 1889 by one of the precursors of ritual studies, orientalist-biblicist William R. Smith, who found, with respect to ancient Semitic religions lacking systematic doctrine (yet heavily dependent on ritual), that “while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was explained by different people in different ways, without any question of orthodoxy or heterodoxity arising in consequency” ([1889] 1956: 18). In much the same vein, Bell mentions that “[…] rituals are multiple and redundant. They do not have just one message or purpose. They have many, and frequently some of these messages and purposes can modify or even contradict each other” (1997: 136). MacCauley and Lawson presume that “for many features of religious ritual […] meanings simply do not seem to matter much” (2002: 36); but “[w]hile the meanings associated with rituals may vary, such variability typically has no effect on the stability of the ritual’s actions’ underlying forms” (2002: 9). Regarding the meaning side of ritual, many scholars foreground its symbolic quality; others put emphasis on the playful-yet-serious character of ritual interaction; still others focus on its actional properties, holding that ritual performance amounts to mimetic (re-)enactment, and stressing that this quintessential feature hangs together with its prehistoric pedigree. 2.1.

Ritual as stereotyped behaviour

Like its cognates “rite”, “ritualistic” and “ritualised”, the word “ritual” is often used to denote modes of (verbal) behaviour characterised by a high degree of formality, standardisation, stylisation, ceremoniousness. This view is already manifest in the work of one of the founding fathers of ritual studies, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who, in his pioneering Les rites de passage ([1909] 1960), dealt with the structural similarities between superficially diverse magical ritual practices, highlighting the sequential organisation (“typical pattern”) of ceremonial rites (1960: 8). This approach enabled him to identify a limited set of putative universal underlying structures, which, in view of their functional import, he interpreted as rites of separation, transition and incorporation. That ritual adds up to stereotyped behaviour has always loomed large in the field, and the notion that formalisation is central among its differentia specificae is still widely held. The views taken by Parks (1990) in his inquiry into heroic precombat rituals, Donald (1991) in his foray into prehistoric ritual, or Dundes, Leach and Özkök (1972) in their survey of Turkish duelling rhymes are essentially in this

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vein, as is the conception of cultural historians like Muir (1997), Burke (1987) and Huizinga ([1919] 1990), judging by their accounts of ritualised demeanour in late medieval and early modern public life. Comparable notions are behind analyses of the formulaic tendencies, reflecting their background in oral culture, of ritual(ised) utterances and genres such as blessings, prayers, vows, curses, charms, spells, proverbs, mantras, or epics (e.g. Sebeok 1964; Staal 1989; Arnovick 1999, 2006; Reichl 2003). Although claims about the formal fixity of rituals are justified, there is a detrimental aspect because they give rise to the perhaps too liberal view that all kinds of stereotyped or “socially standardized and repetitive” behaviour (Kertzer 1988: 9) qualify as rituals. Maren Hoffmeister explains that rituality has been “broadened into a category of forms which can also be found in other social contexts such as sports, politics, the mass media, the arts, theatre, and jurisdiction” (2007: 224). On surveying the literature, we come across a whole gamut of public practices like ceremonies, celebrations, meetings, commemorations, parades, political rallies, healings, carnival processions, entries in state, communal worships, sports events, exhibitions and so forth and so on, only to find out that, because of their comparatively conventionalised make-up, such events constitute ritual/ritualised performances (e.g. Ong 1981; Rothenbuhler 1988; Grimes 1990; Koster 2003). This broad-minded approach can also be seen in Goffman, especially his argument that everyday interaction ritual is a “conventionalized act through which an individual portrays his respect and regard […]” (1971: 62). Apropos of the historical past, in Burke’s (1987) and Muir’s (1997) studies on early modern ritual, numerous fascinating customs, curious conventions and other allegedly ritual practices are passed in review; whether they really concern “rituals” is often questionable, given a lack of clear criteria. As to this very matter, formal fixity is but one of the distinctive features of ritual performance; its other defining characteristics lie in the sphere of meaning, function and effect. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that “[t]raditionally, ritual has been distinguished from other modes of action by virtue of its supposed nonutilitarian […] qualities” (Bell 1997: 46). A staunch proponent of the view that ritual is meaningless is Staal (1989) who, persistently stressing its “autonomy of form”, conceives of ritual as pure action, entirely void of meaning or function. From a pragmatic angle, Tambiah (1979) professes that “in ritual, language appears to be used in ways that violate the communicative function” (cited in Wheelock 1982: 57), while Wheelock argues that ritual utterances “are speech acts that convey little or no information” (1982: 58). MacCauley and Lawson’s study on the psycho-cognitive effects of religious ritual departs from the premise that “ritual form and the properties of rituals it explains and predicts are overwhelmingly independent of attributed meanings” (2002: 10). However, regarding Staal’s central argument that ritual (inter)action is both meaningless and functionless, many scholars take the opposite stance.

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Ritual as symbolic action

In a paper on tool-use by chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist William McGrew points to two remarkable activities within particular wild populations that “are certainly ritualised, often communicative, and probably symbolic” (1994: 157), i.e. leaf-clipping and leaf-grooming. Both ways of manipulating leaves are ritualised in the sense of being stereotyped and derivative, the behaviour involved having assumed a secondary significance beyond its original functions in other contexts. Both involve the recruitment of an object into use for communicating esoterically. Both behavioural patterns are directly functionless […]; the groomed or disintegrated leaf is of no interest in its own right, and so seems to function only symbolically […]. (McGrew 1994: 158)

This quotation neatly captures the view that rituals boil down to stereotyped ways of behaving that derive significance from their symbolic import. David Kertzer defines ritual as “symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive” (1988: 9), whereas MacCauley and Lawson conceive of religious rituals as “symbolic cultural systems” (2002: 212). Goffman, in his volume of essays on interaction ritual, uses “the term ritual because [he is] dealing with acts through whose symbolic component the actor shows how worthy he is of respect or how worthy he feels others are of it” (1967: 19). The association between ritual action and symbolic meaning dates back to the early days of ritual studies, and received a strong boost from the fieldwork done by cultural anthropologists such as Victor Turner (1969) and Clifford Geertz (1973), the latter theorising that “any religious ritual […] involves symbolic fusion of ethos and world view” (1973: 113). The symbolic approach is also manifest in historical analyses, cf. Peter Burke’s description of one of many early modern papal rituals: Before making his official declaration that “the pope is dead”, the cardinal chamberlain strikes the head of the corpse three times with a silver hammer, calling on the dead man by name. Then the master of ceremonies takes the fisherman’s ring from the late pope’s finger and gives it to the chamberlain to be broken. All the bells of Rome toll for the departed. (1987: 172)

Symbolic rituals presuppose a cultural framework of understanding and serve cultural-societal functions. Durkheim “saw ritual as the means by which individuals are brought together as a collective group. Ritual functions to ‘strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member’ […]” (Bell 1997: 25), while Geertz “attempted to describe how the symbols and activities of ritual can project idealized images that reflect the actual social situation […] yet also [function] as a template for reshaping or redirecting the social situation” (Bell 1997: 66). For Leach, “ritual is a medium for the expression of cultural ideals and models that […] serves to orient, though not prescribe, other forms of social behavior. As a medium for cultural messages, ritual enables people to modify their so-

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cial order at the same time that it reinforces basic categories of it” (Bell 1997: 65). Raymond Firth holds that ritual “is basically symbolic in that the physical behaviour of the participants ‘stands for’ relations of another kind” (1967: 12–13). For Grimes, ritual involves “the symbolic means by which a group maintains cohesion and establishes its own mystique” (1990: 101). Lincoln asserts that “ritual is best understood as an authoritative mode of symbolic discourse and a powerful instrument for the evocation of those sentiments (affinity and estrangement) out of which society is constructed” (1989: 53). Kertzer characterises ritual as “action wrapped in a web of symbolism” (1988: 9) and goes on to explain that symbols effect “condensation of meaning”: Condensation refers to the way in which individual symbols represent and unify a rich diversity of meanings. The symbol […] somehow embodies and brings together diverse ideas. […] Closely tied to the condensation of meaning in ritual symbols is their multivocality, the variety of different meanings attached to the same symbol. Where condensation refers to the interaction of these different meanings and their syntheses into a new meaning for an individual, multivocality suggests another aspect, the fact that the same symbol may be understood by different people in different ways. […] Given the properties of condensation and multivocality, […] ritual symbolism is often ambiguous: the symbol has no single precise meaning […]. The complexity and uncertainty of the meaning of symbols are sources of their strength. (1988: 11)

That “rituals are symbolic and extremely powerful actions” that “affect society” is also emphasised by Hoffmeister (2007: 225). Before discussing the functions of ritual and their ramifications as to what ritual performance is all about, it is worth expanding on the actional properties of ritual practice. 2.3.

Ritual as iconic-mimetic (re-)enactment

It is widely accepted that rituals encompass (non-)verbal symbolic actions. In other words – those of McGrew in fact, quoted above – ritual behaviour involves “a secondary significance beyond its original functions in other contexts”. As regards chimpanzee leaf-clipping, which most likely occurs in the context of an “approach–avoidance conflict, so that the result [looks] like a ritualised displacement activity” (McGrew 1994: 157), its communicative significance derives from the fact that the behaviour is “completely arbitrary” in that it functions “only symbolically, in a non-iconic way” (1994: 158). That symbolic acts amount to non-natural arbitrary sign sequences is consistent with classic Peircean semiotic theory. However, that the behavioural patterns that constitute rituals should invariably be taken as symbolic act structures is doubtful. It rather seems that many such practices qualify as iconic events, considering they can be construed as mimetic (re-)enactments – in effect, iconic-mimetic ritual may well be the historically primal variety. The view that ritual is essentially re-enactment or dramatisation emerged early on in the history of ritual studies, particularly apropos of the question of how ar-

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chaic ritual relates to myth. The British folklorist and classics scholar James Frazer was among the first to argue, in his legendary The Golden Bough ([1890] 1957), that ancient rituals served to act out real-life events rendered in myth. This, and comparable views, epitomise a rather strict interpretation of re-enactment, i.e. the staging, on repeated occasions (and for various reasons), of specific past (mythological) events. According to Frazer, Egyptian fertility rites involved the imitative representation of the death and resurrection of Osiris. Given that such re-enactments build on a depiction in the form of myth, the “direction of fit” between ritual and myth is “word-to-world” (cf. Searle 1979: 3–4), in that the ritual matches a mythological reality. Nowadays, the hypothesis of the primacy of myth is generally discarded, also because the archaeological and historical evidence for the presumed ritual traditions appears to be lacking (Fontenrose 1966: 8, 11). Yet, to point out that the Frazerian view on ritual-and-myth has lost most of its appeal is not to imply that the conception of ritual as (re-)enactment has been abandoned, too. On the contrary, Burke, in his account on ritual in early modern Italy, points to the long history of serpent-handling cults that draw on biblical sources, including the therapeutic customs of the faith healing Pauliani. “Since rituals often re-enact important events”, he comments, “it is worth adding that the pauliani claimed that their snakes were descended from St. Paul’s snake, just as they were descended from St. Paul, so that their healing was a kind of re-enactment, a sacred drama” (1987: 213). In addition to the (still viable) classic conception, there is the more recently evolved view that many ritual (re-)enactment varieties have a “world-to-word” direction of fit, in that the (language) behaviour serves to define, if not create, reality, instead of representing it iconically. What it primarily concerns are verbal practices that look like antagonistic encounters but are, on closer inspection, merely enacted controversies. An apposite example is African-American sounding, analysed by Labov (1972) as a competitive exchange of ritual insults. As follows from his inquiry, it concerns a ritual speech event for at least two reasons. Firstly, the speech acts involved in the encounter are governed by strict rules pertaining to propositional content, seeing that the underlying structure of ritual insults reads T(B) is so X that P, “where T is the target of the sound [typically the opponent’s mother or other relative], X is the [pejorative] attribute of T which is focused on, and P is a proposition that is coupled with the attribute by the quantifier so … that to express the [more often than not bizarre] degree to which T has X” (1972: 336). For example (cf. 1972: 312): A: Your mother so old she got spider webs under her arms. B: Your mother so old she can stretch her head and lick out her ass.

As to its formal fixity, sounding also involves sequencing rules. For B is constrained to counterattack, instead of gainsay A’s allegation, and to thematically link up with A’s assertion. Secondly, yet of utmost importance, sounding is governed by

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the interpretation rule that B believes (a) that A believes that P is not true and (b) that A believes that B knows that P is not true; as Labov notes, (a) and (b) make up “conditions for shared or social knowledge” (1972: 339). This analysis clearly exposes the playful nature and the multiple meaning design of soundings, i.e. the prima facie pragmatic meaning of sounds as opposed to their real communicative significance. In a similar vein, but from a wider-ranging comparative perspective (i.e. a cross-cultural analysis of oral performance), sociolinguist Viv Edwards and classicist Thomas Sienkewicz put forth that “[t]he abuse of the mother and even the grandmother in African, Caribbean and Afro-American communities […] is not real; it is a ritual phenomenon […]” (1990: 35; given the insights offered by Dundes, Leach and Özkök 1972, this applies to the Near East as well). The authors explain that [t]he critical difference between ritual abuse and blaming is the truth value of what is said. It is vital that any insults should be blatant exaggerations: abuse which has some basis in truth is likely to provoke retaliation. […] While obscenity, scatology and sexual prowess are important themes in these exchanges, accusations must remain in the realms of the imagination. (1990: 130; cf. Ong 1981: 108)

It is material to stress that various other ritual genres, including historical varieties, also entail a multiform structure of meaning, and that such rituals must be conceived of as (re-)enactments of which the indirect import transcends their apparent meaning. Such rituals can be taken as make-believe behaviour in the sense of Goffman (1974), because they involve the element of stratified meaning, whereas their interpretation is dependent on the knowledge and the attitude of the participants. It does not seem, however, that the recognition of the “secondary significance” (McGrew 1994: 158) of ritual make-believe emanates from the symbolic quality of the actions being performed. There is, for example, nothing arbitrary about the fact that, in the context of sounding, offensive utterances relating to T(B) are (meant to be) heard as ritual insults of T (indirectly B). That sounding adds up to make-believe antagonism has everything to do with the fact that ritual insults closely resemble real insults. In other words, the relation between real and ritual insults is iconic. Hence the notion of mimetic (re-)enactment: the contenders engage in an interaction in the course of which they play-act or simulate – “iconically enact” – a controversy by imitating the typical behaviour during authentic slanging matches. What sets ritual make-believe apart from Frazerian-type word-to-world rituals which iconically re-enact (mythological) events, is the distinct way in which it relates to reality. Contrary to the latter variety, the direction of fit in ritual make-believe is world-to-word in that the ritual acts are not only iconic but also serve to define or transform the nature of the event; e.g. an utterance like Your mother so black, she sweat chocolate (Labov 1972: 312) is not only mimetic in the sense that it “mirrors” a serious insult; given its particular features, it also functions as a “framing device” for the ritual interpretation of the speech event, consistent with

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Goffman’s contention that “cues will be available for establishing when the transformation is to begin and when it is to end, namely, brackets in time, within which and to which the transformation is to be restricted” (1974: 45). Accordingly, (re-)enactment in the form of ritual make-believe amounts to something different than in, say, ancient fertility rites, a matter discussed below. Here, it suffices to say that the Labovian approach has been very influential, not only on the analysis of currently practised verbal rituals (e.g. Smitherman 1977; Kochman 1983; Garner 1983; Eder 1990) but also regarding historical(-pragmatic) inquiries into ritual language behaviour in earlier times (e.g. Clover 1979; Harris 1979; Swenson 1987; Parks 1990; Arnovick 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000). 2.4.

The mimetic roots of ritual

2.4.1.

Ritual (re-)enactment as a prelinguistic innovation

The notion that ritual involves mimetic-iconic (re-)enactment leads us to the issue of its evolutionary origins. Ritual exemplifies a behavioural mode of which the antecedents date back to prehistory. Many archaeologists, concerned with what their finds actually stood for, have interpreted barrows, henges and other material remains such as cave paintings or engraved tools as evidence for the existence of Palaeo- and Neolithic rituals (e.g. Pryor 2004). It is self-evident that the existence, at that time, of initiation and hunting rituals, funerary and fertility rites, etc. sheds light on the cognitive and cultural development of prehistoric man, more especially Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Literal and make-believe re-enactment suit semio-cognitive advancements that mark the earliest stage in the evolution of humankind, and the recent (when considered from an evolutionary viewpoint) rituals referred to in this chapter attest to the existence of what Merlin Donald, in his landmark study on cognitive-cultural evolution, terms “vestigial structures” in human cognition and behaviour (1991: 44). Donald’s thesis, which builds on insights from a wide range of fields, including neuroanatomy, palaeoanthropology, cognitive psychology, and neurolinguistics, is “that the modern human mind evolved from the primate mind through a series of major adaptations, each of which led to the emergence of a new representational system” (1991: 2). As advantages in the struggle for survival and reproductive success are usually preserved, “each successive new representational system has remained intact within our current mental architecture, so that the modern mind is a mosaic structure of cognitive vestiges from earlier stages of human emergence” (1991: 3). The most likely scenario of cognitive-cultural development involves “three hypothetical transitions in the evolution of the human brain and mind” (1991: 15); what concerns us here is “mimetic culture” (1.5–0.3 Myr BP), which involved a radical qualitative change from the “episodic cultures” of primates and early hominids (1991: 148–153).

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“The key innovation in erectus”, says Donald, “was the emergence of the most basic level of human representation, the ability to mime, or re-enact, events. This ‘mimetic’ skill supported a culture that formed a necessary intervening layer between ape and modern human cultures” (1991: 16). Setting mimesis as a resource for iconic representation off against comparable yet more primitive skills as found at large in animals (imitation, mimicry), Donald argues that prehistoric mimetic performances were “creative, novel, expressive acts” (1991: 169) that rested on the ability “to produce conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic” (1991: 168). Representing events in an iconic fashion that transgresses the bounds of imitation, mimetic acts are “outputs” that derive from abstract mentally represented event and action models (1991: 226). Although fashioned after an underlying mental model, such outputs are unique and original accomplishments. A straightforward example would be the play-acting of a wedding ceremony; such a mimetic representation is not a replication of a particular wedding: it draws on a mental model, a script-like prototype that guides the mimetic performance in that it provides an outline of its overall features but does not govern each and every detail. Thus, mimetic (re-)enactment entails a twofold distinction. For one thing, mimetic re-enactment refers to a category of behaviour, rather than to a specific state of affairs. For another, there is a marked difference between staging an event and the event itself: for participants, and conversant observers, playacting is not the “real thing” (cf. Donald 1991: 172; Turner 1982: 12). Both characteristics underscore that the mimetic mind is capable of distinguishing between events and representations of events, a capacity found lacking in the “concrete, literal, time-bound episodic mentality” (1991: 164) that typifies, and restricts, the understanding of animals and australopithecines (1991: 160). Mimetic representation, including its earliest manifestations, capitalises on a cognitive attribute that is the epicentre of human semiosis: the ability to distinguish between representational objects and their referents. From the outset, mimetic re-enactment has been a typically social enterprise, and “[w]hen mimesis takes the form of a collective, or group, action, one common outcome is ritual” (Donald 1991: 175). There is, evidently, a wide gulf between current make-believe encounters like African-American sounding, or juvenile verbal duelling in Turkey and its environs, in which interpersonal rivalry is ritually enacted, and the gestural, postural and/or vocal mimetic performances of languageless prehistoric man; the same goes for the (often agonistic) rituals that have passed through the “textual record” (section 5). Most importantly, there is, both in modern and historical specimens, a “rechanneling” of the relevant actions, since the struggle is chiefly waged with linguistic means. This is in line with Donald’s theory about vestigial structures. Regarding the eventual integration of mimetic into verbal-semiotic culture, he posits that there must have been, and still are, various behavioural genres that exhibit “an underlying mimetic form in which language is embedded” (1991: 170).

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The ritual enactment of conflict

Perhaps the clearest case in point for the contention that oral ritual involves “an underlying mimetic form” is ritual contestation, a widely found practice that traces its origin back to prehistoric human custom and, ultimately, non-human aggression display. According to Walter Ong, “[c]ontest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another” (1981: 15). As for intermale antagonism, which often takes the form of “a kind of ritual contest” (1981: 51), Ong endeavours “to reflect on […] the deeper biological and psychological roots of the disposition to contest in the human male, with occasional reference to subhuman analogues” (1981: 64). This leads him to sociobiology, expressly noobiology, i.e. “the study of the biological setting of mental activity (Greek nous, noos, mind)” (1981: 11), and enables him to interpret many present-day polemic, adversative and competitive practices, including sports, politics and games, as ritual/ritualised events. For example, “the violent contest of [modern] athletes directly continues the ritual combat of conspecific males that regularly marks the upper reaches of the entire animal kingdom” (1981: 156). A behavioural pattern in animals that is directly relevant for oral-ritual conflict is symbolic aggression display. Ethological studies certify that animal threatening behaviour that comprises postural attitudes, facial expressions, growls, outcries, or showing off feathers or colours serves to settle conflicts without lethal injury, as it allows for submission or withdrawal (Donald 1991: 156). Survival theory offers a ready explanation for this device: large-scale killing is fatal to a population, if not a species, and the threat–submission pattern is an effective means of settling conflicts (about territory, food, females, etc.) without casualties (cf. Parks 1990: 21). Animal display is usually characterised by conventionalisation or ritualisation. Ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt mentions “ritualized fighting […] in animals”, quoting as an example that “poisonous snakes never bite each other, but the rivals wrestle according to fixed rules” (1966: 475–476). Another example is the display behaviour of gorillas, featuring mutual symbolic actions such as chest-pounding. Parks speaks of “ceremonialized aggression” and “ritualization in conflict” (1990: 19, 21) so as to underline the stereotypic nature of animal display, and argues that heroic “flyting” (< Old English fl¯ıtan ‘strive, dispute’) is “continuous with [such] interactive patterns” (1990: 19). For an example of flyting – “one of the major historical and literary antecedents to the more ‘civilized’ contests of the modern world” (Parks 1990: 161) – I shall briefly attend to the verbal procedure preceding the life-and-death battle between Achilles and Asteropaios in the Iliad (21, ll. 139–204). In this encounter, verbal aggression functions as a deterrent, and is therefore – just like animal bluff display (but unlike later generic variants) – “ethologically sound” (cf. section 2.5); yet

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given the stereotypicality of the display behaviour, it also partakes of the characteristics of mimetic ritual. Achilles initiates the flyting with a scornful question and a dreadful warning: “Who and from where are you among men, you who dare to come against me? / Children of unfortunate ones are they who oppose my strength” (ll. 150–151). Asteropaios counters that he leads the Paeonian javelin throwers, prides himself on his descent from a mighty river god, and challenges his opponent: “But now, splendid Achilles, let us fight” (l. 160). “By this exhortation”, Parks explicates, “Asteropaios demonstrates his refusal to be intimidated and ratifies the contract option (of fighting) that Achilles had intimated” (1990: 51). After he has slain the Paeonian chieftain, Achilles boasts about his own ancestry, thereby illustrating that he “had interpreted Asteropaios’s earlier genealogical statements eristically: In his view they implied a boast (on battle proficiency) that he has now proved hollow” (1990: 51). Parks’s explanation establishes that the pragmatic ramifications of reciprocal oral display go beyond the recognition of inadvertent (non-semiotic) symptoms. In their mimetic-iconic context, the contenders’ assertions are aimed at overawing the rival, and features that under “natural conditions” are symptomatic, acquire, by virtue of the intentionality of mimetic performance (Donald 1991: 168–169), the radically different semiotic status of “communicative signs” (Bax 2004: 194–196). There is, of course, a substantial difference between “natural” dominance behaviour (as occurs in the animal kingdom) and “non-natural” mimetic dominance display (cf. Grice [1957] 1971), i.e. showing off one’s superiority with the purpose of intimidating the opponent into submission. The crux is that mimetic conveyance is ultimately dependent on shared knowledge. To apprehend the communicative significance of mimetic display, a participant must realise that the antagonist’s actions are intentional. In order to “cue” the intended interpretative framework, the ostensive character of verbal display must be mutually manifest (cf. Goffman 1974: 45, 83). Heroic flyting “can stake strong claims to chronological primacy in the sense that it appears in some of the earliest Greek and English texts, thus antedating and probably influencing other disputative forms in these societies, and perhaps in other cultures as well”; what is more, “it displays the agonistic mind-set underlying all verbal contests in a particularly bald, even naïve form” (Parks 1990: 6). As for this qualification, the archaic variety is obviously much akin to animal display, and Parks does not hesitate to link flyting to “the dueling matches of red deer and tomcats, and other such interactions that ethologists have generally agreed are related” (1990: 20). But there are, overall, important differences between human “high-display intraspecific aggressive encounters” (1990: 19) and animal display. What seems to set the two apart is the intentionality of the iconic-mimetic enactment of dominance. However, whether animal display is (or can be) intentional or merely instinctive is a controversial issue among experts. Besides “certainly ritualised, often communicative, and probably symbolic” leaf-clippings (McGrew 1994:

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157), chimpanzees perform make-believe fights, signalling the tussle’s playful nature by specific cues (e.g. keeping the teeth unexposed). On the available evidence it would seem that chimpanzees and other great apes, along with other species that engage in “ritual” play-fighting (e.g. bears, otters), possess basic mimetic skills, and that their make-believe fights are close behavioural homologues of human ritual. But the point stands that heroic flyting and analogous ritual genres are thoroughly “culturalised” in that they draw on culturally defined values. Early Greek flytings pivot on kleos ‘fame’, and “the heroic ethos requires that a hero’s performance match his own report. The hero who succeeds in doing this wins kleos, whereas he who fails loses it” (Parks 1990: 46). Much the same can be said for more recently developed agonistic genres. Sounding reflects the values and assumptions of the African-American culture, particularly the centrality and prominence of the mother figure; Turkish duelling rhymes often select the opponent’s female relatives as a target for verbal abuse, and inherit much of their thematic material from cultural taboos – for example, imputing the opponent with (culturally rejected) homosexuality is a recurrent theme in Near and Middle Eastern ritual verbal contests (Dundes, Leach and Özkök 1972). The thing to stress, all the same, is that ritual conflict involves (re-)enactment, and has its cognitive-behavioural origins in prehistoric mimetic culture, whereas its ultimate substratum is the ubiquitous threat–submission system. 2.5.

Ritual make-believe and ritualisation

Regarding verbal genres like the ones just mentioned, Parks notes that “these types, which I […] call ‘ludic’, must be differentiated from heroic flyting, with its serious claims and martial elements” (1990: 163). Heroic flyting that, given its enacted design, exemplifies an oral-mimetic genre is ethologically sound (or pristine), in that interhuman intimidation, as with animal display, serves to impress, unnerve and, if possible, scare away the opponent. The threat–submission pattern is not an outdated prototype in human society; even today, (non-)verbal display can be an effective means to overawe others and regulate their behaviour; also, violent individuals may be soothed by more or less ritualistic responses that signal submissiveness or retreat. The notion of ludic flyting stresses the game-like character of make-believe confrontation, and underscores the idea that the participants primarily engage in the enactment of conflict because it is fun. The ludic approach exposes “a natural, universal, human liking for argument: an inclination to assume an attitude towards an issue, and to favour one side rather than the other almost arbitrarily, without necessarily having regards to its intrinsic merits” (Mattock 1991: 155). This does not rule out that the more general aims and consequences of ritually enacted conflicts can be quite serious. “Ritual is”, as Turner emphasises, “both

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earnest and playful” (1982: 35), and ritual contention likely recalls Renaissance serio ludere (Huizinga [1938] 1980), also if non-European traditions are concerned. For example, during so-called “twin rituals” the women and men of the Zambian Ndembu tribe taunt each other with bantering sexual remarks. But then [t]his ludic behavior is pressed into the service of the ultimate aim of the ritual – to produce healthy offspring, but not too many healthy offspring at once. Abundance is good, but reckless abundance is a foolish joke. Hence cross-sexual joking both maintains reasonable fertility and restrains unreasonable fecundity. Joking is fun, but is also a social sanction. (Turner 1982: 32)

For another example, proficiency in sounding enhances in-group prestige (Labov 1972); such trials of verbal strength moreover provide “strategies for living” in that they teach the participants how to cope with the difficulties and set-backs to be encountered later in life (Garner 1983). Dundes, Leach and Özkök (1972) indicate that ritual conflict among Turkish adolescents is also linked up with the establishment of intragroup hierarchy; furthermore, given the obscenities and (homo)sexual reverberations, such ludic exchanges reflect the traumatic experiences brought about by circumcision and/or the expulsion, immediately after childhood, from the protected realm of womanly care. Whatever the case, traumatism seems a major driving force behind ritual performance and the ritualisation of (language) behaviour (section 3.2.2 below). On the subject of ritualisation, two conceptions should be outlined. Whereas numerous word-to-world rituals simply “re-enact important events” (Burke 1987: 213), other (re-)enactment varieties involve more of a loose connection with their “models”, because the relation is mimetic, not imitative. Thus, sounding can be construed as a ritualised genre, in that a sequence of ritual insults echoes another verbal practice (i.e. reviling) but cannot be conceived of as the literal re-enactment of a particular exchange of verbal abuse. Also, while sounding consists of “ritualised” offences, since they are modelled, leastwise ultimately, on serious insults, the ritual genre is governed by a set of discourse rules that differ substantially from those pertaining to ordinary argument. The idea that certain (non-)verbal genres or activity types are amenable to ritualisation figures prominently in the field; there is, in effect, nowadays “an increasing tendency among ritual studies scholars to avoid the term ‘ritual’ altogether and to use other terms (such as ritualisation or public events) instead” (Hüsken 2007: 337). The “generic” interpretation of the ritualisation process is manifest, or else implied, in, e.g., Honegger’s (1999) analysis of parting routines in medieval erotic-amatory contexts, Arnovick’s (1999) inquiry into agonistic insults, Beetz’s (1991, 1999) and Burke’s (1987, 2000) accounts of medieval and early modern politeness, and Goffman’s essay on modern-day “presentational rituals” and “avoidance rituals”, i.e. face-saving procedures that “often become habitual and standardized practices” (1967: 13).

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An alternative for the understanding that, diachronically speaking, ritual genres result from the ritualisation of non-ritual (language) behaviour, is the “dynamic” view that ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction […]. (Bell 1992: 74)

Ritualisation, according to this interpretation, is a device that can be employed at any point in any ongoing interaction, whereas the term itself designates “the way in which certain social actions strategically distinguish themselves in relation to other actions” (Bell 1992: 74). This agrees with Grimes’s argument that “[r]itual is not a ‘what’, not a ‘thing’. It is a ‘how’, a quality, and there are ‘degrees’ of it” (1990: 13); hence his contention that “[r]itualization […] refers to activity that is not culturally framed as ritual but which someone […] interprets as if it were potential ritual” (1990: 10). Unlike “ritualizing”, i.e. “the act of cultivating or inventing rites” (1990: 10), ritualisation is realised in actu by formalisation, elevation, stylisation and other such means of differentiation (1990: 14). What it concerns here is a radically processual approach.

3.

Why ritual?

3.1.

The many uses of ritual

A key question, also for (historical) pragmatics, is why individuals across the globe do, and did for ages on end, engage in ritual performance. To be sure, given its omnipresence, ritual has, and must always have had, enormous appeal and impact. The former notion relates to what ritual does with “ritualists”, i.e. the participants; the latter points towards its various functions. Engaging in ritual can, on the word of Muir, effect a “feeling of awe”, and “[i]n that emotional evocation lies the work of the ritual. […] to share in a ritual performance means to live ‘a life of emotion, not of thoughts’” (1997: 2). Kertzer professes that “[t]he power of ritual […] stems not just from its social matrix, but also from its psychological underpinnings. […] Participation in ritual involves physiological stimuli, the arousal of emotions; ritual works through the senses to structure our sense of reality and our understanding of the world around us” (1988: 10). Linguist Jan Koster, writing about the dangers of mass ritual, claims that ritual activity produces “a temporary destruction of awareness of the wider meaningful relations of one’s individuality and the reduction of the self to the immediate physical experience of the here and now” (2003: 219). For a kindred view, ritual interaction as exemplified by, e.g., medieval pre-combat dialogues may have brought about the state of

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recklessness that allowed warriors to face the enemy with total contempt for death, as such procedures stimulated the discharge of euphorising neurotransmitters like endorphin (Bax 2006: 500). This may seem a fanciful notion, but there are still largely unexplored connections between ritual performance and psychoactive stimulants (Staal 2001; Weinhold 2007); besides, warfare and martial arts often involve ritualtype preliminaries aimed at enhancing concentration or focus, as well as ritual finales (e.g. triumphal processions) to re-establish “normality” (cf. van Creveld 2008). If the emotional, psychological, or therapeutic effects of ritual performance primarily concern the ritualists involved, they may also extend over audiences, “for rituals are designed […] to impress the bystanders, to reinforce (if not create) solidarity, and so on” (Burke 1987: 175). As for early modern Italy, Burke purports that “this participation was an essential part of the ritual” (1987: 174) that even affected its import: “Audience participation could modify the meaning of a ritual event. […] the same ritual was not the same on different occasions, because the protagonists were different” (1987: 178). Kertzer refers to the theatre to elucidate the workings of ritual: its “dramatic quality […] provokes an emotional response. Just as emotions are manipulated in the theater through the ‘varied stimuli of light, colour, gesture, movement, voice,’ so too these elements and others give rituals a means of generating powerful feelings” (1988: 11). As it facilitates perceptivity, restricted awareness, elevating or mind-expanding experiences, or psychological and/or social cleansing (Weinhold 2007: 53; Lincoln 1989: 100), the salience of ritual is ultimately functional. Putting aside immediate and individual outcomes, the relevance of ritual performance is to be found in its consecutive effects on society: ritual is “a way of regulating relations between society and the supernatural” (Burke 1987: 75); ritual “creates social solidarity or forms social identities” and “constructs, maintains and modifies society itself” (Muir 1997: 6); it serves to underline “social values […] by making clear which patterns of behaviour are acceptable and by applying pressure to non-conformists”, and to establish “the values for a community and lay the ground rules for acceptable behaviour” (Edwards and Sienkewicz 1990: 82 and 88, respectively). Some rituals have quite lofty objectives like enhancing rebirth, achieving spiritual purification, or bringing “the cosmic order into daily life by giving persons access to divine power” (Muir 1997: 16). Others accomplish more down-to-earth social functions; e.g. verbal duelling is used as a means of establishing in-group hierarchies, whereas in everyday social interaction “ritually delicate” actors are “pledged to maintain a ceremonial order by means of interpersonal rituals” (Goffman 1967: 31 and 169, respectively). More generally put, “ritual practices seek to formulate a sense of the interrelated nature of things and they reinforce values that assume coherent interrelations” (Bell 1997: 136). In effect, as summarised in section 2.2, rituals maintain cohesion (Grimes), attach individuals to society (Durkheim), are templates for reshaping social situations (Geertz), and/or express cultural ideals and models that guide social behaviour (Leach).

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Rituals are, thus viewed, socially sanctioned “technical devices” (Koster 2003: 224) to sort out individual, socio-interactional and/or cultural-societal inadequacies, obscurities and ambiguities. For example, rituals and functionally comparable genres strengthen cultural identity. Apropos of Turkic oral epic, Karl Reichl observes that like a religious ritual, [epic recitation] is structured according to the rules prescribed by tradition. It reinforces this tradition by taking the participants of the communicative event into the tradition and making them a part of it. The propagation of traditional forms and values might take a more specific turn […] when historical roots and ethnic origins of clan or tribe are explored. (2003: 263–264)

Religious rituals, according to Bell, create “a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors” (1992: 74); e.g. cultural-sacred “rites of affliction” present an argument […] for a cosmos of ordered and interdependent components. While human efforts at maintaining this order appear to pale in comparison to the power attributed to gods, ancestors, and demons, rituals of affliction hold all these powers to some degree of accountability and service. Indeed, even though this genre of rites may be particularly effective in maintaining the status quo of the traditional social order in a community, they demonstrate that the human realm is not completely subordinate to the realms of spiritual power; these rites open up opportunities for redefining the cosmological order in response to new challenges and new formulations of human needs. (Bell 1997: 120)

Worthy of brief mention is that early theorists like van Gennep and Durkheim tended to foreground the magical functions of ritual “due to what they deemed to be its manipulative intent” (Bell 1997: 120). During communal magical rites, “[t]he participants voice their desires; acting and speaking together, they reach a high pitch of emotion and enthusiasm. The collective emotion is projected or externalized in a person, a daimo¯n or god” (Fontenrose 1966: 26). Such magical rituals can be likened to spells, charms, conjurations and other verbal uses that bespeak the ancient belief that the (super)natural world can be influenced, if not in fact imposed upon, by volitional human action (cf. Pahta and Taavitsainen, this volume). There is, for example, a ninth-century Germanic magic charm to drive worms out of a horse’s hoof. It consists of a series of directives aimed at the vermin themselves, starting with Gang út, nesso, mid nigun nessiklinon ‘Come out, worm, with [your] nine wormlings’, and concludes with the unmistakably Christian (but not necessarily “original”) invocation Drohtin, uuerthe so ‘So be it, Lord’ (cf. van Oostrom 2006: 60). What also connects the two are the severe, sometimes very detailed orthopractical requirements (cf. Staal 1989): as the performance of charms is governed by strict felicity conditions (to employ Austin’s notion), most notably word-perfect “deliverance” (in that even a slight slip of the tongue renders a charm ineffective),

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so many religious and sacrosanct rituals demand utmost precision in carrying out the constituent (speech) acts. It would, moreover, seem that spell-casting and other such magical practices have traditionally occurred within a ritual context. “Although […] the linguistic form is important […]”, says Reichl, “the form is not the defining element: the text is a charm because it occurs in a ritual, is uttered in a specific setting and with a specific purpose” (2003: 256). The small yew-wood prayer stick inscribed with Old Dutch magic runes that has come down to us from the eighth century apparently served to be ritually cast into the wild billows so as to obviate the danger of flooding (van Oostrom 2006: 59). Note that the actual casting of the spell re-enacts an obviously momentous event from the past, and that the incantation itself has distinctly mimetic-iconic overtones: ophæmugistndaæmluþ :iwimostæhþuæn iwiosustduæale

On [the mound] Opheim Amluþ took his stand To [his] stick the breakers yielded May the waves yield to [this] stick

Be all this as it may, so manifold are the functions attributed to ritual, so varied the ways rituals are (re-)enacted, and so diverse their cultural contexts, that the many uses of ritual must somehow reflect, and draw upon, an underlying common feature. The convergence of the multiformity of ritual practice, as I see it, is its unparalleled feeling side. 3.2.

Cognitive-emotional aspects of ritual

3.2.1.

Ritual and liminality

In a 1961 handbook entry on ritus, Mühlmann noted that “[r]ites are based on the human need for security” (cited in Reichl 2003: 251). This agrees with the fact that ritual performances almost invariably bear on the vicissitudes of human experience. Van Gennepian rites of passage (cf. section 2.1) are inextricably bound up with unsettling, latently precarious “transformations”, e.g. pubescent boys turn into adult men, or even warriors; sexually inexperienced maidens become marital spouses. All rituals of passage tie in with such alterations, and typically focus on the transitional stage or “liminal period” (Turner 1969). The notion of liminality (< Latin limen ‘threshold’) is not resticted to intermediary phases in the human life cycle, but applies also to other categories – and ritual likewise. Bogs and moors can be interpreted as geographically liminal areas, as they exemplify the borderland between culture and nature, between civilisation and the hostile wilderness, if not the perilous twilight zone between everyday reality and the otherworld; tellingly, some such sites are construed as “ritual landscapes” (e.g. Pryor 2004: 173). Koster mentions that “[t]he ritual enclosure has been an essential part of ritual from prehistorical times to the present”, and that “the function of ritual performance cannot be understood without consideration of this territorial aspect” (2003: 216). Regarding the liminal aspect of space, the Vedic S´rauta ritual originated in the Sadas, one

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of the Soma ritual’s sacrificial spaces, “in an attempt to reconcile two rival parties, i.e. Indo-Arian speaking peoples and non-Indo-European speaking peoples” (Staal 2004: 276; own translation). Leach (1964) discusses the interconnections between rituals, taboos and liminal categories. Pets, for example, are usually tabooed for food on account of their in-between status, i.e. neither human nor game animal; for many people their pets stand midway on the humanDnon-human continuum. Given their position between edible game and inedible wildlife, foxes are, in English upper class culture, categorically problematic, and the barbarous practice of the hunting and killing of foxes in Britain is an elaborate ritual surrounded by extraordinary taboos. Even the language used is extraordinary, marked by special words for familiar objects, an avoidance feature so typical of the language of sacred rituals in countless other cultures. The fox itself must not be spoken of as such: it is referred to as a dog (the dogs themselves are hounds), its head as a mask and its tail as a brush. (Foley 1997: 104)

Dealings with liminal persons like sorcerers, witches and magicians – who purportedly belong to the intermediate class between the natural and the supernatural (and often act as go-betweens) – are likewise “particularised” by a ritual approach. The same goes for the humanDdivine contrast; e.g. in early modern times, popes were seen as ambiguous beings, and “[p]apal ritual came to centre more and more on the Vatican complex as the pope became increasingly remote from the people” (Burke 1987: 180). Comparably, a pilgrimage […] was no ordinary journey to a particular shrine, it was a form of ritual, which often involved mortifying the flesh, by going barefoot, or climbing the steps to a sanctuary on one’s knees, or licking the floor. […] Like many other rituals, pilgrimage can be seen as a kind of drama, in which series of acts have to be performed in sequence, and the actor is in a “liminoid” state, while in passage from one status to another. (Burke 1987: 210)

As to ritual particularisation, mortuary and burial rites centre on the transition from this world to the next (lifeDdeath), whereas in many past and present cultures hermaphrodites – and homosexuals, too – are singled out as aberrant liminal cases because they are outside the traditionally conceived manDwoman dichotomy. All kinds of real, imagined, or would-be “hybrids”, varying from demigods (humanD divine), werewolves (humanDanimal), or warriors wearing scary masks (humanDspirit) to the bodily deformed – e.g. elephant men (soundDsick), castrati and eunuchs (manDwoman) – and the mentally ill (soundDsick or ordinaryDinspired), potentially qualify as liminal figures, and can (and could always) count on special, including ritual(ised), treatment. Among the impetuses underlying ritual, liminal experience presumably has a governance role. From time immemorial, liminality has been a vital driving force behind ritual invention and performance, including the amityDenmity dilemma underlying the widespread ritual approach of strangers and outsiders. A well-nigh universal ancient custom is the guest–host bond ensuing from the antithetic rela-

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tionship between goodwill and hostility. The liminal stranger (friendDfoe) to whom hospitality and protection are offered can turn out to be an offender, deceiver, or adversary; conversely, the visitor may be defied by a traitorous host. “Sacred” principles guiding the behaviour of the host, his household, and the guest must warrant that the visit will not end in strife. The sacrosanct guest–host bond is a notable motif of early literatures, and it is significant that this motif can merge with the ritual conflict motif (cf. the Unferþ episode in Beowulf ). Such is the affinity between pre-combat rituals that particularise the liminal aspect of mortal contest (lifeDdeath) and the hallowed custom of accommodating strangers (friendDfoe) that “the Homeric and Old English heroic traditions both seem to have recognized within the logic of the battlefield pattern [of verbal conflict] itself the possibility of modulation into the guest–host channel” (Parks 1990: 77). Ultimately, the amityDenmity dilemma also underlies (non-)verbal politeness, specifically Goffman-type interpersonal rituals. In Western Europe, such procedures gained momentum during early modernity (Burke 2000), as the proliferation of urbanisation went hand in hand with the waning significance of social practices adapted to well-integrated communities and the traditional security of the extended family; (early) modern town life, with its much more frequent contacts with “aliens”, called for new-modelled ritual means of linguistic relation management (Bax 2010). To end on a general note, rituals provide safeguards. As resources to subjugate uncertainty and avert danger, they promote feelings of safety. Most particularly, ritual procedures pervade the realm of liminal experience, the domain of human understanding characterised by mutually exclusive motives and deep-seated contrarieties. The remarkable persistence of ritual in human culture may well rest on its potential to fashion a route of escape from the agony of conflicting cognitive realities. 3.2.2.

Ritual and cognitive-emotional dilemma

“Ritual is a way of solving problems” (Burke 1987: 180) and not only for humans, seeing that the ritualised leaf-clippings of chimpanzees arise out of liminal approach–avoidance conflicts (McGrew 1994: 157), whereas mating rituals – found in many animal species – “suspend the self-protective instincts that normally prohibit very close interactions between organisms” (Koster 2003: 243). For humankind, and for millennia on end, ritual has been the problem-solving device par excellence, considering that “[o]ur primitive ancestors knew what we have long forgotten – that at times of crisis and transition […] man needs a ritual that reconnects him with all of life” (Grimes 1990: 113). Ritual performance taps into cognitive dissonances; as with taboos and sacrosanct customs that enable individuals and collectives to cope with paradoxical situations, ritual constitutes a cultural method of dealing with opposite truths. Although “ritual is never able to eradicate

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cleavages or to resolve tensions […]”, as Lincoln acknowledges, it serves “to cloak the fundamental conflicts, thereby permitting groups and individuals to forget them for a time (or at least take them less seriously) so that some temporary measure of goodwill, common spirit and stability may emerge” (1989: 89). As for ritual revilement, [i]t is not difficult to understand why invectives should have developed in the ritual setting provided by marriage in various oral cultures. The tensions which surround weddings are strong. The social pressure on the girl to get married and on families to find suitable partners is considerable. Weddings provide many opportunities for displaying wealth and forging new links which enable a family to consolidate or improve their position in the social hierarchy. However, opportunities of this kind also bring with them great anxiety and worry. Either party could withdraw up to the last minute. Guests may be invited to the wedding but until the day arrives there is no way of knowing whether the occasion will be sufficiently important or well managed to merit their presence. If key figures are missing or relatively few people arrive, the effect on the social standing of all concerned could be disastrous. (Edwards and Sienkewicz 1990: 129)

Ritual performance is closely associated with cognitive-emotional “trauma”. In effect, the historical literary representations of oral ritual that have been studied by the present author can be reduced to a single dimension in that they all touch on incompatible cognitive realities. The keynote of the dialogic encounter of sinnekens ‘mischievous demons’ in the late-medieval Dutch allegorical theatre is the tension between irreconcilable pressures, i.e. trust and distrust; ritual performance provides a way out in that make-believe controversy smoothes the way for co-operation (Bax 2000). The ritual confrontation in the Old Icelandic Hárbarðsljóð stems from a predicament, too, namely whether Thor will be taken across the fjord because of his pre-eminence or via the humiliating request that the ferryman do him a favour (Bax and Padmos 1983). How ritual conflict and opposite behavioural constraints hang together is also illustrated by the Old High German Hildebrandlied where ritual protocol serves as a means to overcome the clash between tribal clan ethic and feudal loyalty (Bax 1983). The challenge convention of chivalrous knights shows that ritual make-believe is a method to come to terms with conflicting pressures, i.e. the instinctive drive to preserve one’s life versus the cultural maxim to preserve one’s honour (Bax 1999). As for verbal duelling and ritual argument, Ong concludes that “[e]arly oral combativeness and the early ascendancy of rhetoric […] were ways of dealing with […] insecurity” (1981: 144). Manifestly, or deep down, having resort to ritual is a way of averting or surmounting, at times even flirting with, cognitive-emotional bewilderment on the strength of “semiotic distancing”, i.e. iconic-mimetic or symbolic displacement (cf. McGrew 1994: 157).

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4.

Matters of interplay: Structure, meaning, function

4.1.

The need for an integrative framework

If not for the perils of overstatement, I would contend that the average student of ritual is more given to presenting grand theories than to submitting detailed analyses. Linguists, particularly the more philologically-oriented, cannot help noticing that the science of ritual is often flawed by broad and general outlines of ritual performances, all too sketchy summaries of, if not merely global references to, concrete ritual activities. Lacking in ritual studies tout court are in-depth analyses to assist in understanding both the (speech) behavioural minutiae and the intricate dynamics of ritual practice, as well as methodologies to accomplish such a task. Another challenge for the field is to dispel the proverbial elusiveness of ritual. For, in addition to the conceptual muddle outlined in section 2 above, there is the dichotomy between scholars like Staal, who emphasise the orthopractical rigour of ritual and its stability over time, and those who stress the creative and original character – and so the variability, within generic bounds – of ritual performance; Labov (1972), for one, underlines the ingenuity of ritual insults, while Dundes, Leach and Özkök (1972) highlight the vital role of mnemonic resourcefulness. It should be emphasised, nevertheless, that the widely divergent approaches are not mutually exclusive; which is to say that dealing with the formal constraints on ritual (speech) behaviour or the structural make-up of ritual (speech) events is not at variance with tackling the communicative significance, the social function, or the direct or longer-term consequences of ritual performance. “Thick” descriptions (Ryle 1971; Geertz 1973) that engender insights into how the realisation, the (inter)actional organisation and the outcome of ritual behaviour hang together are imperative to gain an understanding of the interrelatedness, and interdependency, of the formal and the meaning poles of ritual interaction. Hence my attempt, in what follows next, to outline a conceptual framework for analysing, classifying and comparing ritual (speech) events. For as Staal duly reminds us, “[w]hat we lack is not rituals, but ritualists, and a science of ritual” (1982: 38). 4.2.

A bandwidth model of ritual performance

As is patently obvious, language and language use cannot be studied in vitro, as it were. That is to say, linguists must, of necessity, rely on physical manifestations of “language” (i.e. the numerous natural languages), whereas pragmaticians are bound to examine empirical examples of language behaviour. The same goes for ritual scholars: the ultimate touchstone for ritual science, if it is to yield cumulative insights, is ritual in vivo, in other words: (representations of) concrete ritual behaviour. However ambiguous the concept of ritual, however varied its realisations, or however strikingly dissimilar its uses, in the context of empirical-analytic interpre-

Rituals

FORMAL

/ BEHAVIOURAL D

pre-arranged / formally fixed

ad hoc (inter)actional structure

fixed formulations / formulaic tendencies

creative utterances

static

dynamic / fluctuating

generic / traditional

processual / (newly) invented SEMANTIC

/ SEMIOTIC

D

meaningless

meaningful

iconic (natural)

symbolic (non-natural)

literal / imitative / replicative

mimetic

conventional / fixed meaning

ambiguous / variable meaning

particular(ised) meaning

stratified / multiple meaning

truth-conditional

performative PRAGMATIC

/ FUNCTIONAL D

human actors

semi-divine / superhuman actors

anyone

special (institutional) roles

liminal / transitional

Ø

serious / sincere / ethologically sound

ludic / make-believe

non-utilitarian

functional: A practical / instrumental A social A cultural / societal A ideological / normative A spiritual / transcendental

immediate outcome

consecutive effect

individual outcome

collective effect CONTEXTUAL

context-dependent

D

contextfree

sacred

profane

private

communal / public / mass

individual

interactional / collective

secret

overt

restricted to: A area A season, calendar A occasion (e.g. baptising, name-giving)

Ø

Figure 1. Pragmatic space of rituals

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tive approaches aimed at furthering the science of ritual it is worthwhile to have at one’s disposal an overall model aimed at identifying the relevant parameters of ritual (language) behaviour. Such a model can be derived from the “pragmatic space model” introduced by Jucker and Taavitsainen. In a paper on insults from ancient flyting to flaming on the Internet, the authors, building on the linguistic concept of “semantic field”, develop a model that “indicates the multidimensionality of criteria that are relevant in the description of specific speech acts” (2000: 74). These criteria define the bandwidth of verbal abuse (its “pragmatic space”), and can usefully serve to compare insults to neighbouring speech acts. In the wake of their proposal (2000: 74–76), and bearing in mind the various characteristics of ritual mentioned above, I suggest that ritual performances can be apprehended in terms of the distinctions in Figure 1 (cf. section 5.2.2; in some cases the opposition involves a continuum; the item list is tentative and not exhaustive).

5.

Within the discipline: Historical pragmatics and ritual

5.1.

Oral ritual and the textual record

Within historical pragmatics, ritual interaction is not, as yet, a main consideration; that is, only a mere handful of its “official” exponents, including the present writer, have explicitly addressed the issue. But if we take a wider view and take in more or less pragmatically-oriented literary scholars such as Ward Parks, Joseph Harris or Carol Clover, along with historical anthropologists like Peter Burke and Edward Muir, the topic of historical rituals does not come off badly. Historical rituals, needless to say, are not amenable to direct observation or recording. A remarkable exception, in a manner of speaking, is the static Agnicayana ritual which originated around 1,000BC but continues to be performed in India, albeit very rarely. In 1975, its performance was recorded on film, and this provided the empirical basis of Staal’s (1983) exhaustive but, at the same time, on principle non-interpretive (or “thin”) descriptions. Yet, in the ordinary course of events, historical pragmatics needs to fall back on indirect sources within the textual record: written historical documents which shed light on contemporaneous ritual practices and/or early literary texts that portray oral rituals. In the framework of narrative and dramatic art, rituals typically make up identifiable “generic units” (cf. Harris 2000: 322). As to the question of how realistic such fictional representations are, it has been argued that, for several reasons, including historical arguments, such depictions epitomise real-life traditions (Bax 1999: 53–62; cf. Parks 1990: 184; Arnovick 1999: 38), so that they can serve, with due reserve, as “referential models” for authentic ritual practices, to borrow a notion from evolutionary psychology (McGrew 1994: 164).

Rituals

5.2.

Ritual in historical pragmatics

5.2.1.

Ritual conflict: An almost paradigmatic case

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What comes to the fore concerning the study of ritual in historical pragmatics (broadly conceived) is a particular interest in antagonistic language behaviour. Thus, Jucker and Taavitsainen concentrate on insults, developing a model for the diachronic analysis of such often ritualised speech acts, and discussing “both the changing cultural grounding in which insults occur and the changing ways in which they are realized” (2000: 67). In a similar vein, chronologically (as well as geographically and culturally) distinct agonistic speech events have been compared in order to “construct a framework for interpreting the diachronic pattern that emerges” (Arnovick 1999: 17; cf. Harris 1979; Parks 1990). Others, such as Clover (1979, 1980), Bax (1999) and Tolmie (2003), offer “thick” historical-synchronic analyses of agonistic speech events, with the aim of explaining the discourse-pragmatic rules and sociocultural codes behind the realisation of ritual speech acts, the interactional structure, and the functional meaning of medieval oral rituals. The interest in verbal aggression is presumably not accidental. “Historically”, says Ong, “some of the most conspicuous manifestations of adversativeness in the human lifeworld across the globe have been in speech itself” (1981: 34), and it was only with the rise of literacy that its momentum began to wane: “Male ritual combat, which governs so much of early narrative, is conspicuously external, however deeply interior its sources. Over the centuries, from classical to modern times, in narrative the incidence of the externally violent male combat diminishes, but gradually and slowly” (1981: 188). A pertinent example of male ritual combat is heroic flyting (section 2.4.2 above). (Inter)female flyting also occurs (e.g. in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied and the Old Irish Fled Bricrend), but it is rare in contemporary fictional depictions of ancient and medieval speech communication (Parks 1990: 11–12). Tolmie’s (2003) essay on female incitement in the Icelandic sagas deals with gender in relation to agonistic ritual, particularly the ambiguous position of women in this respect. Male ritual antagonism, then again, is a recurrent theme in medieval European literatures. Several scholars have probed into Anglo-Saxon flyting as portrayed in Beowulf, specifically the hostile encounter between Beowulf and Unferþ (Clover 1980: 460–468; Parks 1990: 127–128; Arnovick 1999: 26–31; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 77–78), as well as in The Fight at Finnsburh (Parks 1990: 81–83; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 78–79) and The Battle of Maldon (Arnovick 1999: 31–33). Sennur and mannjafnaðir – representing two major types of ritual contention in Old Icelandic – have been studied by Lönnroth (e.g. 1979), Clover (1979, 1980), Harris (1979), Bax and Padmos (1983), Frotscher (2001) and Pakis (2005). Like their Old English counterparts, both Icelandic genres exemplify verbal matches in which the contenders, by boasts and insults, imputations and rebukes,

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try to injure each other’s honour, or encroach upon each other’s prestige. Other instances of ritual studied from (or close to) the historical-pragmatic perspective are the pre-combat encounter between father and son in Hildebrandlied (Wisniewski 1975; von Polenz 1981; Bax 1983), the incident of how Sigfrid the dragon-slayer confronts king Gunther of Burgundy in Nibelungenlied (Bax 2004: 180–183), and the challenge procedure in Middle Dutch Arthurian romances (Bax 1999). The overarching concern of most such ventures is to ascertain the rule-governed nature of ritual(ised) antagonism, particularly the constraints on ritual speech acts and the standard behavioural pattern of such ludic or pristine spoken interactions, and to establish that the functional import of ritually enacted speech acts differs considerably from their prima facie pragmatic meanings; what is often at issue, too, is the culturo-historical significance of ritual performance and/or the development of ritual behaviour over time. Since all of this is fairly general, a more closely analysed example of the historical-pragmatic approach is provided below. At this juncture, it needs to be added that historical pragmatics has, to date, concentrated on European traditions. Still, many non-European cultures have produced relevant ritual conflict genres as well (cf. Pakis 2005), which, to my knowledge, have barely been studied from a pragmatic viewpoint. The Arabic poetic muna¯zarah genre – which continues to be practised today – traces its origins back to the late eighth or early ninth century (Mattock 1991: 155), but this ludic duelling variety was conceivably influenced by older traditions, possibly even Sumerian dispute poetry of which “the oldest and fully-developed examples […] date from the beginning of the 2nd Millennium BCE ” (Reinink and Vanstiphout 1991: 1). Verbal contestation is also found at large in the Sanskrit Maha¯bha¯rata (c. fourth century BC ; Parks 1990: 129–136) and the fourteenth-century Japanese Heike monogatari (Parks 1990: 30–31, 34), just to mention two other early “exotic” sources. 5.2.2.

Ritual conflict interaction: Sample analysis

The ritual genre under consideration here is the Old Icelandic mannjafnaðr ‘comparison between men’; the specimen discussed stems from Hárbarðsljóð ‘Lay of Harbard’. This verbal duel, recorded from oral tradition c. AD 980 (Olsen 1960: 84–86), can be taken as a literary representation of an actual ritual tradition in early northern Europe (Harris 1979: 67) and exemplifies a lengthy mannjafnaðr (stanzas 15–46) between Thor and Odin, the latter in the role of Harbard the ferryman, who proves reluctant to take Thor across the fjord. As in all mannjafnaðir, the contenders try to belittle the achievements that the opponent boasts about. The first two exchanges of the encounter are cited below (own translation, cf. Bax 2009); the ritual argument serves to establish which contender is superior so as to settle the ritually enacted ferry controversy.

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16

17 18

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Thor: Do you wish to refer to my fight with Hrungni, That blusterous giant with his stony head? I nevertheless struck him down, mortally injured. Meanwhile, what were you doing, Harbard? Harbard: For five long winters I stayed with Fjolvar, In the isle called Algroen. There we fought battles, felled heroes; Showed courage, and gave chase to the women! Thor: And did it go well with those ladies over there? Harbard: Voluptuous women, how eager they were! Nice bits of skirt, ready for anything! Out of sea-sand they made ropes; Out of deep gorges they quarried grit. In cunning I was superior to them all, I slept with seven sisters, with each of them I had my way! Meanwhile, what were you doing, Thor?

Indirectly, Thor asserts that he is an able warrior (stanza 15). Harbard makes a similar counter-claim (16): boasting about his warlike deeds in Algroen, he verifies that his martial status equals Thor’s. Then he adds that he was successful with the other sex besides. So, from the perspective of superiority display, he outmatches Thor. Thor tries to weaken Harbard’s counter-claim by throwing doubt upon his amorous feats (17). Harbard defends himself via grotesque boasts of his cunning and sexual exploits (18). The second exchange shows exactly the same interactional pattern: 19

20

21

Thor: I slew Thjazi, that haughty giant; I cast the eyes of Alwaldi’s son Up into the arch of heaven. That is the most illustrious of all my deeds, And all humankind may know so. Meanwhile, what were you doing, Harbard? Harbard: Through cunning and guile I overcame the powers of darkness, Whom I enticed away from their darlings. A bold giant I deemed Hlebard: He lent out a magic staff, I charmed away his wits. Thor: Then he got small thanks for his pains!

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Marcel Bax Harbard: One oak has what it scrapes off the other: Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin! Meanwhile, what were you doing, Thor?

Thor initiates this exchange by bragging about how he conquered the night (19). For the benefit of humankind, he brought light into the darkness (the eyes of Thjazi, son to Alwaldi, are the stars in the sky). He challenges Harbard to come up with a comparably significant feat. As in the first exchange, the turn-taking is established by a fixed formula which implies the speaker’s belief that the hearer cannot outdo him. In riposte, Harbard alleges that he, too, conquered the night (20) because he prevailed over the hideous mycriðor ‘nightriders’, demonic entities he lured away from their human prey. He also prides himself on how he managed to bewitch Hlebard with the latter’s own magic wand. This claim to superiority is warded off, in that Thor gives forth that such a thing is unfair, and so does not count (21). Harbard then quotes, and explains, an appropriate proverb (22): ¢at hefir eic, er af annarri scefr, um sic er hverr í slíco ‘One oak-tree thrives when another is stripped, each is for himself in such matters’ (Pakis 2005: 171). Given how the duel proceeds, this is an adequate move: Harbard wins this round on the grounds that in Germanic society, as in most pre- or semi-literate cultures, proverbs and other codifications of generally accepted wisdom amounted to ungainsayable truths. A: claim + motivation B: counter-claim + motivation A: challenge of counter-claim B: defence of counter-claim Figure 2. Basic interaction structure of the mannjafnaðr in Hárbarðsljóð

Figure 2 models the interaction structure of this ritual speech encounter. In the next rounds, the exchanges are prolonged because the moves “challenge” and “defence” are recursively applied. In, for example, the fourth exchange (stanzas 29–36, cf. Figure 3), Harbard again bases his counter-claim on his sexual endeavours; he made love to a beautiful girl: “I gratified her desires, she conferred her favours on me” (H1). Thor derisively questions Harbard’s bravura: “So you consorted with a lively lass, what?” (T2). In what is according to the basic model the final speech, Harbard defends his counter-claim (H2): indeed, the girl was such a handful that he could have done with Thor’s support. Yet, Thor playfully elaborates on Harbard’s reply (T3), thus challenging his counter-claim again. Slighting Thor (H3), Harbard tries to sustain his claim, but Thor disproves the argument that he cannot be trusted (T4): “By springtime an old leather shoe has shrunken so much that it hurts at the heel”, de Vries explains; hence his conception that “a heel-biter [is someone who]

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perfidiously attacks another from behind” ([1938] 1978: 92; own translation). This move proves effective, for in his responding turn (H4) Harbard, apparently outwitted, confines himself to the turn-taking formula. T1: H1: T2: H2:

claim + motivation counter-claim + motivation challenge of counter-claim defence of counter-claim

T1: H1: T2: H2:

T3: challenge of counter-claim

T3:

H3: defence of counter-claim

H3:

T4: challenge of counter-claim

T4:

H4: Ø

H4:

[…] […] So you consorted with a lively lass, what? Your help would have been very welcome, Thor, when I held that girl in my arms. I would certainly have liked to help you, if only I had been around at the time. You can be trusted, but only as long as you don’t renege on your word. I’m not a heel-biter like an old hide-shoe in spring. Meanwhile, what were you doing, Thor?

Figure 3. Interaction structure of the 4th exchange of the mannjafnaðr in Hárbarðsljóð

Given this analysis, along with additional sources (Clover 1979; Bax and Padmos 1983), the variables in Figure 1 can be specified thus: the mannjafnaðr in Hárbarðsljóð is pre-arranged as for its speech-actional and discursive-interactional design; exhibits formulaic tendencies (especially regarding turn-taking); encompasses highly creative utterances; fits in a traditional generic framework; involves particularised meanings with a secondary significance (superiority display); exemplifies a mimetic act structure; is ludic (not truth-conditional); is situated within a liminal context (Thor’s dilemma, see above); is functional (problem-solving); has an immediate outcome (Thor loses the contest and has to walk all the way around the fjord); and is tied to a specific area (the typical “sundering flood” setting).

6.

Out of ritual

To conclude, I will briefly consider ritual as a prerequisite for the emergence of language as well as its bearing on discourse-pragmatic development. Staal (1989) theorises that by virtue of the non-representational formal structure evidenced by the complex hierarchy of ritual performance, ritual lies at the root of language, specifically syntax. Building on Staal’s conception of ritual as a set of “semantically empty” formal procedures, Haverkort and de Roder (2003) discuss neurological data that suggest that ritual, syntax, music and poetry (especially archaic chanting) involve the same brain structures and processing modes,

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and are, hence, likely to share their evolutionary antecedents. Most particularly, according to these researchers, poetic-like incantation was the intervening layer between non-verbal ritual and natural language. Although there is reason to put into perspective Staal’s radical contention that rituals are meaningless, it cannot be dismissed out of hand that the formal and conceptual structures underlying ritual and related mimetic practices were an important factor behind the emergence of oral-semiotic competences. Ritual is not only a primeval phenomenon; it is, in point of fact, one of the earliest modes of complex representation and communication. Evolutionarily, language is a recent innovation/adaptation, and mimetic culture has likely “provided the basic social and semantic structures on which symbolic language was later to be added” (Donald 1991: 200). As also argued by Enfield and Levinson, language itself rests on other abilities that are ontogenetically, phylogenetically, and logically prior – in particular, the ability to attribute action, meaning, and intention in structured sequences of interaction. Communication is possible without fully fledged language […], operating on a basis of reflexive or anticipatory intention attribution, which is always at work even in the use of languages with full expressive power. (2006: 28; cf. Levinson 2006: 42)

As for mimesis being “logically prior” to language, several characteristics that are essential to language (but also vitally important for ritual) appear to have already developed during the languageless iconic-mimetic era; in particular, reference, intentionality, communicativity and generativity (cf. Donald 1991: 171–173). Ritual, it is broadly assumed, pervades many domains of human life and interaction. Its mimetic descent and quality can explain the oft-professed close links with literary art, notably drama, and “theatrical” public behaviour. As for the roots of the theatre, the early twentieth-century classicalist Murray argued that much of the structural make-up of Greek tragedy derives from rituals that had become dissociated from myth, whereas Gaster explained that the interpenetration of ritual and myth potentiated dramatic art (cf. Segal 1998: 95 and 307, respectively). Turner also advocated the idea that drama is historically continuous with ritual, claiming that “[t]heatre is […] a hypertrophy, an exaggeration, of […] ritual process” (1982: 12). Folklorist Raglan (1934) reckoned that heroic epic, too, derived from ritual performance, while Reichl (2003) stressed the inherently ritual dimension of public epic recitation. Frye (1951) even alleged that all literature has ritual origins. The affected public manners that were virtually emblematic of the early modern period (Burke 1987; Muir 1997) reflect the then widespread humanist theatrum mundi conception. Given the prevalent notion that “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” (as Shakespeare put it in As You Like It [II, vii, ll. 139–140]), stagey display can readily be taken as ritual(ised) self-presentation. The ritual aspect of early modern interaction comes to the surface very ob-

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viously in the excessive display of politeness, both in writing (Bax and Streekstra 2003) and spoken interaction (Beetz 1991, 1999; Burke 2000). Concerning its pragmatic-diachronic background, it has been argued (Bax 2010) that ritual selfdisplay was originally the default format for (linguistic) relation management, and that from the early modern period onwards, face-work and politeness evolved into more rationalised methods of relational work, consistent with the general trend in Western society towards rationality (Weber 1949; Donald 1991) and culminating in the currently widely held view that (linguistic) politeness involves rational strategies to express other-face concern (Goffman 1967; Brown and Levinson 1987). On a related note, ritual interaction may also underlie other discourse-pragmatic developments. For example, ritual superiority display (sections 2.4.2 and 5.2.2 above) can be conceived of as proto-argumentative discourse, i.e. a preliminary stage of modern discursive rationality; in the context of classico-medieval rhetoric, the dialogic model of ritual antagonism seems to have served as a model for rational disputation as regards its formal structure and pragma-semiotic design (Bax 2009). Concerning the impact of ritual, it has also been posited that the now prevailing methods of indirect communication (Searle 1969; Grice 1975) are a late medieval/early modern pragmatic innovation that heavily builds on indirect conveyance as occurs in ritual display (Bax 2004). If there is merit in such “out of ritual” construals, the study of ritual can enhance our understanding of pragma-diachronic development, all the more so because it is quite possible that – despite being, since the European Reformation, all too often regarded with some disfavour as “mere ritual” (Muir 1997: 7; Burke 1987: chapter 16) – ritual modes of representation/communication have (had) a bearing on other ways of using language, and on other discourse genres as well. However that may be, ritual is a much more central and productive phenomenon than might appear, and so deserving of greater historical-pragmatic scrutiny than it has hitherto received.

References Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999 Flyting and sounding the agonistic insult. In: Leslie K. Arnovick, Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development, 15–40. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arnovick, Leslie K. 2006 Written Reliquaries: The Resonance of Orality in Medieval English Texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bax, Marcel 1983 Die lebendige Dimension toter Sprachen. Zur pragmatischen Analyse von Sprachgebrauch in historischen Kontexten. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 11: 1–21.

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Bax, Marcel 1999 Ritual levelling. The balance between the eristic and the contractual motive in hostile verbal encounters in mediaeval romance and early modern drama. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 35–80. Bax, Marcel 2000 Ritual discord and the contractual framework. An essay on a paradoxical framing device of the early modern theatre and its foundation in oral tradition and mimetic culture. Semiotica 132: 25–74. Bax, Marcel 2004 Out of ritual. A semiolinguistic account of the origin and development of indirect language behavior. In: Marcel Bax, Barend van Heusden and Wolfgang Wildgen (eds.), Semiotic Evolution and the Dynamics of Culture, 155–213. Bern: Peter Lang. Bax, Marcel 2006 “Soe wee uwen hovede …” Ritueel verbaal geweld en historische pragmatiek [“So woe betide your head …” Ritual verbal violence and historical pragmatics]. Historisch Tijdschrift Groniek 39: 487–501. Bax, Marcel 2009 Generic evolution. Ritual, rhetoric, and the rise of discursive rationality. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 780–805. Bax, Marcel 2010 Epistolary presentation rituals. Face-work, politeness, and ritual display in early modern Dutch letter-writing. In: Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Kádár (eds.), Historical (Im)politeness, 37–85. Bern: Peter Lang. Bax, Marcel, and Tineke Padmos 1983 Two types of verbal dueling in Old Icelandic: The interactional structure of the senna and the mannjafnaðr in Hárbarðsljóð. Scandinavian Studies 55: 149–174. Bax, Marcel, and Nanne Streekstra 2003 Civil rites. Ritual politeness in early modern Dutch letter-writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 303–325. Beetz, Manfred 1991 Negative Kontinuität: Vorbehalte gegenüber barocker Komplimentierkultur. In: Klaus Garber (ed.), Europäische Barock-Rezeption, 281–302. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Beetz, Manfred 1999 The polite answer in pre-modern German conversation culture. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), 139–166. Bell, Catherine 1992 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine 1997 Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, Peter 1987 Historical Anthropology in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hüsken, Ute (ed.) 2007 When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual. Leiden: Brill. Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.) 1999 Historical Dialogue Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis. Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. Kertzer, David I. 1988 Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kochman, Thomas 1983 The boundary between play and non-play in black verbal dueling. Language in Society 12: 329–337. Koster, Jan 2003 Ritual performance and the politics of identity. On the functions and uses of ritual. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 211–248. Labov, William 1972 Rules for ritual insults. In: William Labov, Language in the Inner City, 297–353. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leach, Edmund 1964 Anthropological aspects of language: Animal categories and verbal abuse. In: Eric H. Lenneberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language, 23–63. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 2006 On the human “interaction engine”. In: Nicholas J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), 39–69. Lincoln, Bruce 1989 Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lönnroth, Lars 1979 The double scene of Arrow-Odd’s drinking contest. In: Hans Bekker-Nielsen (ed.), Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, 94–119. Odense: Odense University Press. MacCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson 2002 Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mattock, John N. 1991 The Arabian tradition: Origin and developments. In: Gerrit J. Reinink and Herman L.J. Vanstiphout (eds.), 153–163. McGrew, William C. 1994 The intelligent use of tools. In: Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (eds.), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, 151–170. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muir, Edward 1997 Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, Magnus 1960 Edda- og Skaldekvad 1. Hárbarðsljóð. Oslo: Aschehoug.

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Ong, Walter J. 1981 Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pakis, Valentine A. 2005 Honor, verbal duels, and the New Testament in medieval Iceland. Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 26: 166–185. Parks, Ward 1990 Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative. The Homeric and Old English Traditions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pryor, Francis 2004 Britain BC. Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans. London: Harper Perennial. Rabb, Theodore K. 2006 The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity. New York: Basic Books. Raglan, Lord 1934 The hero of tradition. Folk-Lore 45: 212–231. Reichl, Karl 2003 The search for origins: Ritual aspects of the performance of epic. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 249–267. Reinink, Gerrit J., and Herman L.J. Vanstiphout (eds.) 1991 Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East. Leuven: Peeters. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. 1998 Ritual Communication. From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Ryle, Gilbert 1971 The thinking of thoughts. What is ‘Le Penseur’ doing? In: Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers. Vol. II: Collected Essays, 1929–1968, 480–496. London: Hutchinson. Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1964 Structure and content of Cheremis charms. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society, 356–371. New York: Harper and Row. Segal, Robert A. (ed.) 1998 The Myth and Ritual Theory. Malden, MA.: Blackwell. Smith, William R. [1889] 1956 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. New York: Meridian Library. Smitherman, Geneva 1977 Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Staal, Frits 1982 The Science of Ritual. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Staal, Frits (with C.V. Somayajipad and M. Itti Ravi Nambudiri) 1983 AGNI. The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, Vol. I and II. Berkeley, CA.: Asian Humanities Press.

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Staal, Frits 1989 Rules Without Meaning. Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Bern: Peter Lang. Staal, Frits 2001 How a psychoactive substance becomes a ritual: The case of Soma. Social Research 68: 745–778. Staal, Frits 2004 Waarom is ritueel nog geen taal? [Why is ritual still not language?]. In: Frits Staal, Drie bergen en zeven rivieren, 254–277. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Swenson, Karen 1987 Verbal Duels and the Heroic Self. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979 A performative approach to ritual. Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 113–169. Tolmie, Jane 2003 Goading, ritual discord and the deflection of blame. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 287–301. Turner, Victor W. 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Turner, Victor W. 1982 From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. van Creveld, Martin 2008 The Culture of War. New York: Presidio Press. van Gennep, Arnold [1909] 1960 The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. van Oostrom, Frits 2006 Stemmen op schrift. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur vanaf het begin tot 1300 [Voices in Writing. The History of Netherlandic Literature from its Beginnings until 1300]. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. von Polenz, Peter 1981 Der ausdruck von sprachhandlungen in poetischen dialogen des deutschen mittelalters. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 9: 249–273. Weber, Max 1949 The Methodology of the Social Sciences. [Translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch.] New York: The Free Press. Weinhold, Jan 2007 Failure and mistakes in rituals of the European Santo Daime church. In: Ute Hüsken (ed.), 49–72. Wheelock, Wade T. 1982 The problem of ritual language: From information to situation. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50: 49–72. Wisniewski, Roswitha 1975 Hadubrands Rache. Eine Interpretation des Hildebrandsliedes. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 9: 1–13.

VII. Discourse domains

17.

Religious discourse Thomas Kohnen

1.

Introduction

Seen from the perspective of language history, the domain of Christian religious discourse is very significant and very fertile in most European languages. Religion, and the power of the Church and its teachings were pervasive in every branch of life during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As a consequence, the various genres of religious discourse enjoyed not only great prestige but also basic social and linguistic relevance, and texts have come down to us in reasonably high numbers. In addition, our knowledge about the text users is often more detailed than in other domains. It is true that after the early modern period the influence of religious writings was somewhat waning but nevertheless we find a rich inventory of important religious genres surviving until today. Thus, an analysis of religious discourse offers the possibility of creating a fascinating and continuous picture of the development of pragmatic phenomena across the centuries. This chapter will deal exclusively with the discourse world of Christian religion, with an emphasis on developments in the Middle Ages and the early modern period in England. This restriction can be justified from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it was the Christian religion that exerted a most noticeable and almost exclusive influence on the culture and societies of most major European countries in the core period between 700 and 1800, and even beyond. On the other hand, the situation in England can be seen as typical but also as particularly interesting within the European context since it embodied a state Church, which comprised both orthodox and independent elements. In the following sections there will first be a short systematic outline of the discourse world of Christian religion, with its major spheres (the Bible, prayer, religious instruction, theological discussion) and their associated genres and text functions. Then the focus will be on the development of the religious domain in the history of English. After a short discussion of the historical background and pragmatic aspects of English Bible translations, the presentation will select three different genres (prayers, sermons, treatises) from the large range of forms of English religious discourse, each of which will be discussed with a different pragmatic focus to illustrate the breadth of approaches in the field. One of the basic difficulties for an overview of the field of English religious discourse is that the linguistics literature, in particular historical-pragmatic research, is scarce. The lack of available investigations has been acknowledged with regard to contemporary discourse studies in the religious domain (see, for

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example, Mühleisen 2007: 485), whereas for historical studies the issue is hardly ever mentioned (but see Görlach 1999: 519 on linguistic studies on the influence of English Bible translations). But it seems to be the case that the large majority of historical investigations on religious discourse are literary or stylistic studies, especially those on individual genres. There are some linguistic investigations on the Book of Common Prayer (for example, Nevalainen 1998; see also Crystal and Davy 1969) or on English Bible translations (for example, Moessner 2001), but the number of historical-pragmatic studies in English religious discourse is quite limited. Recent research in the field is mostly connected with work on the Corpus of English Religious Prose. Thus, the overview given in the following sections will strongly rely on these and associated studies.

2.

The discourse world of Christian religion

A pragmatic description of the world of religious discourse requires a coherent and systematic account of its most important “pragmatic entities”, which will then serve as a basis for further descriptions. Such an account could comprise, first of all, the texts and types of texts that are typically associated with the world of Christian religion (and, of course, the settings and text users linked with these texts and genres). If genre is chosen as a point of departure for a pragmatic description of the discourse world of Christian religion, the most notorious difficulty encountered is the large number and diversity of genres contained in the religious domain. It is quite instructive to look at the comparatively modest array of religious genres found in the Helsinki Corpus (Kytö 1996), one of the most important diachronic multigenre corpora for the study of the history of the English language and an important tool for historical-pragmatic analyses of the English language. The genres found in the Helsinki Corpus are homilies, sermons, religious treatises, rules, saints’ lives and the Bible. It goes without saying that such a list is far from exhaustive. A slightly more realistic but still fairly limited picture of the diversity may emerge from the following short list of (additional) prevalent genres: penitentials, catechisms, devotional manuals, exempla, prayers, collects, litanies, anthems, hymns, Bible commentaries, and devotional letters (see also the many religious terms in the instructive collection of designations for genres in Görlach 2001). The problem of the diversity of the religious genres is made even more serious by another difficulty: the status of the most important book or type of text in Christian religion, the Bible. Should a systematic account of the discourse world of religion treat Biblical writings as a genre of their own (see, for example, the Helsinki Corpus, where the Bible is given the status of a separate text type)? This does not seem to make much sense; the Bible can hardly be seen as a genre of its own. Rather, the texts of the Bible are instances of several different genres; for example,

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chronicles, reports, narratives, laws, poems, to name a few (for a fairly comprehensive list of the genres included in the Old Testament see Simmler 2000: 678). In addition, the collection of texts contained in the Bible is rather heterogeneous. C. S. Lewis (1962: 27) commented on the diversity and coherence of the Bible: “It is a collection of books so widely different in period, kind, language, and aesthetic value, that no common criticism can be passed on them”. But in spite of this generic diversity the canon of Biblical writings is often seen as a coherent whole, especially when it is interpreted as “God’s word” or as a work inspired by God. A uniform, homogeneous aspect may also come into play when we link the Bible to a particular translation that is associated with one person; for example, the Wycliffe Bible or Tyndale’s New Testament. The Bible might also be seen as one genre since it has served (and still serves) as a fundamental frame of reference for all other Christian religious writings, providing “evidence” and “justification” for theological claims and arguments. A last point which seems to add to the coherent nature of the Bible is its fixed nature. Biblical texts never change, apart from the possibility of differing or new translations. In the literature, the problem of the diversity of religious genres, in connection with the special status of the Bible, has not been satisfactorily resolved. Clearly, there is no point in simply enumerating the different genres, without providing a coherent grid for a systematic description. Some scholars claim that the common denominator of religious genres is their religious content and nothing else. Görlach (1999: 143), for example, says that “[t]he field of religion is covered by a great variety of text types which share their content, but possibly little else”. Such a view seems to imply that religious genres are more or less similar to secular genres in terms of function and structure, the difference being only in their propositional content, which can somehow be qualified as “religious”. The opposite view (see Kohnen 2007b) is that religious genres are different in relation to function. This separate function derives from the discourse world of religion, its major protagonists and the distinctive ways in which they communicate. The diversity of religious genres can be given a systematic description by locating them in the discourse world of religion and explaining their different functional relationships (as will be shown in more detail below). There are only a few accounts of the domain of “religion” or suggestions for a classification of text types within the religious domain. Joshua Fishman (1972: 47), in his sociolinguistic investigation of diglossia, gives a fairly straightforward sketch of the religious domain in terms of one typical situation associated with it. This situation is defined by the interlocutor (usually the priest), the place (usually a church) and the topic (how to be a good Christian). This outline is mainly designed for the empirical investigation of a diglossic language situation within the framework of the sociology of language. It is, however, not elaborate enough to deal with the many historical religious genres with which we are confronted in the history of English.

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In the approach suggested by Simmler (2000), who also refers back to several previous studies (Güttgemanns 1983; Blank 1984; Steger 1984), the religious domain falls into five spheres of communication (Kommunikationsbereiche): the Bible, liturgy, catechesis, theology and the (institution of the) Church. In this framework, individual genres can be assigned to spheres; for example, sermon and prayer to liturgy, catechisms to catechesis, pastoral letters to the Church, and so on. It is true that this approach renders a far more elaborate and faithful picture of what is or was happening in the religious domain. But it lacks a coherent, uniform foundation that may link the different spheres and show how they are related (in particular, the relationship between the Bible and the other spheres is not explained). In addition, it does not allow a systematic and unambiguous allocation of the different genres. For example, the genre of prayer may turn up in liturgy, catechesis and, of course, the Bible. Blake (1974) does not give a description of the religious domain, but, rather, a classification of the different genres of Middle English religious prose. Such a classification may, of course, have important consequences for a description of the religious domain (in Middle English). Blake distinguishes primary and secondary instruction, works of a historical and legendary character, affective works, spiritual autobiographies and polemical literature. The advantage of Blake’s approach is that it covers many different genres and thus renders a very detailed picture of (Middle English) religious discourse. But his distinctions seem to have been made primarily from a literary perspective and they seem to be less useful from the perspective of historical pragmatics. For example, the distinction between primary and secondary instruction, which seems so attractive at first sight, is simply built on whether a work has a particular addressee or not, and at the same time it takes for granted that a work without a specific addressee necessarily employs a more extravagant and strident style (Blake 1974: 351). Thus, the classification combines language-external and language-internal features. In addition, it is difficult to make out a clear difference between affective works (whose job it is, among other things, to frighten the recipient) and works of instruction, because frightening the reader is clearly one means serving the end of religious instruction. A recent account of the Christian religious domain (see Kohnen 2007b) tries to combine the detail of Blake’s description with a more systematic approach to the spheres of religious communication. It starts with the major protagonists or interactants in the world of religious discourse and the distinctive ways in which they can communicate (see Figure 1). The major interactants are God, as the transcendental authority, and the Christian community. The Christian community can be divided into “specialists” and “laypeople”, that is, those members who are typically in ecclesiastical office and exert some “power” and those members who lack both detailed knowledge and ecclesiastical power. There are three possibilities of communication between these interactants, which may be said to constitute different fields or spheres of religious communication. The first one is God addressing the Christian

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community. In the discourse world of Christian religion, the Bible is typically conceived as “God’s word”. Thus, the text tradition of the Bible and its canon forms the first sphere of religious communication. The second possibility is the Christian community addressing God, which is prayer. The third possibility is members of the Christian community addressing other members of the Christian community. Here, at least two plausible options may be distinguished: theological discussion and religious instruction. Theological discussion can be seen as specialised professional discourse among theologians. This will usually be restricted to clerics and other specialists. Religious instruction, on the other hand, will typically include both specialists and laypeople. The most usual option will be members of the clergy addressing ordinary laypeople, but other possibilities seem likely as well and have been attested in the history of Christian religion (for example, members of the clergy addressing other members of the clergy or laypeople addressing other laypeople).

Figure 1. The discourse world of (Christian) religion (Kohnen 2007b)

The spheres of communication in the above description may be said to comprise religious genres and reflect their categorical differences (in particular, the Bible and liturgical prayer on the one hand, and the genres of religious instruction and theological discussion on the other). The texts of the Bible and prayers have a different status from genres of religious instruction (sermons, treatises, catechisms, etc.) because they involve a transcendental authority as addressor or as addressee. They constitute a special field of communication, not just two different religious genres. The special status of the Bible is also reflected in its function as a more or less fixed fundamental point of reference and a common basis for justification in the world of Christian religious discourse. In addition, portions of Biblical texts are spread out as fixed elements in other kinds of religious writings (in different

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spheres). In a similar way, prayers have a special status because (especially as liturgical prayers) they are more or less fixed; they have been passed on from generation to generation, forming a long tradition. It is true that several books of the Bible also contain prayer, religious instruction and theological discussion (see, for example, the psalms and the epistles of Paul). But in the discourse world of Christian religion they are treated as texts inspired by God, which qualify as an indispensable basis for theological justification and thus enjoy the special status associated with the Bible as “God’s word”; it is this special status that sets these texts apart from “ordinary” religious instruction or theological discussion. Things are slightly more complex in the context of the medieval Church. Here, writings of certain Church Fathers (e.g., Augustine or Jerome) may approach the “sacred” status of the Bible, often assuming a similar authority. Quite clearly, the schematic representation of Figure 1 cannot do justice to these finer details. The privileged nature of both Bible and liturgical prayers, and the categorical differences of the spheres may also be seen against the background of the contemporary description of religious language (Crystal and Davy 1969). In their analysis of the religious register in Modern English, Crystal and Davy focus on the language of the Bible and liturgical language as prototypical manifestations of religious language. By contrast, sermons or treatises (which belong to the sphere of religious instruction) are less prototypical since they also include elements of public speaking or elaborate exposition. Another important aspect of the relationship between the spheres and their respective genres is that the genres that can be associated with one particular sphere will probably share common features, which can be inferred from the communicative setting of the sphere. We can assume that the spheres of religious discourse will typically show similar functional profiles in their respective genres. For example, the major text functions associated with the genres of religious instruction will be similar, but different from those functions associated with the genres found in the sphere of prayer. To illustrate the relationship between spheres, genres and functions, I will focus in the following paragraphs on the functional profile of the genres associated with the spheres of religious instruction and prayer. The field of religious instruction was defined above as (mostly) specialists or clerics communicating with laypeople. Typical genres are, for example, sermons, treatises and catechisms. The term “religious instruction” can be seen as a complex unit that seems to comprise at least five text functions, which in turn may be linked to differing subsections in one text (see Kohnen 2007b; on basic text functions see Werlich 1976); these are exhortation, exposition, exegesis, narration and argumentation. Exhortation is the functional element that may be most associated with religious instruction since it aims at a change of the addressee’s behaviour. The addressee is supposed to realise his or her miserable state as a sinner and consequently has to change his or her life. Exhortation is often based on exposi-

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tion: the fundamental elements of Christian belief have to be explained. Since the tenets of the Christian faith are based on the Bible, sections from the Bible will be presented and explained. This is exegesis. In addition, stories or short narrative sections are often included in religious instruction. They serve as illustration or simply to entertain people. Religious instruction may also include argumentation and logical reasoning, which serves to convince the addressee. These different text functions usually correspond to different text sections, which are reserved for the particular function. In religious instruction, all or some of these five text functions seem to combine in most pieces of religious instruction in an unforeseeable way, with changing proportions. The following extract from a Middle English sermon stems from Mirk’s Festial (Erbe 1905) and illustrates typical text functions of religious instruction. They include exposition, narration and exhortation (which have been marked in the text excerpt). The sermon starts straight away with an exposition of the name of quadragesima Sunday and the requirements of lent and fasting, adducing several sources. It then goes on to re-narrate a section from the gospel about the temptation of Christ and adds several instructions about how to proceed with fasting so as to avoid three special kinds of sins (gluttony, pride and covetousness). (1) DE DOMINICA IN QUADRAGESIMA SERMO BREUIS. Good men and woymen, [Exposition] þys day ys called in holy chyrch Sonday yn Quadragesin. þen ys quadragesin a nowmbur of fourty; for fro þis day to Astyr ben forty dayes þat byth þe teþedayes of þe ere. And for ych man dothe forfet more oþer las, þerfor, forto make satysfaccyon for þat gylt, yche man ys holden by þe lawe of holy chyrch to fast þes fourty dayes, […] þen byn þer þre dyuerse skylles why e schull fast þes fourty dayes. [Narration] On ys, bycause as þe gospell of þys day tellyþe, how þat þe Holy Gost lad our Lord ynto desert þat was bytwyx Ierusalem and Ieryco, forto be temptyd of þe fende […] þen þe fende lafte hym, and angelys comyn, and broghten hym mete. [Exhortation] Then, for þe fende ys most bysy forto make yche man to gylt yn þes þre synnes, most þes fourty dayes, þerfor you nedythe þre helpys aeynys hom; þat ben þese: aeynys gloteny, abstynens; aeynys pryde, mekenes; aeynes couetyse, largenes. Then aeyne gloteny e most fast, þat ys, not ete befor tyme; but abyde Tyll none of þe daye … (Erbe 1905: 82–84) ‘A short sermon about Quadragesima Sunday Dear men and women, this day is called Sunday in Quadragesima in holy church. Quadragesin designates the number forty, because from this day to Easter there are forty days, which are the forty days of Lent. And since each man commits sins, more or

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less, therefore, in order to expiate that guilt, each man is required by the law of holy church to fast these forty days, […] then there are three different reasons why you should fast these forty days. One is that, as the gospel of this day tells how the Holy Spirit led our Lord into the desert that was between Jerusalem and Jericho, in order to be tempted by the devil […] then the devil left him, and angels came and brought him food. Then, since the devil is most busy to drag each man into guilt with regard to these three vices, above all during these forty days, therefore you need three kinds of assistance against them, that is, these: against gluttony abstinence, against pride meekness, against covetousness generosity. Then, against gluttony you must fast, that is, not eat before the proper time, but wait till midday …‘ Depending on the basic orientation of the sermon, other functions may, of course, also be present, but it seems that in most sermons, as in many other (Middle English) genres of religious instruction, exposition, exhortation and narration are the most prominent functions/sections. The functional profile, or the prominent functions, associated with the sphere of communication I called prayer, is quite different. Here, it is not members of the Christian community teaching other members, but the humble Christian seeking to address God (or a saint). The addressor is in an absolutely subordinate position; in the context of the Christian Church of the Middle Ages and early modern England he or she is typically “wicked” and “needy”, that is, sinful, helpless without salvation and consequently anxious to present his or her requests. In the context of liturgical prayer, the Christian congregation as addressor will tend to emphasise also praise and thanksgiving. Thus, generally, the basic text functions associated with prayer genres typically comprise invocation, petition, thanksgiving, confession/ profession and adoration. Invocation is the basic act of calling upon God (or a saint); the petition includes the various requests addressed to God (or the saint); thanksgiving comprises acts of thanking God, for example, for his grace. In addition, persons praying will confess their sins but also profess their faith, that is, that God is the only true God. Lastly, adoration comprises acts of praising and worshipping. Of course, these functions and their associated text sections may combine differently, and not all of them will necessarily appear in a given prayer. I will just give one example from an Early Modern English private prayer. The prayer starts with a rather long invocation, which includes much detailed information about God and also an explicit request to look at the person praying. It then goes on to thank (and praise) God for his protection and to present petitions (I beseech thee), and it finishes with an act of adoration (to thee […] be giuen all honor and praise).

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(2) A praier for the Morning. [Invocation] O Mightie maker & preseruer of all things, God omnipotent, which like a diligent watchman, alwaies attendest vpon thy faithfull people, so that whether they sleepe or wake, liue or die, thy prouidence neuer forsaketh them: looke fauourablie vpon me, O Lord, thy poore and sinfull seruent, which am not woorthie, but through thy great mercies offered to me in Christ, once to lift vp mine eies vnto thy mercie seat. [Thanksgiving] Wherefore in the name of thy deere sonne my Lord and Sauiour, I offer vnto thee, through him, the sacrifice of praise and thanks giuing; that thou hast preserued me both this night, and all the time and daies of my life hitherto, vntill this present houre. [Petition] I beseech thee of thy great mercie to illuminate my vnderstanding, that I may lead and frame my life as thou hast taught me in thy holie word, that my light may so shine here on earth, that my heauenlie father may be glorified in me, through Iesus Christ our Lord and redeemer; for whose sake heare me deare father, and send thy holie Ghost to direct me in all my dooings. [Adoration] To thee O glorious and blessed Trinitie, the Father, the Sonne, and the holie Ghost, be giuen all honor and praise, now and for euer more, Amen. (Anne Wheathill, A Handfull of Holesome Hearbs, 1584) Here, as in the case of sermons, one could say that prayers with a different focus (for example, on the forgiveness of sins) might include other functions (e.g. confession and profession), but it seems that invocation and petition belong to the core functions of most prayers.

3.

Religious discourse in the history of the English language

One could say that the genres associated with the religious domain are among the most important genres in the history of the English language. Usually, this is hardly ever mentioned explicitly in the literature but rather taken for granted. It is a truism that religion, the power of the Church and its teachings were pervasive in every section of life during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and even later. As a consequence, the respective genres had not only great prestige but also basic social and linguistic impact. The prevalence of religious discourse is most conspicuous in Old English. Christianisation and, later, the Christian religion itself were the agents of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England. This had obvious consequences for language use. The primary users of written language were members of the Church – despite the fact that in many cases the functions of the texts were determined by secular matters

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(Mitchell 1995: 194, 223–232). In addition, the production of texts and the documentation of extant (oral) text traditions were also in the hands of the Church. As a consequence, the large majority of the genres and texts which have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times are religious in nature and function. The Dictionary of Old English Corpus is mostly biased towards religious genres and towards text functions within the spheres of religious communication (for a useful overview of Old English genres and text traditions, in particular religious ones, see Pulsiano and Treharne 2001: 3–10, 209–267). Old English religious texts include the traditional array of religious genres (for example, homilies, sermons, saints’ lives, rules, treatises, penitentials, liturgical prayer collections). But, in addition, the Christian religion also affected other, secular genres. For example, traditional Germanic topics and plots were adapted to fit the requirements of Christianity and the teachings of the Church. Robinson (2001: 286–287) demonstrates such a qualification in terms of Christianity in Beowulf when he argues that “the Beowulf-poet implies an Anglo-Christian’s judgement of the heroic age he is describing” (286). The violence and suffering prevalent in the world of the Germanic tribes is implicitly criticised against the background of the “new” values of Christianity. The transmission of vernacular texts during the early Middle English period is particularly scarce, and here it is, above all, religious texts which have survived. In all, the general picture of Middle English is similar to that of Old English. The prevalence of religious discourse is clearly noticeable (with a similar array of religious genres), although during the fifteenth century the rise of genres connected with the secular domain cannot be denied. The development of texts of religious instruction in Middle English is closely linked to the implementation in England of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which required annual confession and communion of every Christian layman. This implied an opportunity of testing the laity’s knowledge, which resulted in the creation of a large variety of pieces of religious instruction that focused on the basic elements of the Christian faith (on the major genres of religious instruction in Middle English see Russell 1962; Barratt 1984, Heffernan 1984; Heffernan and Horner 2005). Other major branches of religious discourse in Middle English comprise the Wycliffite writings (including the Bible translation initiated by Wycliffe; see Hudson 1984; Dove 2007) and the so-called mystical tradition associated with Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton and others (see Edwards 1984: 35–108). With the Reformation and the religious upheavals in the course of Early Modern English the importance of religious writings was hardly less prevalent. During the Tudor and Stuart periods, with their inseparable link between politics and religion, the choice and justification of the “right” religion was of supreme political and social relevance, making religious writings extremely welcome as well as persecuted.

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Many studies have shown that manuscripts and books containing religious documents show great circulation from the start. For example, Deanesly (1920) and Moran (1985: 185–220) looked at fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wills, confirming that manuscripts containing religious writings were much more widespread than elaborate and seemingly popular pieces of “literature”. Bennett (1969: 65) points to “the predominating position held by works of a religious and devotional nature” in the sixteenth century. According to him, the printers invested half their output in this part of their business. The most popular book in the early modern period was the Bible (especially the King James Bible), followed by the Book of Common Prayer and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (see King 2000; on the influence of religious writings during the early modern period see also the several articles on “literature and the church” in Loewenstein and Mueller 2002; also Erler 1999; Collinson, Hunt and Walsham 2002; Green and Peters 2002; all these surveys are basically “literary” or “stylistic” in their orientation). Apart from the traditional inventory of religious genres (ranging from prayer books to controversial writings) the early modern period shows two new developments. On the one hand we find the genre of catechisms, which is mainly a Reformation or post-Reformation phenomenon (see Green 1996 and 2000). Catechisms are scripts of dialogue that present basic doctrinal contents and practices in a concise form and are used as an instrument in teaching. On the other hand, we find a new form of religious biography, the martyrology, which includes significant changes to the traditional saints’ legend; for example, by doing without saintly intercession, healing and other miraculous incidents (see King 2000). A last point concerns the diversification of religious writings as a consequence of emergent denominations, factions and sects, which seems to be particularly noticeable from the early modern period on. While religious writing had always been highly variable in terms of form and content (see, for example, Heffernan 1984 with regard to Middle English sermons), the differing denominations and sections branching off from the Christian Church(es) complicated religious discourse during and after the Early Modern English period to a considerable extent. This may have serious implications for a historical-pragmatic analysis. Patterns of language use might well be restricted to one special denomination or sect and must consequently be limited to the “variety” the data stem from. It is true that after the early modern period the influence of religious writings was somewhat waning, but religious discourse has remained significant enough to provide the same rich inventory of religious genres right up to the early twenty-first century. A genre like sermons or prayers can be traced from Old English to the present day. Thus, the religious domain offers a vast potential for long-term diachronic pragmatic analyses. Given the outstanding and fairly continuing importance of the genres of the religious domain in the history of the English language, it is surprising to see that

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they are not well represented in corpora and databases that have been compiled for linguistic analysis. The most important and widely used English diachronic corpus, the Helsinki Corpus, does not cover religious prose to the extent one would expect even from a “thin” multi-genre corpus. For example, the last text of the genre “religious treatise” in the Middle English section stems from c. 1438 (“The Book of Margery Kempe”), and there are no early modern religious treatises in the corpus. Thus, religious treatises are not represented beyond the second half of the fifteenth century. The sermons in the early modern sections, to give another example, have not received the same quantity of data as other genres (e.g. travelogues or trials). All this contributes to the rather “weak” representation of religious prose in the Helsinki Corpus. Apart from the Helsinki Corpus, there are only a few other English diachronic corpora which include religious discourse. The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (Schmied 1994; Schmied and Claridge 1997) comprises some religious sections, but they are, due to the restrictions of the corpus in terms of genre and period, only of limited value. The ARCHER corpus, a multigenre corpus that covers the years between 1650 and 1990, comprises sermons as the only religious genre, with only five texts per period, and not ten as for the other, secular genres. The Corpus of English Religious Prose, which is being compiled at the University of Cologne, aims to give a more representative diachronic array of genres and texts in the religious domain. In its present outline, it covers English religious prose from 1150 to the end of the eighteenth century. It is designed to reflect continuity and change, innovation and transformation of religious genres, with particular emphasis on pragmatic, text-linguistic analyses. The structure of the corpus rests on the stratified account of the discourse world of Christian religion, with three spheres, as described in section 2 above. In its present form, the Corpus of English Religious Prose is focused on (private) prayer and the genres associated with religious instruction. Genres are classified as “core”, “minor” and “associated”, all of which may be divided into “subgenres”. Core genres are genuinely religious genres, i.e. they originate and are firmly rooted in the religious domain (e.g. sermons and private prayers). Minor genres are similarly rooted in the religious domain; however, they are more restricted in terms of institutions and potential text users (e.g. monastic rules). Associated genres are genres which originally exist outside the religious domain and are not genuinely religious in their nature but become associated with religious writing at a particular point in time (e.g. pamphlets and prefaces). Subgenres are subforms of a genre, such as doctrinal or controversial treatises as subforms of religious treatises. A certain fuzziness of these categories seems inevitable; religious biographies, for example, can be seen as both a core and an associated genre.

Religious discourse Core genres

Minor genres

Associated genres

sermons

monastic rules

pamphlets

treatises doctrinal treatises contemplative treatises controversial treatises

penitentials exegetical commentaries

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letter-pamphlets petition-pamphlets sermon-pamphlets treatise-pamphlets

catechisms

prefaces

prayers

religious letters

religious biographies

religious articles in newspapers

hymns Figure 2. Major genres in the Corpus of English Religious Prose

4.

English Bible translations

The standard linguistic view on English Bible translations is to see them as a stable textual background against which to chart linguistic change in the history of the English language. Since the canon of texts contained in the Bible has not changed considerably (except for the separation of the so-called apocryphal books), successive English Bible translations (from Old English to Modern English) reflect language change, not textual change (see, for example, the text appendix in Görlach 1981; on the history of English Bible translations see Kohnen forthcoming a). Such a view tends to forget at least two important pragmatic aspects of English Bible translations. On the one hand, English Bible translations show interesting and ambivalent facets of the implications associated with the use of the vernacular (as opposed to Latin). On the other hand, they provide an impressive illustration of the relationship between language and society, with one book and the language associated with it exercising enormous social and political influence. While in Anglo-Saxon times the idea of a complete vernacular Bible was not felt as an imminent need, it must be seen as a direct consequence of the pre-Reformation thoughts associated with Wycliffe and his movement. Since in this view the Bible directly reflected God’s law and since every Christian was directly responsible to God, the Bible had to be made accessible to everyone. Within the framework of Reformation thought, the vernacular (in Bible translations) represented a pathway to salvation and to heaven; within the framework of the established fifteenth-century Church, vernacular Bible translations formed an act of heretical insubordination, threatening the Church’s central position as a mediator of divine scripture and undermining its institutionalised vested interests. The emancipatory aspect of vernacular Bible translations seems to have been prevalent in many vernacular languages (see Mühleisen 2007: 462, 468–470) and adds an interesting as-

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pect to the general picture of linguistic emancipation and standardisation associated with the vernacular. In England, it was a fairly early and very strong movement of vernacularisation, reaching far down the social ranks (compare, for example, the impact of the Lollard movement and its political repercussions; see Justice 1999). But, at the same time, the ambivalent nature of the vernacular turn in Bible translations must be seen. In the long run, this emancipatory movement proved to establish one of the most conservative and inflexible registers the English language can offer (at least until the latter part of the twentieth century): socalled Biblical English or simply religious language. The second point relates to the social impact of Bible translations. Bible translations were not philological exercises but claims on or, rather, denials of power and vested interests. During at least three centuries following Wycliffe’s first translation, English Bible translations were read as social, economic and political texts, presenting demands for religious and political change. This was, for example, felt most seriously by James I, for whom the marginal notes contained in the Geneva Bible implied political insurrection and insubordination. For example, when the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible comment approvingly on Daniel “For he did disobey the Kings wicked commandement to obey God” (note on Daniel 6:22), or when they refer to “Kings who were without all religion & contemned the true God” (note on Daniel 11:36), this could have serious implications for faithful Christian readers who were waiting for clear instructions on how to apply God’s word in practical life. And one of the implications might be to disobey kings, especially if they were found to be without the true religion.

5.

Diachronic perspectives on prayer and religious instruction

As mentioned in the introduction, there are not many pragmatic studies on religious language or religious genres and their diachronic developments in the history of the English language. Most of those that do exist are associated with initial work on the Corpus of English Religious Prose and centre on the spheres of prayer and religious instruction. They focus on speech acts and text functions associated with spheres of religious communication, but they also include address terms and connectives. 5.1.

Prayers

The language of liturgical prayer has been described by Crystal and Davy in their study on religious language (1969). Their account includes mostly phonological/ graphological, grammatical and lexical features. Although their stylistic description is in most cases linked to language use, they mostly exclude pragmatic units of description (for example, speech acts). Apart from Crystal and Davy (1969),

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prayers – be they liturgical or private – have not been the topic of linguistic investigations, let alone historical-pragmatic studies. This is in contrast to the real importance they seem to have had. Prayer books belonged to the most popular texts in late medieval and early modern England. At first often still in Latin, they were a familiar item in the lives of many people and they must be seen as among the most important genres in this period (compare, for example, the extremely popular “books of hours” or primers). The basic communicative setting of prayers is quite straightforward: they are unidirectional and involve a transcendental authority (God or a saint, here most often the Virgin Mary or the apostles). This “prayer proper” is usually reflected linguistically in the form of a first person (I) who addresses God (or a saint) using the second person (thee; see example (3)). (3) O Holy Lord God Almighty, … behold here I prostrate my self before thee, … (Anne D. Morton, The Countess of Morton’s Daily Exercise, 1666, A4) But prayers may also include more complex settings and structures. For example, the person praying may talk about God, providing adoring and reverential terms for God (for example, in the phrase Glory be to the father), or may invite other people to join in praising God (for example, Prayse ye the lorde). A prayer may also include a request addressed at other people to join prayer (mostly in the first person; for example, let us pray). In addition, prayers may contain other texts, mostly extracts from the Bible (sections from the psalms or passages from the gospels). A pragmatic study of prayer should include all these different “varieties” of prayer (see Kohnen 2008, 2009 and forthcoming b). Prayers have been shown to form an interactive and performative genre, but they are also conservative and static in their character. The interactive nature of prayers is revealed by the high frequency of first- and second-person pronouns and of address terms designating God. This is a reflection of the basic communicative setting of prayer, which involves a person praying and a transcendental authority being addressed. Corpus data have confirmed a remarkable stability in the high frequency of first- and second-person pronouns across the centuries. They also showed that the frequencies and proportions are (with some minor exceptions) strikingly similar to those given for contemporary conversation (Biber et al. 1999: 334) and for Early Modern English trial proceedings and drama (Culpeper and Kytö 2000: 184–185). This points to the fact that prayers may rank among the typically interactive genres, which show relatively close connections to spoken discourse. The high frequency of address terms designating God (for example, God, Lord, Jesus) further corroborates the interactive nature of prayers. For example, the address term Lord may be used on its own, it can be followed by an apposition or a relative clause, or both apposition plus relative clause (this pattern can be traced to a Latin model followed by medieval authors).

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(4) O My souerayne lorde Ihesu the veray sone of almyghty god and of the moost clene & glorious vyrgin Mary / that suffred the bytter deth for my sake and all mankynde vpon good fryday & rose agayne the thyrde daye. I beseche the lorde haue mercy vpon me that am a wreched synner but yet thy creature. And for thy precyous passion saue me & kepe me from all perylles bothe bodyly & goostly / (Prymer of Salysbury Vse, 1527, ccviir) Both the apposition and the relative clause usually contain additional information that supports the subsequent petition (in the above example that suffred the bytter deth for my sake is linked to the subsequent petition for thy precyous passion saue me). The question is why so much detailed information is added to the address term designating God. On the one hand, one could argue that the information is included in order to recall to the person praying the most essential and most relevant facts of their religious faith (on this see also Crystal and Davy 1969: 170). In this case, the information provided in the appositions and relative clauses were in fact for the addressor, not for the addressee, which would contradict the basically interactive nature of prayer. On the other hand, one could assume that the information presented can be taken to be known to both addressor and addressee as background knowledge but has not been mentioned in the communicative activity so far. A typical situation where such topics are continually raised from a large inventory of common background knowledge is a conversational situation between two people who have known each other for a long time. A similar situation may be assumed for prayers. Quite interestingly, both features, the high frequency of first- and second-person pronouns and the specific patterns of address, can be shown to stay with prayers through the centuries until the late twentieth century, revealing prayers as an exceptionally static and conservative genre. The performative nature of prayers derives from the fact that most of the constitutive speech acts of prayers are usually made explicit by means of a performative formula. We find an exceptionally high frequency of performatives in prayers. These performatives designate directive speech acts (for example, pray, beseech, entreat), acts of thanking God, acts of confessing/professing (one’s sins or God’s true divine nature) and acts of praising/worshipping God. A comparison with other genres shows that, for example, directive performatives are much more frequent in prayers than anywhere else. The only other genres where directive performatives appear in any great number are Old English laws and documents. These are genres which have been shown to have an oral background, where the explicit performative derives its special function from the fact that in an oral environment stating one’s actions ensures the proper performance and validity of the related speech acts (enacting a law, making a will, making a lease, etc.; Kohnen 2000; on the oral nature of Old English laws see also Danet and Bogoch 1994). It seems that

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prayers assume this oral feature for similar reasons. Here as well, the explicit performative ensures the proper performance and validity of the speech acts of the prayer. This is another property of prayers that locates them in the field of orality and interactive language use. A comparative investigation of all the different manifestations of directive speech acts in prayers, sermons and personal letters (Kohnen 2008) showed that prayers share more common manifestations of directives with letters than with sermons. For example, both prayers and letters have a prevalence of performatives and second-person imperatives, whereas sermons show a rather mixed picture, with many modal constructions and other kinds of imperatives. This nicely illustrates the fact that we find (sometimes unexpected) similarities and differences between religious and secular genres. 5.2.

Sermons

Sermons form a prototypical genre of religious instruction. Like prayers, they show a rather stable communicative setting throughout the centuries, with a priest (or a person in a similar clerical function) addressing a religious congregation. While we may assume that most sermons were actually preached or intended to be preached at some occasion, we do not know whether the texts that have come down to us reflect the version performed in front of a congregation or whether they were edited later to form a more elaborate and literate piece. Thus, sermons are typically situated between orality and literacy (on Middle English and Early Modern English sermons see Mitchell 1962; Blench 1964; Spencer 1993; Heffernan and Horner 2005; on the difference between sermon and homily see Heffernan 1984: 179). Sermons have been investigated with regard to a prominent property associated with religious instruction: directive speech acts; and with regard to a feature that can reveal the relative distance to oral or literate patterns: clause-level connectives. The aim was to locate and interpret genre developments that show changes in politeness conventions and shifts between orality and literacy. A study including all the different manifestations of directive speech acts in a corpus of English sermons covering the Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English periods (Kohnen 2007a) shows two interesting developments: a general decrease in the frequency of directives across the centuries, with an increase in the late twentieth century, and shifts towards more polite manifestations of directives. Whereas one would assume that a decline in the total number of directives implies the emergence of more polite and less rigorous requests, and a quantitative increase a trend towards stricter directives, the reverse development was revealed in the data. For example, Old English sermons showed more “common-ground” strategies than Middle English ones (on the “more polite” nature of directives in Old English sermons see also Waterhouse 1982: 24 and

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Green 1995: 114–117); and the increase in directives in late twentieth-century sermons was accompanied by a higher proportion of more polite manifestations. By and large, the general development during the Early Modern and Modern English periods reflects a change towards manifestations of directives that include the preacher and which employ indirect means (see example (5)). On the other hand, quite a few straightforward imperatives are found in modern sermons as well (see example (6); here the use of the imperative rejoice may in fact reflect the obvious citation of Philippians 4:4 [Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say, rejoice.], which nicely illustrates the privileged position of Bible quotes that are spread out in other kinds of religious writing). (5) it’s time we sat down for a while and laid aside our burden of care (LondonLund Corpus S. 12.1b) (6) Rejoice in the Lord always, yes for he heals the broken heart, he binds up the wounds, again I say rejoice. There are those of us here today who are happy. There are even a few who I’m sure don’t have a care in the world, although I’m almost prepared to stick my neck out and say that they’re in the minority. But if you are in that fortunate position then rejoice and give thanks. Give thanks and do your best to spread your good fortune around, as the old song goes, spread a little happiness. But if, and most of … are … I’m sure that we’ve come today with some thorn in our flesh somewhere, some worry, some difficulty or a disappointment perhaps of some kind, then just remember that in all things God works together for good with those who love him, and for that rejoice and give thanks, and again I say, rejoice. (British National Corpus G5H) It seems likely that this shift towards more polite manifestations reflects the changed situation of the Christian Church(es), which, in a modern western society marked by democracy, secularisation and freedom of thought, has to compete with other “agencies” offering spiritual strategies in coping with the vicissitudes of life and the world at large. A second study (Kohnen 2007c) looks at connective profiles in a corpus of sermons covering Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. Connective profiles are patterns of distribution, frequency and proportion found in the major coordinators and subordinators of texts or text types. Late Middle English and Early Modern English sermons, for example, shows quite a distinctive pattern with regard to the frequency of clause-level coordinators (in particular and), of nominal subordination and of subordinators marking condition and concession. In general, the patterning of connective profiles in sermons could be shown to reflect a decrease in orality and an increase in literacy in Early Modern English, whereas the reverse development could be shown in the late twentieth century. The picture emerging from this study nicely complements the one based on directive speech acts: it suggests more “oral” and informal sermons during the Middle English

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period, more formal and elaborate preaching in early modern England, but then again a more relaxed style in the late twentieth century. Quite interestingly, informal patterns of preaching can go along with both strict directives as well as with more polite and face-saving strategies in sermons (for a further study of connective profiles in religious treatises and prayers see Marcoe 2009). 5.3.

Text sections / text functions in treatises and other genres of religious instruction

Treatises, as opposed to sermons, are typically associated with written communication, show a systematic, methodical treatment and, consequently, tend towards linguistic elaboration. The term is often used as a very broad cover term for all kinds of writing, which makes it a rather imprecise designation for classifying texts. On the other hand, the class of texts called religious treatises seems to form a fairly flexible and multifunctional category. Rütten (2009: 72) has suggested a further differentiation of the term, which might reflect emerging subgenres in the history of religious writing. Doctrinal treatises deal with basic points of the doctrine, e.g. the Decalogue, the Pater Noster, or the Seven Deadly Sins; controversial treatises have points of dispute and diverging views on the doctrine as their focus; whereas contemplative treatises are concerned with higher forms of spirituality and religious experience, such as those in the mystic tradition. In her study on changing routines in texts of religious instruction, Rütten (2009) shows that the exhortation section disintegrated as a complex functional section in the course of late Middle English and Early Modern English (on exhortation and other functions/sections in religious instruction see section 2 above). This development first affected treatises and was only later (that is, during the early modern period) noticeable in sermons. It seems that especially doctrinal treatises, as systematic, methodical written texts, can do without complex exhortation sections. Instead, they prefer single, flexible directive acts. By contrast, complex exhortation sections are typically found in sermon collections and predominantly oral contexts. Quite interestingly, exhortation is not simply forgone, but lives on in the shape of individual directive acts that are integrated into other sections of the text; for example, changing the appearance of the narration section quite considerably. Rütten (2009 and forthcoming) also looks at other text functions / text sections in several genres of religious instruction and the emergent changes associated with them. Exegesis, for example, is mainly associated with homilies and sermons in Middle English. Its importance wanes during the Reformation, but it reappears as a pattern of instruction towards the end of the sixteenth century in the context of Protestantism and its emphasis on the written word, when it is found mostly in Bible commentaries, that is, exegetical treatises. This reflects a shift both in terms of prominence in the discourse community and in terms of genre.

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Conclusion

Although religious discourse is among the most important domains in the history of the English language (as in many other western European languages), offering astonishing potential for long-term diachronic pragmatic studies, the number and range of studies found in the literature is somewhat limited. The compilation and eventual publication of the Corpus of English Religious Prose will trigger more comprehensive pragmatic investigations of the field. Starting from the pragmatic description of the (Christian) world of religious discourse, which systematically links the diversity of the genres to their respective spheres of communication and their basic text functions, all pragmatic units (see Jucker 2008) found in religious discourse and their different linguistic manifestations can be investigated. For example, one could look at the different linguistic manifestations associated with the text function of confession in prayer or with exposition in religious instruction. Or one could look at other pragmatic units; for example, address terms or exclamations in sermons or prayers, and link them to the underlying text functions. Apart from in-depth studies of genres and lower-level pragmatic units (Jucker 2008) and their diachronic developments (both in terms of functional profiles and in terms of linguistic manifestations), one new avenue of research might be the comparison of religious genres with secular ones across the centuries. Such a comparison might allow a more precise assessment of the frequently mentioned archaic nature of religious language and more definite conclusions about the relationship between religious genres and genres stemming from different secular domains. It might also give clues about when and how religious language turned into a downright conservative variety, which also today is often felt to be barely adequate even when used in its proper domain.

References Barratt, Alexandra 1984 Works of religious instruction. In: A. S. G. Edwards (ed.), 413–432. Bennett, H. S. 1969 English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Blake, Norman F. 1974 Varieties of Middle English religious prose. In: Beryl Rowland (ed.), Chaucer and Middle English Studies, in Honour of Rossell Hope Robins, 348–356. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Blank, Walter 1984 Deutsche Sprachgeschichte und Kirchengeschichte. In: Werner Besch, Oskar Reichmann and Stefan Sonderegger (eds.), Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, Vol. 1. 46–56. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, HSK 2.1.–2., 1. Aufl.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Blench, J. W. 1964. Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. A Study of English Sermons 1450–c1600. Oxford: Blackwell. Collinson, Patrick, Arnold Hunt and Alexandra Walsham 2002 Religious publishing in England 1557–1640. In: John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. IV, 1557–1695, 29–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David, and Derek Davy 1969 Investigating English Style. Harlow: Longman. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 2000 Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken discourse (re)cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 175–199. Danet, Brenda, and Bryna Bogoch 1994 Orality, literacy, and performativity in Anglo-Saxon wills. In: John Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law, 100–135. London: Longman. Deanesly, Margaret 1920 Vernacular books in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Modern Language Review 15.4: 349–358. Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (DOEC). University of Toronto. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/o/oec/ Dove, Mary 2007 The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, A. S. G. (ed.) 1984 Middle English Prose. A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Erbe, T. (ed.) 1905 Mirks’s Festial. A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk). Part 1. (Early English Text Society, E. S. 96.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erler, Mary C. 1999 Devotional literature. In: Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. III, 1400–1557, 495–525. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, Joshua A. 1972 The Sociology of Language. An Interdisciplinary Social Science Approach to Language in Society. Rowley, MA.: Newbury House. Görlach, Manfred 1981 Einführung in die englische Sprachgeschichte. Heidelberg: Winter. Görlach, Manfred 1999 English in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Görlach, Manfred 2001 A history of text types: A componential analysis. In: Hans-Jürgen Diller and Manfred Görlach (eds.), Towards a History of English as a History of Genres, 47–88. Heidelberg: Winter. Green, Eugene 1995 On syntactic and pragmatic features of speech acts in Wulfstan’s homilies. In: Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (eds.), Insights in Germanic Linguistics I: Methodology in Transition, 109–125. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Green, Ian 1996 The Christian’s ABC. Catechisms and Catechizing in England c1530–1740. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Green, Ian 2000 Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green, Ian, and Kate Peters 2002 Religious publishing in England 1640–1695. In: John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. IV, 1557–1695, 67–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Güttgemanns, Erhardt 1983 Theologie als sprachbezogene Wissenschaft. In: Manfred Kaempfert (ed.), Probleme der religiösen Sprache, 211–256. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Heffernan, Thomas J. 1984 Sermon literature. In: A. S. G. Edwards (ed.), 177–208. Heffernan, Thomas J., and Patrick J. Horner 2005 Sermons and homilies. In: Peter G. Beidler (ed.), A Manual of the Writings of Middle English 1050–1500. Vol. XI, 3,969–4,167. New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hudson, Anne 1984 Wycliffite prose. In: A. S. G. Edwards, (ed.), 249–270. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Historical pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 2.5: 894–906. Jucker, Andreas H., Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.) 2009 Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Justice, Steven 1999 Lollardy. In: David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 662–689. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, John N. 2000 Religious writing. In: Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), English Literature 1500–1600, 104–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kohnen, Thomas 2000 Explicit performatives in Old English: A corpus-based study of directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 301–321.

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Kohnen, Thomas 2007a Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech-act analysis. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 139–166. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kohnen, Thomas 2007b From Helsinki through the centuries: The design and development of English diachronic corpora. In: Päivi Pahta, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.), Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies. (Studies in Language Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Vol. II.) Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/index.html Kohnen, Thomas 2007c Connective profiles in the history of English texts: Aspects of orality and literacy. In: Ursula Lenker and Anneli-Meurman-Solin (eds.), Connectives in the History of English, 289–308. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kohnen, Thomas 2008 Tracing directives through text and time. Towards a methodology of a corpusbased diachronic speech-act analysis. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Speech Acts in the History of English, 295–310. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kohnen, Thomas 2009 Historical corpus pragmatics: Focus on speech acts and texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.), 13–36. Kohnen, Thomas forthcoming a English Bible translations. In: Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kohnen, Thomas forthcoming b Prayers in the history of English – a corpus-based study. In: Merja Kytö (ed.), Papers from the Corpus Linguistics Workshop at the Lund IAUPE Conference 2007. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kytö, Merja 1996 Manual to the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Coding Conventions and Lists of Source Texts. 3rd ed. Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki. Lewis, C. S. 1962 The literary impact of the Authorised Version. In: C. S. Lewis (ed.), They Asked for a Paper. Papers and Addresses, 26–50. London: Geoffey Bles. Loewenstein, David, and Janet Mueller (eds.) 2002 The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcoe, Ingvilt 2009 Subordinating conjunctions in Middle English and Early Modern English religious writing. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.), 375–401.

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Mitchell, Bruce 1995 An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, W. Frase 1962 English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson. A Study of its Literary Aspects. New York: Russell and Russell. Moessner, Lilo 2001 Translation strategies in Middle English: The case of the Wycliffite Bible. Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 35: 123–154. Moran, Jo Ann Hoeppner 1985 The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548. Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Mühleisen, Susanne 2007 Language and religion. In: Marlis Hellinger and Anne Pauwels (eds.), Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change, 459–491. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nevalainen, Terttu 1998 Change from above. A morphosyntactic comparison of two Early Modern English editions of The Book of Common Prayer. In: Mats Rydén, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Merja Kytö (eds.), A Reader in Early Modern English, 165–186. Bern: Peter Lang. Pulsiano, Phillip, and Elaine Treharne (eds.) 2001 A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Robinson, Fred C. 2001 Secular poetry. In: Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds.), 281–295. Russell G. H. 1962 Vernacular instruction of the laity in the later Middle Ages in England: Some texts and notes. Journal of Religious History 2: 98–102. Rütten, Tanja 2009 A diachronic perspective on changing routines in texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.), 61–80. Rütten, Tanja forthcoming How to Do Things with Texts – Patterns of Instruction in Religious Discourse 1350–1700. Schmied, Josef 1994 The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. In: Merja Kytö, Matti Rissanen and Susan Wright (eds.), Corpora across the Centuries. Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora, 81–89. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schmied, Josef, and Claudia Claridge 1997 Classifying text- or genre-variation in the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English texts. In: Raymond Hickey, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Tracing the Trail of Time. Proceedings from the Second Diachronic Corpora Workshop, 119–135. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Simmler, Franz 2000 Textsorten des religiösen und kirchlichen Bereichs. In: Klaus Brinker, Gerd Antos and Wolfgang Heinemann (eds.), Text- und Gesprächslinguistik – Lin-

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guistics of Text and Conversation. Vol. I, 676–690. (Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft, HSK 16.1.–2.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Spencer, H. Leith 1993 English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon. Steger, Hugo 1984 Probleme der religiösen Sprache und des religiösen Sprechens. In: Klaus Mönig (ed.), Sprechend nach Worten suchen. Probleme der philosophischen, dichterischen und religiösen Sprache der Gegenwart, 96–133. Freiburg: Schnell & Steiner. Waterhouse, Ruth 1982 Modes of address in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints homilies. Studia Neophilologica 54: 3–24. Werlich, Egon 1976 A Text Grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer.

18.

Scientific discourse Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen

1.

Introduction

This chapter discusses some key issues in studying the pragmatics of scientific writing in a historical perspective, providing a general overview of earlier research and illustrating a range of approaches and methods that have been used in research to date. We shall begin the chapter by defining the object of enquiry, i.e. the pragmatic angle to scientific writing. In section 3, we address some central aspects of the sociohistorical context, essential in studying the pragmatics of scientific writing. These include the focal concept of science, and the notion of scientific writing itself, which is dependent on our understanding of what science is; these are discussed in section 3.1. Section 3.2 provides a brief outline of the history of Western scientific writing, including the use of various languages as lingua francas and their historical dynamics and power relations, equally important for contextual analysis of scientific writing. Section 3.3 focuses on interactants of the communicative situation in the history of scientific writing, i.e. the readers and writers of scientific texts. Section 4 provides an overview of issues in the data and methods for studying the pragmatics of scientific writing, while section 5 introduces three approaches to the pragmatic analysis of scientific writing from a historical angle, examining it from the perspectives of discourse, genre and rhetoric. In section 6, we present some concluding remarks. The main emphasis in the chapter is on English, but other languages are also addressed. Our focus is on medical writing as it was the spearhead of sciences in many respects and is a key area in pragmatically-oriented research, but we also comment on other branches of science.

2.

The pragmatics of scientific writing

A recent definition of the field states that historical pragmatics “wants to understand the patterns of human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments” (Jucker 2008: 894). Another recent definition emphasises meaning-making practices: “Historical pragmatics focuses on language use in past contexts and examines how meaning is made. It is an empirical branch of linguistic study, with focus on authentic language use of the past” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 13).

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The broad view of pragmatics and historical pragmatics includes areas that are often regarded as belonging to (historical) sociolinguistics. There is in fact considerable overlap between the fields, as the language-external context is a key element of the analytical frame in both approaches, and, in the context of discourse, social and situational factors are often intertwined. Language attitudes are a case in point: they belong to speakers and hearers, writers and readers; they form a part of the social and situational context and, thus, an integral part of historical pragmatics as well. Several phases and macro-level phenomena in the history of scientific writing lend themselves to pragmatic analysis. An example is the gradual process of the vernacularisation of science, which started in the medieval period (see e.g. Voigts 1984, 1989; Pahta 1998; Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004). The process included a power struggle between Latin and the vernacular and the creation of the new register of scientific writing in European vernacular languages, which are central issues for sociohistorical analysis. The choice between Latin and vernacular contains a pragmatic angle as meaning-making practices are also involved. In such instances, authors express their opinions and seek acceptance of their views in an attempt to create common ground. Such communication constitutes a pragmatic process of negotiating meaning and is thus relevant to the present concerns. The choice of language influences what is said and what is understood: how meaning is made. It is not fully known yet what happened when scientific writing emerged as a new register in a language, i.e. how writers of science coped with the problem of having to communicate abstract ideas in a language that did not have readily available linguistic resources or conventions for presenting abstract ideas and proportions or causal relations. New means had to be created. In addition, when learned texts were transferred into vernacular languages, the genre features at the top of the hierarchy were altered as the vernacular versions of the texts were no longer attached to institutional functions (see e.g. Taavitsainen 2004, 2009a). The creation of scientific terminology in a new language also involves a meaning-making process, and scientific texts provide evidence for a variety of practices in the negotiation of new meanings in the vernacular. These range from the adoption and incorporation of Latin terms in vernacular texts to the use of vernacular words or phrases in transferred, extended meanings to various explicatory practices, such as glossing by near-synonymous words or phrases (see e.g. McConchie 1997; Pahta 2001; Norri 2004; McConchie and Curzan forthcoming). A similar negotiation process is involved in translation strategies in turning syntactic constructions used for expressing complex causal relationships in learned Latin scientific texts into the vernacular (see e.g. Pahta and Carrillo Linares 2006; Goyens et al. 2008). The main foci of historical-pragmatic studies on scientific writing can be divided into three areas: analysis of discourse forms and discoursal practices; genre analysis with the aim of mapping the developments of genres of writing and their dynamics; and the rhetoric of science, concerned with persuasive and argumen-

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tative strategies employed by writers of scientific texts. In all these approaches, discussed in more detail in section 5, scientific writing is examined as communication between writer and reader – the participants of the communicative situation – both having an active role in the meaning-making process. The audience function is crucial. It is well known that modern scientific discourse varies according to its target audience. For example, a typical research article intended for professional readers with a great deal of shared knowledge has a highly conventionalised macro-structure and is characterised by a high frequency of discipline-specific terms, complex sentences containing subordination, and an impersonal style created by frequent use of passive constructions, extended noun phrases describing nominalised actions and a low frequency of first- and second-person pronouns (see Biber 1988; Swales 1990, 2004; Zethsen and Askehave 2006: 646). Conversely, these are not the predominant linguistic characteristics of magazine articles aimed at the general audience, which are often presented as narratives (see Myers 1990; see also Vihla 1999). Similarly, earlier scientific writings are known to vary according to the target audience. Recent research in the historical-pragmatic vein has shown that the dissemination and appropriation of scientific ideas is related to the layers of readership (Taavitsainen 2005, forthcoming a; Pahta forthcoming b); recently there has been increased interest in these issues by historians of science (see below, Leong and Pennell 2007; Jones forthcoming). Discursive practices and rhetorical devices in texts aimed at a wide readership are known to differ from practices attested in texts targeted at medical professionals in various ways; this is seen, for example, in the use of special terminology and multilingual resources (e.g. Pahta 2004, 2007), in the use of amplifiers as a persuasive device (Pahta 2006) and in knowledge claims in different types of texts (Hiltunen and Tyrkkö forthcoming). Similarly, information structure, including noun phrase patterns and the use of passives in scientific texts also shows variation according to the target audience (e.g. Taavitsainen 1994; Pahta and Taavitsainen 2003; Seoane 2006; Tyrkkö and Hiltunen 2009; Biber et al. forthcoming).

3.

The sociohistorical context

In recent years the notion of “context” has been problematised. It is a rich concept, and involves textual contexts as well as sociohistorical conditions of text production with its societal, situational, historical, ideological and material sides. In historical pragmatics, the notion of context provides a multilayered frame of reference. It includes the narrow linguistic co(n)text, the situation in which the communication takes place, and the broad context of culture. For historical assessments of scientific discourse, the sociohistorical conditions are of primary importance for understanding its special features and, therefore, we also deem it necessary to discuss some contextual preliminaries in the history of science and scientific

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writing in some detail in this chapter. The notion of science, and historical developments in it, is important. Prevailing scientific paradigms are also reflected in scientific writing and are relevant for pragmatic approaches to it. The methods and objects of scientific enquiry, and the organisation and practices of the discourse communities involved in science, have a great impact on the ways in which science is communicated, and, in a diachronic perspective, changes in these will also cause changes in the patterns of writing science. 3.1.

Science and scientific writing

The question of what constitutes science is essential for determining what counts as scientific writing; the notion of science is different in different periods and thus what should be considered under the label also varies from one period to another (see e.g. Weisheipl 1965; Alioto 1987; Crombie 1994; French 2003). A narrow view limits it to modern classifications, but in a historical perspective a broad view is more in line with how people in the past understood science and how it affected their lives (Grmek 1998). Science deals with the consideration of the world and includes knowledge of the order of the world, natural phenomena and the laws that govern human life. This fundamental aspect of culture is reflected in the extant written documents from the medieval and early modern periods, both in literary and non-literary works (Taavitsainen 2000: 378). Modern science draws a strict line between science and pseudo-science, but historically this line is fuzzy.1 Alchemy and astrology are good examples of the changing position of disciplines in the scale from science to pseudo-science, and both have received some scholarly attention. Alchemy, the predecessor of modern chemistry, was a central scientific pursuit in several European courts in the Renaissance, and even later such spearhead scientists as Newton and Boyle are known to have had alchemical interests (see e.g. Crisciani and Pereira 1996; Grund 2004, 2006). Astrology and astronomy were in the Middle Ages regarded as one branch of knowledge, and their separation is a late modern development. In medieval and especially Renaissance science, astronomy and astrology formed a progressive mainstream discipline with practical applications for several walks of life: medicine, politics, trade and all kinds of other activities such as undertaking a job or setting out on a journey. Nativities, i.e. prognostications cast for the future of a child according to the moment of birth, were a standard practice in the upper classes of society. Medical astrology provided the means of defining the correct times for various actions such as taking medicine or undergoing operations. The adherence to astrology was at its strongest in the Renaissance, and the same doctrines, albeit in a stilted form, linger on as a pseudo-science even today, with similar applications (see e.g. Thomas 1971; Taavitsainen 1988). The range of disciplines addressed in studies on the history of scientific writing is wide. Some attention has been paid to writings in natural sciences such as natural

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philosophy, physics and biology, astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry, botany and mathematics, and to writings in religion and the law. The humanities and social sciences have more rarely been an object of interest, with the notable exception of philosophy and rhetoric, and economics has also inspired some studies (e.g. Del Lungo Camiciotti 2005). In pragmatically-oriented research on scientific writing, medicine can be identified as a key area. It has also been a focus of intensive research on primary sources both in manuscripts and early printed material in the past 20 years, and attracted attention in research on various languages applying various theoretical and methodological approaches. The position of medicine among sciences is special because of the relation of theory and practice; this problem occupied learned writers for centuries. Medicine was both a learned university discipline and an occupation involving technical skills. Medical education comprised both general theories and specialist doctrines, but also practical applications through apprenticeship (see e.g. Siraisi 1990; Getz 1998; French 2003). The development of learned genres from the twelfth century onwards took place within an institutional context, with the newly-founded universities as centres of medical learning (Crisciani 2000: 75–78). More practical, non-institutional medical writings are extant in great numbers both in Latin and in vernacular languages. While learned medical texts began to appear in vernacular translations in various parts of Europe, especially from the fifteenth century onwards, more practically-oriented writings like recipe collections and materia medica texts circulated in vernacular languages already during the first millennium (see e.g. Crossgrove, Schleissner and Voigts 1998). These include various types of individual recipes or fragments, but also some relatively comprehensive magico-medical collections of remedies. The most comprehensive of such early collections is the Old English Læceboc, known as the Leechbook of Bald, containing vernacular passages derived from several Latin works; the collection survives in a unique tenth-century manuscript (British Library, Royal 12.D.xvii; see Cameron 1983: 153). Another way of looking at scientific and medical writing is provided by traditions of writing, defined as a continuing series of texts building on one another, with a great deal of intertextuality. Traditions are an underlying factor with several genres within them. Early medical writings can be assigned to three different traditions of writing: learned texts, surgical treatises and the remedybook tradition (Voigts 1984); the division was modified to specialised treatises and surgical texts, both belonging to the learned tradition, and remedybooks and materia medica for the Middle English Medical Texts corpus (see below, Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 2005). Learned translations of academic and surgical texts were new in the late medieval period, whereas the remedybook tradition is longer and goes back to the tenth/eleventh century in English (Voigts 1984). Yet the above division into three traditions is not always clear because of the lack of knowledge of early authors and their audiences. Remedybooks are a difficult category, as these texts also contain learned materials, which may have come to vernaculars earlier, and most

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extant texts are in fact a product of several chronological layers of borrowing and free adaptation (see e.g. Rand Schmidt 1994; Taavitsainen 2001d; Pahta forthcoming c). 3.2.

Languages of Western science and their dynamics

Scientific writing is one of the areas where communication within a wide discourse community extending over individual language-specific communities has been crucial from early on. Major language shifts have taken place in the domain in the course of history: in the early Middle Ages from Greek via Arabic to Latin; in the transition from the medieval to the early modern period from Latin only into Latin and vernacular; and in the course of the twentieth century increasingly to English only. Latin was the primary language of Western science from the fifth century to the early modern period and beyond. The roots of Western science are in Greek antiquity, and the bulk of scientific writings circulating in the West before and during the Middle Ages goes back to Greek sources. The majority of Greek theoretical science was transmitted to the Latin West through the Islamic world in translations made from Arabic in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas some more practically-oriented writings were translated directly from Greek into Latin earlier (Siraisi 1990). The complex process of transmission sometimes across several linguistic boundaries in handwritten copies is reflected both in the content and the language of medieval scientific writings in many ways. The process involved successive stages of copying, translating, paraphrasing, commenting, excerpting, assimilating, adapting and conflating. On the one hand, ancient authors were revered and many of the prestigious works of the canon were passed on in word-forword translations. On the other hand, it was also customary to compile new texts by assembling extracts from earlier texts. Italy became the focal point for the formation of the traditions and conventions of Western science and medicine (Siraisi 2001). In medicine, the twelfth century is considered the starting point for a long renaissance, which evolved over four hundred years, eventually resolving a broad range of issues and defining a new science of medicine, which grew out of a range of equally new areas of scholarly investigation (McVaugh and Siraisi 1990: 9). These new ideas were expressed in Latin texts in learned centres like Salerno in the twelfth century. Apart from a few notable vernacular texts and the linguistic influence of the underlying Greek and Arabic sources, the discourse world of early medieval science was monolingual Latin. The situation began to change towards the end of the Middle Ages, when scientific writings first emerged in vernacular languages in various parts of Europe. The process of vernacularisation was gradual. In the late medieval period, the gradual increase in vernacular writing affected various realms of knowledge, so that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries vernacular texts

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dealing with scientific, medical and technological subjects were becoming increasingly common in Europe (Crossgrove 1998; Goyens et al. 2008). The earliest substantial body of vernacular scientific texts survives from Anglo-Saxon England, where several translations of scientific and medical texts were made from Latin into English in connection with the educational and social reforms of King Alfred (Abels 1998). Vernacular versions of scientific and medical texts started to appear in greater numbers in the thirteenth century in France and in the fourteenth century in Spain, Portugal, Germany and England (see Crossgrove 1998; Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). The scope of the vernacularisation process can be illustrated, for example, by a set of three gynaecological treatises written in twelfth-century Salerno, attributed to a woman author named Trota or Trotula. These texts were widely disseminated in Latin throughout Europe and are known in 23 different vernacular versions in eight languages: one Catalan translation, three Dutch, five English, seven French, three German, one Hebrew, one Irish and two Italian (Green 1996a, 1997). In England, Anglo-Norman texts started to appear somewhat earlier than English texts (Hunt 1990). In Scandinavia, the emergence of the vernacular scientific register occurred later: the earliest period of Gunnarsson’s medical corpus of research articles is 1730–1799 (Gunnarsson 1992). Some vernacular texts adapted from the early traditions originally derived from scientific treatises, like “Bauernpraktik” prognostications, e.g. on weather, harvest or thunder, circulated even earlier, e.g. in Finnish on the flyleaves of an early sixteenth-century prayerbook (Taavitsainen 1989). The emergence of the vernacular languages in science created a plurilingual discourse world, where languages existed side by side in a diglossic linguistic situation. The institutional language of science was Latin, whereas vernacular languages became increasingly common in non-institutional contexts. As vernacular languages were not used at the highest institutional level, the practical side became enhanced in them (cf. above). Plurilingualism in the domain of science is reflected, for example, in mixed-language writings. A mixture of languages can be found both in manuscripts and printed books where monolingual treatises in different languages alternate and in individual texts containing passages of varying length in more than one language (see e.g. Voigts 1996; Pahta 2004; Pahta forthcoming a). The tendency to combine materials in different languages appears to be more prominent in medicine than in other disciplines, although language mixing is also attested, e.g. in astronomical-astrological and alchemical writings of the medieval period (Voigts 1989). As a result of the vernacularisation process, the late medieval period is also important in establishing genre conventions in vernacular writing. As the register was new in vernacular languages, the means to express scientific ideas did not exist and had to be created. Vernacular texts occupied an intermediate position between the world of learning and the more popular attitudes, between ars and vulgus, as demonstrated by the German versions of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicine (orig-

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inal 1305), also translated into Middle English, French, Castilian, Gaelic and Hebrew (Demaitre 1998: 88). Genre conventions of scientific writing in English show a great deal of fluctuation (see below). Features of vernacularisation are likely to be parallel in different languages; research on vernacularisation processes in Romance languages, especially in Catalan,2 shows features where the broad lines of development are largely similar to those in England. In all languages, vernacular medical texts seem to have had a bias toward instruction and practical knowledge, but there is a great deal of variation between individual texts. More theoretical treatises are also found, but they exhibit difficulties in making vernacular languages function in the new prestige register. In the fifteenth century, the scale of medical writing is wide: there are texts with theoretical considerations transferred from the Latin exemplars, but there are reduced adaptations and applications as well. It seems possible to trace the transmission of scientific ideas to various audiences with a detailed comparison of the contents and styles of writing (see below). More definitive conclusions would need more research both on the Latin background and on features of vernacular writing. The processes of vernacularisation continued over several centuries, and different phases have been discerned. The second phase started at the end of the fifteenth century, and continues in the sixteenth. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, and even later, medieval traditions continued in texts circulating in manuscript form. With the arrival of the print medium, some texts were simply committed to print without any modification in substance, but there were some important changes connected with the new medium as well (see Taavitsainen, Jones et al. forthcoming). One change is seen in the fact that anonymous conflated texts began to give way to texts by known contemporary authors, some of them originally written by learned scientists and leading experts of their time. This is partly related to the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the field, which had begun in the medieval period. An example is provided by John Caius, one of the most learned of sixteenth-century physicians, who in addition to several Latin treatises also wrote an English work, dealing with the sweating sickness, for the benefit of the general public (Caius 1552; Nutton 2004). Glimpses of the motivations for language choice can be found in the metatextual genres of prologues and introductions, and sometimes metatextual passages can also be found in the body of scientific and medical texts (discussed e.g. in McConchie 1997; Taavitsainen 2000). On the one hand, translations were inspired by nationalistic feeling and the desire to enhance the status of the vernacular language; on the other hand, they might also have had charitable motivations. Arguments both for and against disseminating scientific knowledge in the vernacular among the uneducated, non-Latinate masses are presented, and the sufficiency and adequacy of English in presenting sophisticated medical content is called into question. For example, in the preface to his vernacular treatise on English sweat, John Caius writes:

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… neuer more to write in the Englishe tongue, partly because the comoditie of that which is so written, passeth not the compasse of Englande, but remaineth enclosed within the seas, and partly because I thought that labours so taken should be halfe loste among them whiche sette not by learnyng. Thirdly for that I thought it beste to auoide the iudgment of the multitude, from whome in maters of learnyng a man shalbe forced to dissente, in disprouyng that whiche th’ey most approue, & approuyng that whiche they moste disalowe. Fourthly for that the common settyng furthe and printing of euery foolishe thyng in englishe, both of phisicke vnperfectly, and other matters vndiscretly diminishe the grace of thynges learned set furth in the same. (Caius 1552: A4r-A4v) ‘ … never again to write in English, partly because the usefulness of a text so written will not extend outside England but remains within the island, and partly because I thought that the pains taken would be half-wasted among the less educated. Thirdly, because I thought it best to avoid the judgement of the masses, with whom a man is forced to disagree in matters of learning, disapproving that which they most approve of, and approving that which they most detest. Fourthly, because the spreading and printing of all foolish things in English, both of medical knowledge imperfectly and other matters indiscreetly, diminishes the grace of things learned expressed in the same [language].’ The emergence of the first scientific journals in the course of the seventeenth century had a great impact both in “nationalising” scientific communication and in the emergence of new genres of scientific writing. The first scientific journals, Le Journal des Sçavans (later published as Le Journal des Savants) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, founded in 1665 in Paris and London respectively, published from the very beginning research articles, experimental reports, letters and book reviews predominantly in French and English respectively, but also in Latin. Latin retained its position as a language of science for several centuries after the emergence of vernacular languages, serving as the lingua franca of science until the nineteenth century. For example, in England, the majority of medical publications were written in Latin until the end of the seventeenth century (Webster 1979), including the ground-breaking works of William Harvey (French 2004). In Northern Europe and Scandinavia, Latin remained important as the primary language of scientific writing in the eighteenth century. For example, all the landmark publications by Carl Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish pioneer in botany, were written in Latin. The seeds of the development towards modern global audiences can be discerned in the widening of the world especially in the Royal Society period and the expansion of European empires to other continents. In the early twentieth century, there were rival languages for the lingua franca position in science: French, German and English. German was a very strong candidate before the Second World

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War. German had served as a lingua franca in large parts of Europe for centuries, e.g. in the Baltic area since the Middle Ages, and the names of several scholarly journals and series in many fields are still in German (Taavitsainen 2006a). The rapid development towards the present global discourse community is, however, more recent, with its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000), when the global situation started to change in favour of English with the increasing impact of Anglo-American culture. The development towards English only has been extremely rapid in the last decade, and English prevails in medical research writing to the extent that researchers have noticed signs of register narrowing in e.g. Scandinavian languages. The native language is used in communicating scientific results to the wide audience only, while the language of the original publication aimed at the professional community is English (see below, Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995). 3.3.

Readers and writers of scientific texts

The readers and writers of scientific texts in the broadest sense range wide, comprising professionals and lay persons from various social categories and with different levels of expertise in disciplinary knowledge. For example, in the late medieval period, the potential audience for vernacular medical writings included all those who could read – a heterogeneous group in terms of social status, education and profession. The medical profession included practitioners of varied levels and background: university-educated physicians and surgeons, barber-surgeons, barbers, midwives, itinerant specialists like bonesetters and oculists, herbalists, apothecaries, wisewomen and other mixed groups (see e.g. Taavitsainen 1988; Pahta 1998). They can be roughly divided into clerical and elite practitioners and tradespeople or ordinary practitioners. The basic question of literacy is at the core of the readership of scientific texts in the early periods. For example, in medieval England, estimations of the scope of literacy vary (see Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). University education guaranteed the most advanced level of literacy, including professional literacy in Latin. Fairly advanced literacy, including the basics of Latin, was probably widespread among both male and female members of the aristocracy. With the growth of urban society, the rise of a middle class, the grammar school system and new professions, practical literacy was gradually spreading outside the upper classes, rarely, however, reaching the lowest social strata. According to a cautious assessment, 30 per cent of the population in the fifteenth century could read, although in the largest urban centres the figure may have been higher (see Keen 1990: 224). Another estimation, taking social, regional and gender variation into account, proposes that 40 per cent of London merchants were literate, while figures for some other groups are 25 per cent for the urban male population, 6–12 per cent for men in general, and for women less than half the rate of men (Graff 1987: 99, 106). In early modern

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England, there were great differences in the literacy rates both socially and geographically between various parts of the country (Jones forthcoming). It has also been stated that the demand for more writing in the vernacular grew with the increasing number of readers, and the growing supply of vernacular texts in turn encouraged more people to learn to read (see Clanchy 1993: 201). Another facet of readership is connected with access to knowledge, involving issues of gender, class, education and community and what was thought desirable and appropriate to offer in the vernacular for wider distribution among different social strata (Wogan-Browne et al. 1999: 322). The choices of rendering learned texts into the vernacular indicate a conscious decision and the desire for more open access to knowledge among professionals who were familiar with these materials in Latin, but the doubts and concerns expressed by writers like John Caius about using the vernacular show that these issues were not simple (see above). Information about the target readership of historical texts can be gained by various methods. The real consumers can be assessed through text external evidence such as library catalogues and wills. Book historical research concerning ownership inscriptions in manuscripts and early printed books can provide some insight into the readers of scientific texts. For example, evidence from research of manuscript codices containing Middle English medical texts indicates that the readership of vernacular medical works in late medieval England was heterogeneous, consisting of both lay readers and medical professionals of various levels. English medical texts are contained in manuscripts known to have been owned e.g. by members of the highest orders of university-trained physicians and by barbersurgeons (see e.g. Green 1992: 56–60; Jasin 1993; Voigts 1995: 250–251; Tavormina 2006). Similarly, information on the readership can be gained from the prefatory materials of scientific writings, even though these statements need to be reviewed critically both against the contents of the treatises themselves and the book historical evidence. For example, the prologue added to a Middle English gynaecological treatise suggests that the work is intended specifically for female readers. The text itself, however, appears to show no signs of being adapted to a female audience and in fact contains contradictory evidence: unlike many other gynaecological treatises circulating at the same time in the vernacular, this text contains passages in Latin, which would have been of little use to the contemporary, largely non-Latinate female audience (Green 1992: 77). Prefatory materials of medical texts often mention that the leading motivation for writing in English was to make medical advice available to “the poor”, to improve their condition by giving them access to useful knowledge about medicines and healing practices (Slack 1979; Getz 1990; WoganBrowne et al. 1999). It has been suggested that inscriptions like this are a mere social and literary convention, but recent scholarship suggests that at least in some cases they can be taken as an indication of the intended readership the author or printer had in mind (Marttila forthcoming).

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Differences according to intended target audience are found even at the earliest stages of scientific writing, with its different layers and traditions. In the earlier literature, language and audience were thought to correlate in scientific writings so that Latin was associated with learned writings for professionals, and vernacular languages with more popular texts for lay audiences. Research has provided evidence that this macro-level distinction does not hold, but the pattern is more complicated (see above). As in present-day scientific writings, the audience design is also reflected in the linguistic and textual characteristics of historical scientific texts in many ways (see section 5 below).

4.

Data and methods for studying the pragmatics of scientific discourse

The data examined in pragmatically-oriented research on scientific writing range from texts originally written by hand and circulating in manuscript form to various types of printed materials. In data issues, traditional philology, including manuscript studies and book historical research, has a great deal to offer historical pragmatics. The first step is to gain knowledge of extant materials, provided by manuscript catalogues and indices of manuscript texts in particular fields of writing for the earlier periods, and short-title and library catalogues for later periods. The bibliographical index of Latin scientific writings by Thorndike and Kibre (1963) is a pioneering effort towards a systematic catalogue of Latin scientific texts circulating in manuscript form. There are also catalogues of texts according to individual domains or disciplines, authors or text traditions. These are illustrated, for instance, by a detailed charting of gynaecological and obstetrical writings of the Trotula tradition in Latin, English and other vernacular languages (Green 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2001). Some catalogues are language- and period-specific, such as the manual of works of science and information in Middle English by Keiser (1998). New electronic research tools have brought studies on medieval scientific writing to a new phase. Knowledge of the underlying manuscript reality has recently become easily accessible with the electronic Thorndike and Kibre catalogue (eTK, Voigts 2009). The database Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference by Voigts and Kurtz (2000, 2009) is invaluable in charting the extent of English scientific writing and gives us a good overview of the situation up to c. 1500. Another important data-related prerequisite for sound scholarship on the earliest layers of scientific writing is the availability of reliable editions of the manuscript era. There has been considerable editorial activity in Latin and Greek scientific writings from early on, as insights into the world of top science and scientific discoveries in the early periods can only be gained through texts. Solid basic philological research is, however, still in great demand on materials even in classical languages. Research interest in vernacular materials is more recent, although there

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are some early editions of vernacular texts too, often presented as curiosities or based on individual researchers’ personal interest. For example, in English, the earliest editions of scientific writings are from the nineteenth century, the first edition being Reliquae antiquiae by T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, in two volumes from 1841–1843. This eclectic collection consists of passages of recipes and remedybook materials, selected for their curiosity, and is followed by a few similar collections published during the late nineteenth century. Some vernacular surgical treatises attracted early attention as well (see Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). Even today, only a fraction of the vernacular medical texts surviving in medieval manuscripts have been made available for further scholarship, and there is a great demand for basic philological research in all areas of early scientific writing in all languages. The underlying manuscript reality comprises a great deal of unexplored material providing genuine possibilities for new discoveries. In recent years, electronic tools have opened up new possibilities for representing the special characteristics of medieval texts, of which researchers are becoming increasingly aware. These special qualities were first discussed in connection with Old French (Fleischmann 1990): a medieval manuscript text can offer multiple readings (cf. above), sentence boundaries can be fuzzy and scopes of modification vary, the indeterminacy of direct and indirect quotations is well known and the transfer of genre conventions causes additional problems (Pahta 2001; Taavitsainen 2004; see also Kytö in this volume). Unfortunately, sociohistorical background facts are also often deficient in medieval texts, whereas in the early modern period the situation improves. Central to the philological approach is the assumption of linguistic skill and expertise; profound knowledge of language with its sociohistorical background is a prerequisite for successful philological analysis as well as corpus-linguistic analysis. Texts are products of historical contexts that must be recovered in order for the interpreter to negotiate meaning (see Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007). Pragmatic research on the history of scientific writing makes use of a range of methodological approaches. These include both qualitative and quantitative paradigms and their various combinations, and methods that are also used in pragmatic analysis of present-day spoken and written data and in various fields of historical linguistics. In English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics is the prevailing methodology, and it is widely used in analyses of scientific writing as well. Corpora are being compiled and corpus-linguistic methods applied, especially to the study of vernacular scientific writing. There are several projects with slightly different aims, but they have a great deal in common and the field has developed greatly in recent years (see below). Corpus linguistics has made linguistic studies more transparent in the sense that they are replicable. Results can be tested by statistical methods that make conclusions more reliable and objective. Yet there are problems as the datasets must be comprehensive enough to offer sufficient material for statistical assessment – we need electronic corpora to be able to apply corpus-linguistic methods.

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By combining synchronic descriptions of various periods it is possible to achieve an overall view of the diachronic developments. Corpus-linguistic methods offer us a means to achieve facts about the distribution of linguistic and stylistic features. Co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features are important as no feature alone is sufficient to define the style, instead several features work together and make the style of writing “involved” or “detached”, for example, to use Biber’s (1988) terms (see below). Corpus stylistics is an area with exciting new developments. New corpora with new tools for corpus-linguistic assessments can give us more detailed information about developments within the scientific register of writing. There are several corpora containing scientific texts (see also Kytö in this volume). Of the general-purpose corpora, the Helsinki Corpus contains twelve scientific texts of the medieval and early modern periods, mostly of medical writing, but also other branches of science (see Rissanen, Kytö and Palander-Collin 1993; and CoRD). ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), a multi-genre corpus of British and American English covering the period 1650–1990, continues the line with medical texts (see e.g. Biber and Finegan 1997; Biber and Clark 2002). An example of a specialised corpus with scientific texts is the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, which contains non-literary tracts and pamphlets (see Schmied and Claridge 1997). Domain-specific corpora are also being compiled. The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, containing a wide range of medical texts from the period 1375–1800, is in compilation by a project on Scientific Thought-styles: The Evolution of English Medical Writing at the University of Helsinki (see below); the first sub-corpus, Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT, 1375–1500), was published in 2005 (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 2005) and the second, Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700), is nearing completion (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1997; Taavitsainen, Pahta et al. forthcoming; Taavitsainen and Pahta forthcoming a). In recent years, several other corpus compilation projects in scientific writing have been launched. These include the Coruña Corpus, compiled by a project on Multidimensional Corpus-based Studies in English (MUSTE) at the University of A Coruña, and currently consisting of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on astronomy, with compilation of text collections in philosophy and life sciences in progress (e.g. Moskowich-Spiegel 2007). An international research project with participants from Glasgow, Malaga and Oviedo is aiming to produce electronic editions of the late medieval scientific manuscripts housed in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow University Library and to build an annotated corpus of Middle English Fachprosa based on these editions (Moreno Olalla and Miranda García forthcoming3). Scholars in Gran Canaria are actively researching medieval recipes, compiling a Corpus of Early English Recipes and studying the linguistic features of these texts (Alonso-Almeida, Ortega-Barrera and Quintana-Toledo forthcoming).

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In principle, two approaches are possible in analyses making use of corpus methodology: top down or bottom up. Both have been applied to scientific writing. Examples of both approaches are provided by studies of the Scientific Thoughtstyles project (see below), aiming to chart diachronic developments in medical writing in its sociohistorical embedding. In a corpus-based study in search of features that would define the scholastic thought-style in MEMT texts (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1997, 1998), the starting-point was top down, i.e. predefined by earlier research; in this case descriptions of medieval scholastic science by historians of science provided the point of departure. As a defining feature of the scholastic thought-style, histories of science mention logocentricity: knowledge was based on the fact “that someone said so”, i.e. the primary source of scholastic knowledge was the quotative. Another typical aspect was the firm reliance on axioms derived from ancient authorities. The task of the corpus-based pragmatic analysis was to find the linguistic features that would display these characteristics in texts. At this stage, the analysis resorted to the bottom-up method as well, compiling automated word lists of the corpus texts as a basis for selecting features for further analysis. The hypothesis was that we could probe deeper into the style of writing by assessing the following linguistic features: Reliance on authorities > references to them > names of authorities in the word lists (with all spelling variants) > corpus searches Quotative evidence > speech-act verbs of saying (with all spelling variants) > word lists of texts > corpus searches Deontic modality > prescriptive phrases (with all spelling variants) > it is + verb (e.g. it is to wit) > corpus searches The bottom-up method can also serve as a point of departure, combining philological assessment, i.e. careful qualitative reading, with corpus searches. This approach proved useful, for example, in a study on modality (Taavitsainen 2001a), a demanding and elusive category. A small, stratified test corpus was first compiled out of a larger corpus for manual assessment with texts from various genres and traditions, representing the full continuum of medical writing in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. This sub-corpus was studied with the “philological” method to find out what means were used to express modality, and these features were then searched automatically in a larger corpus. The advantage of the bottom-up method is the firm reliance on data, and the results can lead to completely new categorisations. For example, metatextual features in the early periods proved very different from those in the modern period (Taavitsainen 1999, 2006c, forthcoming b).

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Three approaches to studying the pragmatics of scientific writing

Pragmatically-oriented research on the history of scientific writing has mostly focused on the evolution of discourse, genre developments and the rhetoric of science. Several research projects are working on corpus compilation and carrying out corpus-facilitated research. In addition, individual scholars have contributed to our knowledge. Of the languages and fields of science, English medical writing has attracted most attention. The foci of research have been on diachronic developments up to modern times, the vernacularisation processes in the late medieval and early modern periods, and the Royal Society period. Another perspective focuses on the formation of modern conventions of scientific writing. In addition to English, Swedish scientific writing has been assessed in a diachronic perspective, but, to our knowledge, other languages have not been extensively researched from a pragmatic angle. 5.1.

Discourse approach

Historical discourse analysis investigates discourse features, functions and structure in a diachronic perspective. The field is so closely connected with historical pragmatics that the terms are sometimes used interchangeably (Jucker 2008). Discoursal changes are seen as being on a par with phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic change (Brinton 2001). The discourse approach to the history of scientific writing overlaps with historical stylistics. Here the new methodological avenues offered by corpus linguistics and approaches developed in corpus-based analysis of present-day scientific writing have contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the formation of writing conventions in scientific discourse. Biber’s seminal study applying the multidimensional method of linguistic stylistics to a vast range of texts (1988) has inspired several investigations of the evolution of the register of scientific writing in English. The original assessment, which focused on variation across spoken and written genres of present-day English, provides a good point of comparison for diachronic investigations. Follow-up studies have used the same methodology, but dealt with historical periods and varying selections of registers and genres, e.g. eighteenth-century medical texts in ARCHER have been investigated in more detail (Biber and Clark 2002). The multidimensional approach has been applied to written vs. spoken registers in English: medical writing was first contrasted to drama, and then medicine, science, law and news were compared to one another. The difference was not great in the seventeenth century, but grew considerable in the eighteenth century. The specialist expository registers of medicine and science followed a consistent course towards more literate, more specialised writing that exploits the resources of the written mode in innovative ways, whereas the other registers under scrutiny became consistently more oral (Biber and Finegan 1997:

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272–273). Modifications of the method have also been applied to research focusing on some key aspects of scientific writing, such as the ways of marking stance, i.e. epistemic or attitudinal comments on propositional information (Biber 2004). This study was based on a statistical investigation of stance devices with the aim of discovering underlying patterns across past centuries; the same model is applied to EMEMT materials of the second half of the sixteenth century (see below). Multidimensional analysis was also used in an extensive book-length diachronic study by Atkinson (1999), examining the development of the scientific register in the period 1675–1995, integrating quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative analysis of discourse features for a firm sociohistorical anchoring. The study traces the development of the scientific register from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to modern scientific prose, the beginning of modern statistically-based research articles and to present-day use in the lingua franca position. The book also provides a detailed description of the history of the Royal Society itself as a close-knit discourse community. Another study on modern research traced the evolution of medical prose at 45-year intervals in The Edinburgh Medical Journal from the early eighteenth century to 1985 (Atkinson 1992). The same method was employed in a study on earlier data, extending from the late medieval period to the middle of the sixteenth century (Gonzáles-Alvarez and Peréz-Guerra 1998). In addition, the multidimensional method has been applied by Moessner (2008, 2009a) to a corpus composed of Philosophical Transactions texts and earlier texts from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Her findings place the beginnings of modern conventions of scientific writing to the first half of the seventeenth century; similar conclusions were reached independently by Taavitsainen in a study based on the EMEMT corpus (2009a). Together, the above studies show that considerable changes have taken place in the register of scientific and medical writing during its long history in English. The most important trends can be summed up as follows. Contrary to earlier assumptions (Halliday 1988), late medieval texts favour the passive voice and an impersonal way of writing. There is a wave-like development: the style changes first from more detached to more involved, and then back again (Taavitsainen 1994, 2002). The second conspicuous trend is towards a less narrative mode of writing, and a tendency towards a more abstract style of writing, characterised by extensive nominalisation and complex noun phrase structure, has been verified from the eighteenth century onwards (Biber and Finegan 1997; Atkinson 1999; see also Dorgeloh 2005). A large body of pragmatically-oriented research on scientific discourse has been produced by the project on Scientific Thought-styles at the University of Helsinki, charting the long diachrony of medical writing. The aim of the project is to trace diachronic changes in English medical writing in its sociohistorical embedding, including the changing scientific ideologies. A pilot study on medical and scientific writing in the Helsinki Corpus revealed a development contrary to what had been stated earlier (see above), and it also showed that there was a great deal

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that we did not know yet (Taavitsainen 1994). The study gave an incentive to develop an ambitious goal: to investigate the development of medical writing from scholasticism to empiricism and beyond in a sociohistorical framework (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1995). Changes can be conceptualised as changes in scientific thought-styles, and defined as changes in the underlying scientific concepts, objects of enquiry, methods, evaluations and intellectual commitments, which are mediated to us through language (cf. Crombie 1994: 5–6). Styles of thinking and making decisions within any society or culture endure only as long as the underlying commitments and dispositions remain stable. Thus changes in scientific thought-styles are closely connected to the view of science as a dynamic and constant process. There is ample evidence of the dynamics in the history of science, as both the notion of science itself and the methods of enquiry have changed across time and from culture to culture. The project applies both quantitative and qualitative methods, the main focus being on pragmatic analysis of stylistic features and on computer-aided analysis of discourse. Most studies have dealt with vernacularisation of medical writing in the late medieval period (e.g. Taavitsainen et al. 2002; Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004) and the transition to the early modern period (e.g. Taavitsainen 2002, 2009a, 2009b; Pahta et al. forthcoming; Taavitsainen and Pahta forthcoming a und b); less attention so far has been devoted to texts and discourses in the late modern period (Pahta forthcoming b). Research to date shows that innovations in discourse styles are mostly found in learned registers and proceed at different paces in different types of writing and, according to the findings of the project, the transition period from medieval to modern discourse styles started earlier and lasted longer than has been stated in the literature. Scientific discourse is an umbrella term. In addition to the lines of research explained above, attention has been paid to the way scientists communicated with one another to deliver opinions, results and findings to their peers. Correspondence was an important reporting practice connected with scientific experiments in seventeenth-century England and Continental Europe (Valle 1999, 2003, 2006; Gotti 2006). The networks extended over geographical and linguistic boundaries as scientists reported on their findings and discussed current issues in letters in Latin and vernacular languages. Correspondence was also published in the Philosophical Transactions written in or translated into English or Latin, the pan-European language of science (cf. above). The central figure in this activity was the German-born Henry Oldenburg, whose editorial filtering practices were influential (Valle 1999; Moessner 2009b). Before the beginnings of modern scientific news, early reports on the newfound continents were written according to the medieval tradition of depicting the edges of the world as marvellous and monstrous. A change to more realistic eye-witness descriptions took place in the latter half of the sixteenth century (Taavitsainen 2009b). The reception of scientific writing has been highlighted in some studies on appropriation. The term refers to the process by which meaning is produced and com-

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mon cultural sets, such as scientific doctrines, are understood and acted upon. Texts have plural uses and are perceived in different ways by different audiences. The scale from learned to “popular” is applicable, though the word “popular” is problematic in itself; here it is defined as a way of using cultural products. In a historical perspective, a difference between learned and popular layers of writing is evident already in the late medieval period. Professional treatises deal with theoretical issues, while texts aimed at heterogeneous lay audiences revert to applications such as prognostications of various sorts (see above, Taavitsainen 2005). The difference in the style of writing is conspicuous in some pertinent features of scholasticism, such as references to a hierarchy of authorities and the specificity of these references. Verse and prose provided different modes of disseminating knowledge, prose being more sophisticated and associated with philosophical tracts in the Middle Ages. Metadiscursive practices also vary according to the target readership (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1998; Taavitsainen 2000, 2006c, forthcoming b). Besides scientific writing in English, Swedish scientific discourse has been studied from a diachronic angle. The FUMS group (Avdelningen för forskning och utbildning i moderna svenska ‘The Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish’) in Uppsala has developed a model that combines a pragmatic frame with other approaches, and carried out research applying it. The model distinguishes three relevant layers of discourse in the meaning-making process (Näslund 1991; Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995; Gunnarsson 1997, 2006). The first one is the cognitive layer, the knowledge base of the discipline – its objects of enquiry, facts, methods and tools, the ways in which professionals operating within the field view reality, what constitutes knowledge and how it is constructed. The second is the social layer including activities within the discipline, such as the group identity of professionals, group attitudes and internal power hierarchies. The third layer is the macro-social or societal level that concerns the relationship of the professionals to the society in which they operate, their status and role in the society, and their relationship to other social actors, groups and institutions. The model allows both synchronic and diachronic analysis, and includes a pragmatic frame with the analysis of illocutions in informative, explicative, expressive, argumentative and directive speech acts. The metacommunicative level has also been discussed. Swedish text patterns during the period 1895–1995 have undergone radical changes in each of the studied fieds: economy, medicine and technical sciences (Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995: 35). The changes are interpreted to reflect changes in society. Applying this model, Gunnarsson (2006, 2009) compares the conventions of medical research articles in Swedish published in scientific journals over three centuries beginning from the eighteenth. The articles were chosen to be maximally comparable, keeping the underlying parameters of author’s education, audience and genre constant. The timeline was divided into six periods. The results are related to sociohistorical contexts in the history of medical science and changes in medical discourse communities. The following tendencies were noticed:

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more “scientific world” – less “external world”; more “experiment” – less social, political and economic “measures”; more “process” and “results” – less “cause” and “phenomenon”; a large proportion of “theme development” – a smaller proportion of “discussion” and “conclusions”; more “informative” and “explicative” illocutions – fewer “expressive” and “directive” illocutions. (Gunnarsson 2009: 64) Multilingual discourse practices in scientific writing have also received some attention, especially in medieval and early modern medical texts. This research provides important insight into the roles and functions of languages in multilingual discourse communities in the domain of science. Within individual multilingual texts, the languages involved often occur with a functional distribution of labour. For example, research on code-switching between Latin and English in early English medical writing has shown that the texts frequently contain Latin segments in three distinct discourse functions. The most prominent function is related to professional discourse, including specialised terminology and references to earlier sources of knowledge. Latin connected with religious discourse tends to occur in medieval remedybooks – a feature reflecting the importance of religion in healing practices of the time. Latin is also frequently used in text-organising functions, including segments signalling the beginnings or closings of texts or textual units, and quotations, where the change of language indicates a transition to another discourse level. In many instances, a switch from one language into another does not seem to have any external discourse function; these code-switches seem rather to stem from the author’s or scribe’s idiolectal habits and may serve more local interpersonal functions. Many switches are multifunctional, serving simultaneously both macro-level social or textual functions and micro-level interpersonal functions (Pahta 2003, 2004, 2007, forthcoming a). Similar findings have also been made in samples of late modern scientific writing (Nurmi and Pahta 2010). 5.2.

Genre approach

Work in historical genre and register analysis overlaps with historical stylistics and historical discourse analysis and has mostly been conducted with corpus-linguistic tools or corpus-aided methods (see above). Genres are defined as communicative units (Swales 1990) important in meaning-making practices. In historical genre analysis of scientific writing, a central position is occupied by the creation of genre conventions, changes of genre features over time in response to the needs of the discourse communities, and how authors chose to communicate scientific ideas to various audiences for various purposes, e.g. how they instruct people in making medicine (recipes), healing sicknesses or maintaining health throughout the centuries. Some genres survive in written vernaculars from

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the early periods, e.g. handbooks with practical advice, recipes, prognostications and charms are extant from late Old English. In the late medieval vernacularisation processes, learned Latin genres were transferred into the vernaculars and Latin writing set the model. The original genres were used by a small elite of learned physicians and surgeons. The core genres included commentaries, compilationes ‘compilations’, encyclopaedic treatises, questions-and-answers, pedagogical dialogues, and consilia and practica, which were basically medical case reports (Taavitsainen 2006b). As mentioned above, genre features changed when transferred into the vernacular. Genres are operational tools and constitute dynamic systems, which undergo change and variation. In the course of time, sociocultural needs change and genres change accordingly: old genres become adapted to new functions, new genres are created and genres that have lost their function cease to exist (Taavitsainen 2001b). The development of genres and the formation of genre conventions are crucial in the written communication of science. In the field of medical and scientific writing, a dynamic picture emerges when discourse features and generic developments are assessed in their sociopragmatic setting in relation to their audiences in a diachronic perspective. The genre repertoire of late medieval and early modern medical writing in English has been assessed taking the dynamics of the genre development and the sociohistorical reality into account. In the early modern period, new genres were created at the top, and old learned genres became adapted to new uses. The old patterns continue in writings intended for heterogeneous lay audiences (Taavitsainen 2009a). The history of medical case studies provides another example of the dynamics of generic developments, from a central teaching genre to curiosities and exceptional manifestations of disease, and finally to Internet quizzes in a highly specialised world-wide medical journal (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000). Typically, studies in historical genre and register analysis aim at inventories of genres and discourse forms, and such studies have been conducted in other registers, like newspaper language, scientific writing and religious discourse (see the respective articles in this volume). One of the best-known diachronic outlines of genres is by Görlach and deals with cookery recipes (overlapping with medical recipes in the early periods), tracing their genre features over more than a thousand years from Old to Present-day English. The tenet is that the basic function and generic features have remained constant throughout the long history of the genre (Görlach 1992: 756). This view has been replaced by a more diversified view of recipes recently (see e.g. Taavitsainen 2001c; Grund 2003, 2006; Alonso-Almeida and Carroll 2004). Although recipes are a well-defined procedural genre, their transmission is extremely complicated. Recipes are found both on their own and embedded within a wide range of texts. Recipes in different traditions of medical writing in Middle English show different degrees of textual standardisation: in remedybooks, recipes follow a standardised format, but in academic and surgical texts they are more varied. The dif-

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ference can be explained by the different functions of recipes in these traditions: in learned treatises they provide illustrations of healing practices, whereas remedybooks served as handbooks for quick reference. The standardised format, with explicit titles and regular structure, serves practical purposes and makes consultation easier (Taavitsainen 2001c). A new way of thinking about genres like recipes is to see them as discourse colonies (Carroll 2003, based on Hoey 2001) or assess them as speech acts with promises of healing (Alonso-Almeida and Cabrera-Abreu 2002). Other pragmatic approaches include a relevance-theory approach to describe the various functions and meanings of discourse markers and conjunctions (Alonso-Almeida 2008). The medical marketplace idea has been extended to the study of the exchange, acquisition and evaluation of medical information in recipe collections in early modern England. The household is viewed as the primary arena of treatment, and the users of medical knowledge are in the forefront, thus bringing this study by medical historians into the realm of historical pragmatics (Leong and Pennell 2007). Herbals belong to the category of remedybooks and materia medica. A corpusbased study on herbals belonging to the medieval medical register analyses the structure of texts in the herbal genre with a prototype approach, revealing which texts are connected intertextually and how herbal knowledge is disseminated through layers of writing (Mäkinen 2006). Herbals are closely linked with recipe collections and regimens of health. More systematic botanical texts started to appear in the early modern period, e.g. Renaissance botanical texts with plant names reveal an underlying taxonomic organisation (Selosse 2005). A comparison between textual strategies of the medieval and early modern periods revealed differences in the use of personal pronouns and imperative forms. A gap between more practical texts like handbooks and learned treatises was also evident. The purpose of writing and the educational level of the target audience explained the differences (Mäkinen 2002). The birth of new genres in the Royal Society period, especially the experimental essay, has received attention (Gotti 2001, 2003, forthcoming; Moessner 2006; see also Atkinson 1992, 1999; Valle 1999; Gross, Harmon and Reddy 2002). A larger survey on EMEMT materials compares the whole repertoire of genres and their features in the latter half of the seventeenth century to one another, with stance-marking features as the point of departure. Interestingly, the book review, a new genre in the Philosophical Transactions, contains the most innovative linguistic features of stance marking (Gray, Biber and Hiltunen forthcoming). 5.3.

Rhetoric of science

The starting point in research on the rhetoric of science is the notion of science as a rhetorical enterprise, and of knowledge as something constructed by rhetorical activity. The approach stems from the intersection of interests in the sociology, his-

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tory and philosophy of science, and relies on a long tradition of classical rhetorical analysis, going back to the ideas of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (see Kuhn [1962] 1996). The focus is on suasion and argumentation – on how scientists persuade, dissuade and argue in the making of knowledge (Harris 1997: xii). Scientific texts are not seen as a transparent means of conveying “pure facts”, but rather as a site exhibiting persuasive structures by which scientific knowledge is constructed. Rhetorically, the creation of knowledge is seen as “a task beginning with self-persuasion and ending with the persuasion of others” (Gross 1990: 3). In research applying rhetorical analysis to historical scientific writings, attention has been paid to the style and arrangement of science, but also the features commonly construed as the discovery of scientific facts and theories (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Atkinson 1999; Gross, Harmon and Reddy 2002). From the rhetorical point of view, these discoveries are properly described by the term “invention”, which captures the historically uncertain character of all scientific claims (Gross 1990: 6–7). Thus, several areas of enquiry, in addition to style and arrangement, can be discerned in rhetorical analysis of science, including logos, ethos and pathos. Analysis of logos examines, for example, the objects of enquiry in science, definitions of concepts and the nature of scientific proof, including the uses of analogy and logic in scholarly argument. Research on ethos focuses on the persuasive effects of scientific authority and credibility, while examination of pathos is concerned with the emotional appeal in the social interactions of which science is the product. Examples of topics examined in this paradigm include the use of analogy as scientific proof in seventeenth-century mathematics, taxonomic language in Darwin’s Origin of Species and revolutionary model building by Copernicus. Controversies can be discerned as an area of special interest in rhetorical analysis of science. An early example is provided by Bazerman (1988), who studied the emergence of literary and social forms in experimental reports in the Philosophical Transactions in the period 1665–1800. The analysis shows that the meaning of the notion “experiment” changed over time, as the reported events identified as experiments changed during the period examined and experiments gained an argumentative function. According to the study, the definition of experiment moved from any made or done thing to an intentional investigation, to a test of a theory and finally to a proof of, or evidence for, a claim (Bazerman 1988: 65–66). At the same time, experiments acquired debate-solving argumentative functions in controversies, becoming subordinated to the conclusions the authors had reached. More recently, controversies have been discussed in the frame of their generic background and discourse types (Bax 2009). In the early modern period, religious and other controversies were debated in the new medium of pamphlets (see Fritz in this volume). One of the medical conflicts in this period dealt with tobacco, a product imported into Europe from the New World. Interpersonal argumentation strategies and intertextual links between texts in dialogue with each other show how the con-

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troversy developed, in what order and how the texts responded to previous arguments (Ratia 2005, 2006). The linguistic means to express controversiality and conflict in academic medical discourse in French and English 1810–1995 were studied by Salager Meyer and Zambrano (2001), recording and comparing the direct and indirect rhetorical strategies in 180 papers in a cross-linguistic analysis. The results showed no differences between strategies adopted in the two languages between 1810 and 1929, but between 1930 and 1995 direct academic conflict was more frequent in medical French than in medical English. Medical conflicts were personal, polemical and provocative in the nineteenth century in both languages. French conflicts remained so in the twentieth century, whereas academic medical dispute in English became more polite, often shifting the responsibility to some inanimate entity. Explanations for the differences were sought in the intellectual climates and the scientific discursive communities. In a later article, Salager Meyer (2005) developed the same theme of medical conflicts but broadened the comparison to also include Spanish. The results confirmed the previous study, but showed that Spanish criticism started adopting the more polite tone of Anglo-American scientific writing in the twentieth century. As an explanation, medical criticism was interpreted to reflect the “evolution of increasingly competitive, collegial and pragmatic end-ofthe-twentieth-century scientific research” (2005: 144). Finally, evaluation has been studied in a rhetorical frame in Swedish medical writing over three centuries, making use of a socio-semantic analytical grid including the medical case in focus, the scientist’s own work and the work of other scientists (Gunnarsson 2001). The study discussed evaluation along the axis of directness vs. indirectness, i.e. whether it was expressed through the author’s own voice or indirectly through facts and the voices of others. The choice between these alternative ways of expressing evaluation was noticed as depending on the positions of scientists and their scientific community, the stage of medical community and the role of medical scientists in society. The diachronic trend in expressing evaluation was towards more moderate evaluation, more embedded in hedgings of various kinds.

6.

Conclusion

The overview we have provided in this chapter shows that historical pragmatics of scientific writing is a dynamic and rapidly growing area of research with scope for more investigation and new discoveries. Pragmatic approaches are gaining ground in analyses of the history of scientific writing and new avenues are being opened up; but there is scope for a great deal more, both in synchronic studies examining scientific texts in particular past periods and in diachronic research investigating long lines of development. Even in English scientific writing, which has been a

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focus area in research to date, our knowledge of pragmatic conventions and meaning-making practices is far from complete in any historical period, and in some periods pragmatically-oriented research is lacking completely. For other languages, a considerable body of knowledge has accumulated since the early 1990s in research on Swedish scientific writing, with the development of a model combining pragmatic, sociolinguistic and discourse approaches. The formation of writing conventions in French and Spanish scientific writing has also been illuminated, with a spotlight on controversies, for instance. Other languages have received less attention so far. Of the three main approaches discussed above (discourse, genre and rhetoric), stylistic co-occurrence features have received most attention, and corpus-linguistic methods prevail. These studies have given us a great deal of new knowledge about the characteristics of scientific writing as compared with other registers of writing. But even within genre and discourse studies, the scope can widen with new points of departure. On the one hand, interdisciplinary approaches with cross-fertilisation of language analysis and cultural history or the history of science provide fresh angles, where past practices of language use gain a firm sociohistorical anchoring. On the other hand, a wider scope of pragmatic theories as the point of departure for analysis can yield new insights into the research area. First steps in these directions have already been taken, but on the whole such studies are still rare and a great deal of developing is needed here. For example, pragmatic applications of corpus-linguistic methodology present a challenge for future research, but with new corpora already compiled or underway we can expect more activity and new insights in this area. Thus, we would like to conclude that research on the pragmatics of historical scientific writing in all languages is a desideratum in order to gain insight into the development of a key area of human communication, a prestige register, responsible for the construction of knowledge on which our understanding of the world around us so profoundly rests.

Notes 1 The criterion posed by Crombie, a historian of science, catches the distinction and serves as a useful point of departure: one of the prerequisites for science is that it is constantly changing; if it ceases to change, it ceases to be science (Crombie 1994, 1995). 2 For research in Catalan, see the homepage of Sciència.cat research team at http://www.sciencia.cat. 3 See also the homepage of the project at http://hunter.filosofia.uma.es/manuscripts.

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19.

News discourse Claudia Claridge

1.

Introduction: News discourse and (historical) pragmatics

A major contribution to linguistic research on German historical news discourse, Fritz and Straßner (1996: 1), characterises the linguistic relevance of this discourse as concerning a history of text types or genres, the history of linguistic features and constructions (historical syntax and lexicology) and the process of supraregionalisation and standardisation. There is no explicit mention of pragmatics. This is similar in a recent large-scale work on English historical news discourse, namely Studer (2008), which describes itself as an exercise in stylistics. Nevertheless, both works contain aspects that can be called pragmatic; for example, communicative maxims (Fritz and Straßner) and situational aspects of news reporting (Studer). More clearly, however, both works are instances of what Brinton (2001: 139–140) classifies as “historical discourse analysis”, dealing with synchronic states of affairs (discourse forms, functions, structures), and “diachronic(ally oriented) discourse analysis”, concerned with discoursal change. She links these two approaches explicitly to historical pragmatics (2001: 153, fn. 2). It is indeed difficult to draw a clear and sharp line between (aspects investigated by) pragmatics and discourse analysis, apart from stating that the former may be more interaction- or process-oriented and the latter more product-oriented (Brinton 2001; Jucker forthcoming). It could be argued that the material we deal with in historical studies is tilted per se towards the product side, which explains why most studies of historical news discourse are more discourse analytic in nature than pragmatic in a narrow sense. However, if we look at news discourse from the point of view of the recipient, i.e. the effect of features on the reader (whether intentional or not), we are taking a more interactive perspective. In this chapter, discourse analysis will be seen as a part of pragmatics in its wider, European understanding, i.e. language use in particular social and cultural settings (sociopragmatics). This goes hand in hand with a pronounced sociohistorical orientation in this contribution. News discourse as a new form of public communication evolved under very specific circumstances within European culture, linked to technological, infrastructural, political and socio-demographic developments. In order to understand the (changing) shape of the discourse in reaction to these factors, it is therefore necessary to know something about the relevant extralinguistic conditions, which will be the focus of section 3 below. Some conditions have a fairly direct impact on the (text)linguistic shape of the news (e.g. the correspondent system), while the influence of others might be more indirect (e.g. cen-

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sorship). The evolving news discourse constitutes a domain of language characterised by distinctive communicative functions, typical linguistic practices and features, conventionalised forms and text types, and produced increasingly by a specific (social, professional) group. Functions are partly linked to publication types, such as pamphlets or newspapers, in the sense that such types tend to be used for one prototypical function rather than another. Their characteristics and development will be treated in section 4. Genres and text types, to be treated in section 5, are determined partly by function and partly by extra-linguistic conditions. Some features that are either typical of the (modern) discourse type (e.g. headlines) and/or relevant for the (sender/)recipient perspective (e.g. source attribution as a marker of reliability) will be looked at in section 6. But, before proceeding to these aspects, it is necessary, first of all, to define what is understood here by news discourse.

2.

Defining news discourse and its sphere

Two aspects need to be treated in this section, namely the definition of “news” and the organisational/institutional characteristics of this kind of discourse (i.e. partly its register features). So what exactly counts as “news”, and from what time onwards is it a relevant term? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, news in the sense of “tidings; the report or account of recent events or occurrences, brought or coming to one as new information; new occurrences as a subject of report or talk” (meaning 2a), first attested in 1423, was in common use only after 1500. German Nachricht (singular), signifying the making known of an event or fact, seems to be of seventeenthcentury origin (Grimm and Grimm 2004) and does not actually refer to published news, while the more relevant Zeitung (etymologically equivalent to tidings) in the collocation neue Zeitungen, defined as actuelle nachricht ‘current news’, apparently goes back to the fifteenth century (Grimm and Grimm 2004). Both news and Zeitung simply stress the novelty of the thing reported, but say nothing of the subject matter. With regard to the latter, news is probably a prototype category. News in the media is what is judged to be of general public interest by producers. If one thinks of modern TV news and of what makes it onto the front pages of national dailies, it includes political and economic matters, accidents, crime, sport and the lives/actions of well-known people – with this sequence marking the potential order of prototypicality. The picture in the past is similar, as Studer’s (2008: 212) topical classification of news reports in English newspapers from 1701, 1741 and 1791 shows (number of reports in brackets): war (156), politics (51), social life (51), commerce and trade (38), entertainment and features (26), accidents and disasters (24), crimes (24) and announcements (18). A German investigation for the seventeenth century (1609, 1667) yields similar results: most common is politics,

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followed by military matters, court affairs and miscellaneous (Gieseler and Schröder 1996: 46). If one regards war/military matters as essentially a part of politics, this field clearly dominated the news. What these lists also indicate is one of the basic journalistic dichotomies, that of information (e.g. politics, commerce/ trade) vs entertainment (e.g. social life), which also shows up in the distinction of hard vs soft news. This is apparently (almost) as present in the past as it is today. Another commonly used distinction is that between information and persuasion (opinion press), which, as we will see, is also found in early press publications. In the following pages “news discourse” is understood to comprise reportage and discussion of states and events of reasonable novelty,1 which belong to areas of general public interest (like those listed above). Furthermore, the contents are often of only short-lived or temporarily restricted importance. The word “general” used above is meant to exclude very specialised publications, such as the newsletter reports by the Royal Society, which are accepted as news discourse by Brownlees (2006b) and Jucker (2009), for example. Such publications are addressed to a restricted audience and belong to the register of science.2 Publications like The Tatler3 and The Spectator are also excluded as they were not necessarily geared towards novelty and they specialised in cultural and literary discourse; they were journals rather than newspapers (cf. Raymond 1996: 15). The second, institutional aspect can be treated by looking at the characteristics of mass communication, which is the relevant category for news discourse today. Following Burger (2005: 1, based on Kunczik and Zipfel 2001), these include (i) being public(ly available), (ii) offered periodically or regularly, (iii) having a large, diverse and anonymous audience, (iv) representing an asymmetric communication process (no direct feedback) and (v) being produced by organisations with the help of technology and media. Taking (i), (iii) and (v) together, this means that the introduction of printing is important for the discourse type, which puts its genesis in the fifteenth century at the earliest (e.g. Germany 1440, England 1476). Only (largish) print-runs ensured true publicity and the development of the kind of style that comes with not knowing one’s audience. Of course, news was also spread in nonprinted and even highly individualised forms. Nevalainen (2002), for example, investigates private, handwritten newsletters in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which contained both first-hand and second-hand reporting of events that were thought to be of interest for the individual recipients. Professionally produced, handwritten newsletters, so-called Avise, were also provided by subscription in up to 20 copies on the Continent in the sixteenth century (Weber 2006: 390–392). However, neither of these had the same kind of public impact that printed news could have and in fact had. The interest here lies in news discourse as represented in the press / in journalism, as it is printing that in the end makes the new forms of news publications that will be treated below possible. The second characteristic mentioned above, periodicity, did not come immediately with print, but developed within the course of the seventeenth century. The first occurrence of

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the word newspaper, indicating the typical printed periodical, is dated to the year 1670 by the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, although periodicity can also be found prior to that date. To sum up, the focus of this chapter will lie on truly public, i.e. printed, news publications dealing with matters of general interest from around 1500 onwards. The examples to be used will be drawn from Britain and Germany. Given the breadth of material and length of time, the treatment here will necessarily be selective and pay somewhat more attention to the early history of news discourse.

3.

Extra-linguistic conditions

Extra-linguistic conditions can and did have an influence on the visual appearance of and the language use in news publications. One important extra-linguistic condition for news discourse has already been mentioned above, namely the fact of printing itself, the further development and refinement of which is of course relevant. Other aspects to be taken into consideration are the development of an infrastructure for news exchange, the characteristics and extent of readership, conditions of censorship or journalistic freedom and the potential presence of various media competing in the news business. 3.1.

Infrastructure: Communication channels

Behringer (2006: 353) states that “the crucial factor underlying the emergence of the new medium [newspapers], was not so much the demand for news but rather the existence of conditions for the production of news”, by which he means the “undisturbed access to the channels of communication, as far as both news-gathering and newspaper distribution were concerned”. These channels were initially those provided by the postal system in continental Europe and Britain (Behringer 2006: 342, 353). In early news publications, the postal stations and routes show up in the place and date line of reports, indicating the source of the news, and often in the sequence of reports in a newspaper. The importance of some postal hubs for news can also be shown on linguistic grounds, e.g. both early Strassburg and Wolfenbüttel papers date Tuesday news to Aftermontag, a word only used in the Augsburg area (Behringer 2006: 354). Delivery times of letters (and thus also of news) decreased with time, but nevertheless, transport times could vary and influence the degree of topicality/recency considerably; in 1694 it was still possible for two to four weeks to elapse between an event and its reporting (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 36). However, the gradually rising number and frequency of postal couriers also influenced the frequency of newspaper publication, e.g. the move to dailies, which was well under way in Germany by 1700 (Behringer 2006: 361). News in the early days was thus never really new, in the modern sense; a criterion for recognising a

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new, noteworthy event or situation was apparently its having occurred since the last newspaper issue (Schröder 1996: 288). This led largely to the reporting of isolated individual events, neglecting both their interconnections and also topics with large-scale significance. In this situation, readers were left with establishing possible connections themselves (Schröder 1996: 288–289). Many later technological changes brought improvement of a more quantitative kind. Media increasing the speed of news transmissions were the following: optical and electric telegraphy (about 1800 and after 1844, respectively), railway networks after the 1830s and 1840s, transatlantic cables after 1866, telephones after 1878 and in the twentieth century the fax and the Internet (Griffiths 1992: 35; Behringer 2006: 369). The establishment of press agencies, like Reuters in 1851, further aided the supply of news to publishers; it may also have led to greater linguistic uniformity and to more conformity with regard to contents and perspectives. 3.2.

Restraining the press

The degree of liberty and restraint of the press varied greatly from place to place and with time. The fact that the first German newspaper appeared in Strassburg (1605) and not in Augsburg, which would have been a more likely place both as a news hub and a political hub, was due to liberal policies in Strassburg, where the newspaper concept was less mistrusted than in Augsburg (Behringer 2006: 353–354). Newspapers needed permission, i.e. a licence to appear, which was simply not granted by every state or city. Even if newspaper printing was tolerated, there would often be a degree of control, determining what could be published and in what way. German states in the seventeenth century, for example, forbade the reporting of domestic affairs (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 41). The early situation in Britain was similar, as in 1586 a Star Chamber decree had made it illegal to publish domestic news (Raymond 1996: 7). Star Chamber decrees of 1632 and 1637, for example, tightened control, but during the Civil War the system broke down completely, leading to an interim of press freedom. From 1641 onwards, domestic news was regularly provided by the press. In 1649, Parliament renewed its control of the press for the time of the Commonwealth, and in this respect there was no change after the Restoration of the monarchy, with 1662, 1685 and 1693 marking years of press-control legislation. Typically, legal acts and their degree of enforcement had a dampening effect on the number of news publications. In 1695, the Licensing Act lapsed, never to be renewed. The almost immediate effect of this lapse was the launch of three new newspapers, the Flying Post, the Post Boy and the Post Man. Licensing publications (which only worked with periodical publications, anyway) was not the only way of restraining the press, however. Another was putting restrictions on publishable contents, such as the suppression of parliamentary reporting between 1738 and 1768 (Studer 2008: 20). A further one was threatening or actually taking legal action against writers,

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editors and printers, which could have the effect of some news not being printed at all or of matters being presented in a more moderate manner (Black 1987: 156–60). According to Black (1987: 165), some newspapers, e.g. Mist’s publications, resorted to “an allusive style and an allegorical approach, rich in innuendo and code words” to avoid legal persecution, a point that might merit linguistic investigation. Furthermore, writers might be publicly punished for illegal publishing or for libel; in some cases, however, this just gave them more and greater publicity as this included a public speech by the offender, which might even be published afterwards (Bach 1997: 59–60). A more circumspect way of controlling the press was the financial approach via the stamp tax, introduced for newspapers in 1712. It was a direct tax on paper, which had the effect of making newspapers more expensive and as a consequence diminishing overall circulation figures as well the number of readers in lower social classes. Newspapers reacted by reducing their overall size, to use less paper, and by using smaller print and more columns, to squeeze more text into the same space. The column layout in particular, so typical of modern newspapers, seems to have been greatly influenced by the stamp tax. It was only in 1855 that stamp duty on news publications was finally abolished (Studer 2008: 17). This was followed by a decrease in newspaper prices and a concomitant steep rise in circulation figures. 3.3.

Readership

In general, not much is known about newspaper readers in the past (Black 1987: 302). There is, for example, the question as to the amount of influence of the press on readers and on public opinion. Many contemporaries thought it was considerable, and the attempts at censorship and other restrictions signal the same belief or fear. But, according to Black (1987: 138–139), “historians are uncertain, with reason, as to the influence of the press in the period”. With respect to readers, an aspect that becomes more and more important the further back one goes in news history is literacy, i.e. the question of how many people could actually read news publications themselves. Literacy was linked to social rank to a certain extent (Bach 1997: 49). In Britain, literacy may have increased from slightly under 40 per cent around 1700, to about 50 per cent in 1750, 55 per cent in 1800 and 65 per cent around 1850 according to Cressy (1980). Breaking up these figures for social groups, which Cressy also does for the period around 1700, shows a more varied picture: 100 per cent literacy for the learned professions, 98 per cent for the gentry, 82 per cent for apprentices, 72 per cent for tradesmen and craftsmen, 69 per cent for servants, but only 22 per cent for labourers and 24 per cent for women overall. Furthermore, literacy was higher in larger towns, especially in London, than in rural areas. The ability to read a news publication was thus greater / more likely the higher the social standing. Black (1987: 297) therefore considers eighteenth-century newspapers to be a part of polite cul-

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ture, not so much of popular culture, and thus also expects no great increase in popular readership numbers during the century. In the wake of the introduction of obligatory schooling in 1870 (in Britain), literacy could and did rise substantially, so that by 1900 one may assume almost everybody was a potential, if not actual, newspaper reader. Over time, news publications thus had to reckon with an increasing and an increasingly diversified readership. Besides the reader, another recipient type was the (illiterate) listener (Bach 1997: 11, chapter 3). The reading out loud of pamphlets, newspapers and other printed matter remained common in Europe into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Schwitalla 1999a: 27–28). Another possible approach to estimating readership type and numbers is via the cost of press publications. German sixteen-sheet pamphlets of the early sixteenth century cost about the equivalent of a third of the daily wages of a journeyman; for the price of the pamphlet he could equally have acquired a chicken or two pounds of beef (Schwitalla 1999a: 31). Pamphlets and also newspapers were thus a fairly expensive product, as Black (1987: 106–107) also states for the English situation in the eighteenth century: newspaper prices outgrew the rate of inflation and were beyond the means of most workers, with stamp duties contributing substantially to this state of affairs. Stamp duties and thus newspaper prices reached their peak in the first half of the nineteenth century; then prices fell and stabilised again. There is evidence, nevertheless, that even in the eighteenth century the working population could sometimes afford more than the bare necessities, including newspapers (Clay 1984: 31; Porter 1990: 221). Towards 1900, with rising wages and declining newspaper prices, this was certainly the case. The assumed readership is also important for classifications of newspapers, such as tabloid vs broadsheet, populars vs qualities, or down-market vs mid-market vs up-market (cf. Jucker 1992 for the sociolinguistic implications). Schneider (2002) attempted to extend such distinctions into the past, using a two-fold classification for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (popular vs quality newspapers) and a three-fold one for the twentieth century (popular: down-market, midmarket; quality: up-market). Whereas quality papers are geared towards a readership within the middle and upper classes, popular down-market papers cater for the working class and popular mid-market ones for the lower middle class (and parts of the working class) (Schneider 2002: 46). Both types make assumptions about the wishes of their readership and thus about greater or less saleability. Popular papers in Schneider’s definition are characterised by a focus on soft news and human-interest stories, reader-friendly layout and pictures, ads and good readability/comprehensibility (e.g. headlines, short words and sentences, simple structures and emotionality) (2002: 14). She finds that, historically, popular papers indeed led the developments in the direction of the above-mentioned characteristics: decreasing sentence length, decreasing paragraph size, greater use of short, simple words, emotionally loaded words, personalisation strategies and the use of headlines for structuring information.

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Interactions between news media

A last point to be mentioned under extra-linguistic conditions concerns the question of how news media segment the market, i.e. how many forms of media there are and in how far their aims compete and/or overlap. Again, this is interesting as it may have (text-)linguistic consequences. In the sixteenth century, we find only various pamphlet publications. When these are joined by newspapers and later by various journals, the question arises of how the division of labour worked between them. While journals retreated from prototypical news discourse, concentrating on cultural and/or specialised topics, pamphlets and newspapers remained competitors for a while. While both could and would treat the same topics or topic areas, a certain specialisation might nevertheless have been taking place. According to Black (1987: 249), religious controversy, for example, tended to be written about and be carried on by pamphlets rather than by newspapers. Weber (2006: 394–395) claims that newspapers in the seventeenth century specialised in dry and serious reporting, while pamphlets also covered the spectacular and the miraculous, which points to a differentiation along the axis of information vs entertainment. Another important difference may have been that between information and persuasion, at least in the eyes of seventeenth-century contemporaries. According to Sommerville, newspapers at first were not taken seriously as political instruments, whereas pamphlets were: “[p]olitics was a matter of argument, and it was understood to take at least a pamphlet to develop an argument” (1996: 122). It is certainly true that if a pamphlet and a newspaper dealt with the same event, the former could do it at greater length and in more detail. This does not mean, however, that pamphlets only dealt in persuasion and early newspapers did not; the latter simply did so less overtly. Newspapers and pamphlets might also interact with each other, as e.g. there are pamphlets reacting to views voiced in the newspapers The Craftsman or the Flying Post (cf. the Lampeter Corpus pamphlets PolB1730, Observations on the writings of the Craftsman and RelB1718, The Flying Post posted). While neither of these two media had the edge over the others in terms of access to news, the meaning of “new(s)” changed for newspapers with the advent of radio and, subsequently, TV and Internet. With these developments, classical print newspaper content is often no longer really brand-new, i.e. it is not necessarily news in the strict sense any more (Ungerer 2000a). According to Ungerer (2000a: 185–191), newspapers thus increasingly have to focus on so far unexplored aspects of the story (“extracted topics”) and on splitting the treatment across several contributions from different angles and with different formats, such as news story, interview, features, commentary, cartoon, etc. (“package approach”) in order to make the coverage more interesting. A comparable event would thus be treated very differently in an early and a late twentieth-century paper.

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595

Publication types and their history

News discourse can be transmitted in various formats or publication types. “Publication type” is defined, above all, by extra-linguistic criteria, such as medium, physical appearance and layout, purpose, periodicity, etc. A daily TV news show thus is a different format/publication type from a weekly paper. The focus here will be on printed formats, excluding both handwritten (cf. section 2 above) and audiovisual news. There are various types that are of interest in the sphere, some of which have already been mentioned above: these are – in the order of their appearance on the (English or European) scene – pamphlet, Messrelation, coranto, newsbook and newspaper. The following sections will explain their respective characteristics and some relevant aspects of their history. 4.1.

Pamphlets

Perhaps the most important defining criterion for pamphlets is a very specific combination of content and purpose characteristics. Pamphlets are thought to deal with current, topical contents, which are both of great public interest and discussed controversially, even polemically (Bach 1997: 15, 27; Schwitalla 1999a: 1). Thus, pamphlets are supposed to reflect in a rather immediate way the feelings and opinions of contemporaries (Spencer 1959, quoted in Bach 1997: 15). Pamphlets not only want to report controversial contents, but play a part in persuading the reader that one or the other point of view is the right one (Bach 1997: 27). Schwitalla (1999a: 1) points out that beyond influencing attitudes the aim was also to incite political and social action; in fact, he thinks that the most important criterion for pamphlets is whether their purpose was to change or uphold the existing sociopolitical situation. Pamphlets thus can be seen as a means of propaganda and of political agitation with the express purpose of influencing a mass audience (Köhler 1981: x, quoted in Bach 1997: 26; also Black 1987: 145). European governments, especially in the seventeenth century, tried to exploit this situation by launching pamphlets of their own to propagate their policies (Schwitalla 1999a: 73). This means that pamphlets represent news discourse with a clear twist and that news may even recede into the background against foregrounded discussion. However, it also needs pointing out that pamphlets are a prototype category and come in many different shades; thus, not all pamphlets are of the polemical, propagandistic type and not all of them deal with highly topical material. Regarding physical appearance, the following points have been identified as typical of pamphlets in the literature: a pamphlet consists of one or more pages, with the upper limit often set at 50 or 64 pages (e.g. Grabes 1990: viii; Bach 1997: 15). A pamphlet is a separate publication, not part of a larger work and it is generally unbound (Bach 1997: 27; Schwitalla 1999a: 1). Pamphlets are characterised

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by a very varied typography and layout and can, and often do, have accompanying illustrations (Bach 1997: 27). Another important defining characteristic is that, in contrast to newspapers, pamphlets are not serial/periodical, but one-off publications, usually reacting to a specific event, situation or concern (cf. also Bach 1997: 15). This also means that they do not emanate from a constant source and could therefore somewhat more easily circumvent repressive, censoring measures. Furthermore, many pamphlets appeared anonymously for that very reason; in some instances name and place of the printer are not provided either – in the first half of the sixteenth century, for example, as many as three-quarters of German printers preferred to remain unknown (Schwitalla 1999a: 22–23, 25). An author of a pamphlet could be anybody who was literate; for Germany it has been shown that the majority of authors were (university-)educated people, often churchmen and as time went on increasingly lawyers (Schwitalla 1999a: 15–21). The audience for pamphlets could in principle be as unspecified as that for newspapers, although a narrower focus was also possible. Thus pamphlets could be addressed to specific persons (e.g. A letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, one of his Majesties Privy Council, upon the reading of a book, called The present interest of England stated. LC PolA1672) or to specific groups (e.g. The equity of Parliaments, and publick faith, vindicated; […] address’d to the annuitants… LC EcB1720; Reasons most humbly offered to the honble House of Commons, why the Bill sent down to them from the […] House of Lords […] shou’d not pass into a law … LC PolA1720). What made pamphlets in some cases appear less one-off than stated above was the fact that there could be chains of pamphlets reacting to each other, thus creating a printed dialogue (such as LC SciB1735). Such pamphlet debates, controversies or even wars took place repeatedly, could involve many different or just a few authors and last anything from a few days to months (Schwitalla 1999a: 23). Often this dialogue is visible in the title formulation, for which Bach (1997: 149) quotes a good example indicating four “moves” in such a pamphlet dialogue: An Apology against a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus. The work of Fritz, Dascal and their collaborators on historical controversies is notable in this respect (cf. the project “Controversies in the République des Lettres 1600–1800” referred to in Fritz’s publications). Due to some of the characteristics mentioned (e.g. persuasiveness, clear addressees, controversies), pamphlets tend to be characterised by a style that is much more personalised and interactive in nature than news discourse in other print media. Schwitalla (1999b) and Fritz (2002) both highlight the dialogic nature of German and English pamphlets that are part of controversies constituted by an often quick succession of publications.4 The textual structures in such pamphlets are determined by argument and counter-argument, realised by forms such as question–answer, assertion–objection/refutation, accusation–counter-accusation, either including citations from an opponent’s work or sometimes presented as (invented)

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direct speech. The dialogic presentation makes for more vivid and interesting reading and has the further advantage of providing all necessary knowledge to the reader (who might not have read all relevant pamphlets in a controversy). Such pamphlets have a clear connection to orality, in so far as they often follow the oral rules of disputation and as the presented dialogue sometimes does approach spoken language styles. However, a more literate, distancing effect might be achieved by addressing the opponent only indirectly, through use of third-person forms. Fritz (2005) focuses on the use of first-person singular statements in such pamphlets as a marker of subjectivity. Such statements can have various functions, such as justifying one’s entry into a controversy, hedging through more personalised and thus less general statements, emphatically marking contrastive viewpoints (he says … but I say), self-praise and self-advertising, clearing up misunderstandings and claiming incomprehension of an opponent’s statement. Interactive features are also present in pamphlets that are not strictly speaking part of a larger controversy (Claridge 2000). The authorial persona as well as individual addressees and the readers in general are referred to and thus highlighted in the text, visible in pronominal usage (I, we, you), conventionally polite forms of address (e.g. your Honours, Great Sir, the impartial reader) and modesty strategies on the part of the authors (e.g. my humble opinion, give me leave to trouble the world with a few of my reasons). The last two points need not be taken at face value, as Fritz (2005) has remarked, as they are simply part of the style of prefatory text types (dedication, “to the reader”). Such linguistic features are not, or rarely, found in (early) newspapers; the authorial I, for instance, is very rare and starts to come in only from the end of the eighteenth century (Claridge 2000; Schneider 2002). Positive or negative descriptions, in particular for pamphleteers with the same or different opinions (e.g. this silly little man), are not uncommon. Often extremely impolite statements, insults and attacks are directed at opponents (e.g. the notions of Mr. Hobbs are very absurd; if he has any such Thing as Brains, they are really crackt). Levorato (2009) has shown that impoliteness is in fact also a common feature in the “pamphlet war” preceding the union of Britain and Ireland in 1801, with anti-union tracts being especially prone to it. Following the models of Culpeper and Bousfield she identified negative impoliteness strategies, such as scorn/ridicule, threaten/frighten, associate other with a negative aspect; and positive impoliteness strategies like snub, derogatory denominations, seek disagreement, expression of impolite beliefs, dissociation from the other. Sarcasm is shown to be a common realisation of off-record impoliteness. Questions functioning as face-threatening challenges are treated prominently by Levorato. Not all questions have (im)politeness implications, however; some are simply interactive devices for increasing reader involvement and giving more force to argumentation and persuasion, depending partly on who the questions are explicitly addressed to (the reader or an opponent) (Claridge 2005). Questions found are often of the rhetorical or conducive type, thus steering the reader towards an intended conclusion. In the

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Lampeter Corpus questions are most frequently employed in political and religious pamphlets, both of which had a high news value at their time. The history of pamphlets (and their family of broadsheets, etc.) starts almost immediately with the introduction of print. The sixteenth century was essentially their century, with no public rivals, but they were relevant through to the eighteenth century, though to a lesser extent in Germany than in England (Black 1987: 145; Schwitalla 1999a). Pamphlets discussing government policies were published before each parliamentary session in Britain, thus highlighting their political role (Black 1987: 144). The closer we get to the present from then onwards, however, the less important pamphlets become as a mass medium for news discourse. Regarding the pamphlet–newspaper relationship, towards the end of the sixteenth century, more and more pamphlets with a news character were published, mostly about non-political topics (e.g. trials, executions, witchcraft) (Raymond 1996: 6), and such news pamphlets would remain relevant for some time (e.g. A true and exact relation of the late prodigious earthquake and eruption of Mount Ætna […] as it came in a letter written to his Majestie from Naples by […] the Earle of Winchilsea … LC MscA1669). This shows both that the thirst for news was catered for before the introduction of newspapers and that, once both types existed, they could carry the same type of information and probably be read by some of the same people (Black 1987: 146). Looking at late seventeenth-century news broadsides and pamphlets, Cecconi (2009) identifies some interesting differences from contemporary newspapers: while the latter are more sober in reporting and (visual) presentation styles, the former exhibit a mixture of factual reportage and sermonising editorial, make use of eye-catching visual and lexical choices and prefigure later newspaper elements like major topic headlines and “proto-leads” (an introductory section in line with the top-down principle). 4.2.

Messrelation, coranto and newsbook

These three types will be treated together here, as they are all precursors of the modern newspaper proper. All of them are thus transitional types that only existed for a while and then disappeared as newspapers were developing and expanding. So-called Messrelationen, first published in 1583, were biannual news collections that were produced especially for the participants in the big trade fairs taking place each spring and autumn. Collecting, summarising and ordering chronologically everything that had happened since the last volume, they represent a mixture between a news publication and history or chronicle writing. Their authors apparently saw themselves as doing the latter (Fritz 2001: 70–71; Weber 2006: 388–389). A similar instance, although not linked to trade fairs, is the Mercurius Gallobelgicus, which was published in Cologne from 1594 to 1635. It had a fairly wide circulation, including Britain. Like the Messrelationen it appeared every half year and presented the accumulated news in large volumes (Raymond 1996: 6).

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With the advent of more regular periodicals (Raymond 1996: 7) such publications lost their relevance and were eventually discontinued. Corantos were periodical news publications, whose intervals were as a rule not fully regular (usually roughly weekly) but depended on the availability of enough news to fill an issue (Raymond 1996: 8). This type appeared first on the Continent, probably in 1620 (Raymond 1996: 7). While the first “English” corantos were translated from Dutch or German publications, London printers and publishers set up the infrastructure to produce genuinely English corantos in 1622, after periodical news publishing had been licensed in 1621 (Bach 1997: 49; Brownlees 2006b: 8–9). Corantos contained foreign news only, which were presented as a continuous narrative. They were usually 24 pages long, had full title pages (like pamphlets or books), but from early on contained a serial number (like newspapers) (Raymond 1996: 8). According to Raymond, the coranto type did not directly and continuously develop into the newsbook or the newspaper; these have to be seen as at least partly new developments. Newsbooks were introduced in 1641. What distinguishes them from proper newspapers is their size (quarto, like a pamphlet), the title pages of early newsbooks, the occasional addressing of a specific audience and their partly controversial and aggressive style of writing (the last two features more typical of pamphlets) (Raymond 1996: 9, 13, 80). Aspects that are suggestive of newspapers are their exact periodicity (numbering from 1642 onwards), their short and constant title, the use of section headings and the fact that some newsbooks (e.g. Mercurius Politicus) printed news in a, at least superficially, non-controversial manner (Raymond 1996: 9, 14). Newsbooks were a thriving and progressive part of the publishing scene during the 1640s and 1650s, but became fewer and more conservative in the 1660s (Raymond 1996: 14), until they finally ceased to exist. 4.3.

Newspapers

Weber gives the following definition of newspaper, based on the criteria of publication, periodicity, topicality and universality: … a printed medium appearing at regular short intervals of at least once a week, produced in relatively large print runs, sold to the public at a moderate price and providing information to a sizeable number of readers about important current events and developments around the world. (Weber 2006: 387)

Similar definitions are found elsewhere, e.g. Black (1987: xiv, quoting Frank 1961), who points out that too strict definitions may be problematic for the fluid nature of the early press. In fact, these typical newspaper features only evolved gradually, over a period of around 150 years (Weber 2006: 387). The first ever printed newspaper appeared in 1605 in Strassburg, which was followed in Germany (Wolfenbüttel) by the Aviso and the Relation in 1609, in

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Switzerland in 1610 (Basle), in the Netherlands in 1618, Austria (Vienna) in 1622, France (Paris) in 1631 and England (London) in (1620)5 (Fritz 2001: 69; Weber 2006: 391, 396). During the seventeenth century, Germany had the most diverse newspaper landscape in Europe with roughly 200 newspapers being founded in about 80 locations, although of course not all of those survived. While there were circa 25 German newspapers in the mid-seventeenth century, the end of the century saw about 60 papers in circulation. From the 1630s onwards, the publication intervals became shorter until the first daily newspaper (i.e. six times a week) was published in Leipzig in 1650 (Weber 2006: 396, 398). In England, an overview of the development yields the following picture. From the first real newspaper, the Oxford Gazette (later: London Gazette) in 1665, up to 1800 a total of 88 newspapers are attested, between 1800 and 1830 it is 126 newspapers, by 1855 there are already 415 publications and 492 by 1861 (Studer 2008: 18, based on Jones 1996: 23). How many of them existed at the same time is another question, however, as many papers did not survive very long (Black 1987: 15). Black (1987: 14) quotes the following estimates for London (among others): 1746 – six weeklies and essay sheets as well as six tri-weeklies and dailies; 1790 – thirteen morning, one evening, seven tri-weekly and two bi-weekly papers. An early spate of new papers occurred after the end of licensing in 1695, e.g. London Post, The Post Man and The Flying Post. The earliest papers were weekly, biweekly or thrice-weekly; the English first daily newspaper was the Daily Courant from 1703 onwards (Raymond 1996: 15). The first evening paper followed already in 1706 with the Evening Post, while the oldest Sunday papers, the Observer and Bell’s Weekly Messenger, appeared only in 1791 and 1796, respectively (Fries and Schneider 2000: 4–6). London was the most important location for the English press, but provincial newspapers existed as well. The first provincial paper was probably the Norwich Post in 1701 (Black 1987: 13), which was followed by many others; by 1723 there were 24 provincial papers, and by 1808 there were over 100 (Black 1987: 304). During the eighteenth century, neither dailies, nor evening and Sunday papers were found outside the capital. Provincial papers were often derivative of the London papers, taking over large amounts of content, which practice decreased over the eighteenth century, however (Black 1987: xiv). The foundation dates of some of the national papers still of importance today are: 1785 The Times, 1821 The Manchester Guardian (now: The Guardian), 1855 Daily Telegraph, 1888 Financial Times, 1896 Daily Mail, 1900 Daily Express, 1903 Daily Mirror and 1986 The Independent. It is noticeable that among these only one originally provincial paper gained supralocal importance. What distinguished these publications, especially the early ones, as newspapers? One aspect was physical appearance. The Oxford/London Gazette, for instance, did not have a separate title page (i.e. the title was found at the top of the first page), it was printed in two columns and it used a type design typical of official documents (fitting for the official paper that the Gazette was) (Raymond 1996:

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14; Fries and Schneider 2000: 5). The first two points were to remain typical for newspapers, although column division was increased later – in the eighteenth century – from two to three columns (Fries and Schneider 2000: 6). The earliest Continental newspapers, however, did not always carry a title, or a masthead at all; instead the institution of the annual title page existed, to be used when all editions of the year would be bound together to form a kind of chronicle (Weber 2006: 394). The size of English newspapers in the eighteenth century was usually four pages, sometimes six, but with varying, and in particular increasing, page size (Black 1987: 278). The average newspaper was thus smaller than the average pamphlet. Looking at the word count, newspapers nevertheless tended to become larger during the eighteenth century (often by squeezing more content into the same space); Studer (2008: 114–115) provides the following average word counts for paper editions based on the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN): 2,850 words (1701), 4,750 words (1741) and 11,850 words (1791). Another distinguishing aspect is type of content and treatment. In contrast to other types of news discourse, early newspapers concentrated rather on simply reporting news, without much discussion or evaluation (Weber 2006: 393). Reporting news, which is said to dominate in German papers up to 1800, is mainly concerned with answering the important wh-questions about any reported event (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 46). Most items in newspapers were fairly short, giving just the news itself and not bothering with any background information (Black 1987: 26–27). Early newspapers (seventeenth century) simply printed the despatches of their correspondents the way they were and in the order in which they arrived instead of adapting and restructuring them (Fritz 2001: 73). This means that the latest news came last (Studer 2008: 176) and also that there was not one common editorial and stylistic perspective. A later development (eighteenth century in England) was to structure the news items by grouping them into thematic sections and providing these with headings; these sections increased with time and became fixed, so that the chronological order mostly vanished (Studer 2008: 190). As correspondents (of German papers) often were experts (e.g. diplomats) and wrote their texts accordingly, the result was not necessarily easy to read for the average reader (Weber 2006: 400). For German papers in the seventeenth century, good intelligibility for the readers seems not to have been an important concern, as there are very few attestable attempts at aiding comprehension (Gloning 1996a). In order to make good use of a newspaper, readers needed to establish interconnections themselves, have considerable background knowledge (things were not explained), understand specialised lexis and deal with partly complex syntax. According to Gloning, it is likely that only people who were themselves involved in politics and administration as well as regular, thorough readers could really profit from these papers. Discussion and evaluation were gradually creeping into the newspaper; in Britain faster than in Germany, however. While an early instance of a leading article is

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found in a 1687 Hamburg paper, editorial content is only really present in German papers from the end of the eighteenth century onwards (Weber 2006: 393). In spite of this, Schwitalla (1999a: 76, 84) regards newspapers (vs pamphlets) as the most important opinion-setters not only during the Napoleonic Wars, but also during the Enlightenment era. In English papers, original political comment was also not prominent and was introduced often through summaries from pamphlets and books (Black 1987: 128). Also, the news sections themselves did not contain any clear attempts at argumentation (Studer 2008: 196). But many newspapers during the eighteenth century contained editorials, and by the 1790s this was established practice for most London papers (Black 1987: 281). While explicit comment and editorial content might not have been present or frequent in early newspapers, these could nevertheless be exploited for influencing public opinion. Prentice and Hardie (2009) have used a discourse-analytical approach to show how the choice of lexis and semantic fields in newsbooks dealing with the Glencairn Uprising serves to characterise the Scots as violent, threatening, untrustworthy and criminal. The English side, in contrast, is honourable, brave, peaceable, etc. A clearly evaluative us vs them / good vs bad situation is thus constructed within the news reporting. Gloning (1996b: 152–153) mentions such implicit evaluation for early German newspapers as well, e.g. by choosing the word Unwesen ‘terrible state of affairs’ over a neutral term in a report. Newspapers treated both national and international news (Black 1987: 51) and other miscellaneous information and news items. Non-political content referring to the economy, to the theatre, to sports and to social events increasingly came into the papers (Black 1987: 26). Economic and trade matters were prominent in the eighteenth-century press; comprising, for example, shipping news, grain prices or developments in agriculture, industry and mining (Black 1987: 67–71). The amount of sports reportage increased during the second half of the eighteenth century (Black 1987: 82). In the social realm, we find reporting on crime and executions, partly for the sake of instructive warning and partly for “entertainment”, but of course also more “positive” news on births, marriages, celebrations, etc. of the gentry/nobility and the court (Black 1987: 81, 272). Moreover, newspapers could contain a host of things that one might not expect there, such as sermons or poetry (Black 1987: 145). Apart from their own correspondents’ information (Fritz 2001: 73–74), newspapers also used material from other papers (both domestic and foreign); in England especially from the well-informed London Gazette, from pamphlets and from books, without always identifying their sources adequately (Black 1987: 88, 95, 218). The Lancaster Newsbook Corpus Project, conducted by McEnery, was concerned with such borrowing processes, investigating the amount and types of text re-use in newsbooks published in 1653 and 1654.6 Similar to Schneider (2002) presented in section 3 above, Studer (2008: 79–102) provides stylistic profiles for newspapers in his study of complete newspapers contained in ZEN for the years 1701, 1741 and 1791, but without taking an

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explicit reader perspective. His profiles are based on thirteen quality variables and nine popular variables, with clear criteria for assigning the variable or not. The quality variables are the degree of news focus, amount of foreign politics and of domestic politics, amount of advertising, presence of features/editorial sections, relevance consistency, stylistic consistency, consistent coverage, thematic cohesion, pragmatic coherence, truth consistency, argument consistency and opinion consistency. The popular variables comprise human-interest content, theming, news-copying, emphasis, humour, moralising, narrative, categorisation/stereotyping and personalisation. The result is not a clear two- or three-fold distinction, but one that is both more fine-grained and hazier, which may be very adequate for a situation in flux. Seven profiles are proposed: conservative, conservative-popular, quality, popular, quality-popular, popular-quality and balanced. The profile “conservative” is characterised by low levels in both quality and popular criteria; it is found in 1701 and 1741 and illustrated by the London Gazette as well as the English Post. “Quality” papers are the Post Man and the Country Journal, whereas popular papers can be exemplified by the London Post and the Post Boy. Quality papers are characterised by a strong news focus, in particular on foreign news, indepth analytical treatment and impartial coverage. The remaining profiles are necessary for hybrid publications.

5.

Genres and text types or text classes

A newspaper or pamphlet is not a textual category, but a medium or publication type (as explained above), i.e. neither is, in itself, a genre or text type (Claridge [1999] 2002; Schwitalla 1999a). While newspapers are always multi-text conglomerates, pamphlets can consist of one or of several texts (Bach 1997: 28 calls them “Vertriebseinheit”). Pamphlets often include prefatory material, such as dedications, addresses and prefaces, occurring in 13.3 per cent, 26 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively of the 120 texts in the Lampeter Corpus. Some pamphlets even contain more than one such prefatory text. Besides these elements, pamphlets can also comprise more than one text in the body (text clusters in Bach’s 1997 terms), e.g. the pamphlets An answer to the paper delivered by Mr. Ashton at his execution to Sir Francis Child […] Together with the paper it self (LC PolB1690), Two petitions of Thomas Violet of London Goldsmith, to the Kings Majestie … (LC LawB1661) and A discoverie for division or setting out of land, as to the best form (LC SciA1653). While the first example assembles texts from two different genres (a speech and written reply) and two authors, both genre (petition) and author remain constant in the second. The last example couples a signed letter with several anonymous smaller texts of an informative and/or instructive nature. Both newspapers and pamphlets can accommodate a number of different genres and text types, with various communicative intentions and textual real-

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isations. Schwitalla (1999a: 43–45) charts the variety of German pamphlet literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, mentioning as texts found, among others, letters, sermons, speeches, dialogues, prophesies, parodies, satires, reports, contracts, didactic works, (political) programmes, social utopias, exhortations, accusations, etc. Schwitalla (1999a: 62) sorts German Reformation-era pamphlet genres and text types according to their sphere of origin, listing text forms from institutional contexts (e.g. contracts, statutes, interrogation protocols), from either institutional contexts or everyday life (e.g. private or public letters, announcements), from university/academic contexts (e.g. disputation protocols, commentaries) and from (folk-) literature (e.g. songs, rhymed verses, plays). English pamphlets exhibit a similarly varied picture. Bach (1997: 55 and passim) refers to pamphlet titles containing genre descriptions (German Textsortenbeschreibung), such as dialogue, conference, discourse, sermon and speech, and/or performative expressions, the latter clearly signalling the communicative intention, e.g. defence, apology, vindication, warning, caveat, exhortation, counterblast, confutation, etc. The Lampeter Corpus, which also pays attention to the self-description of pamphlets, lists such terms, 50 of which were found, in the mark-up. While some of these self-descriptions are rather uninformative (e.g. book, discourse, dissertation, notes, pamphlet, paper(s), remarks, tract), others are (close to) established genre terms, (e.g. address, articles of impeachment, biography, catalogue, cosmography, epistle, essay, history, laws, lecture, letter, ordinances, petition, plea, sermon, speech, summary and treatise). Other self-descriptions found point in the direction of text types, such as narrative (e.g. account, history, narration/narrative, news, relation, report), descriptive (e.g. description, model, observations) and instructive texts (e.g. directions, instructions). A last and fairly diverse group indicates the dialogic and argumentative/polemic nature of most pamphlets (both of which characteristics often coincide); these are terms like advise, answer, apology, argument, defence, dialogue, enquiry, proposal, prediction, reasons, rebuke, remonstrance, reply and vindication. Pamphlets could thus serve as a vehicle for almost any kind of text. Newspapers have not been versatile to quite the same extent, at least not during the early stages of newspaper history. The full inventory of newspaper genres that modern readers are familiar with was only present in German papers after World War II, for example (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 38). Modern newspaper genre terms are thus usually inapplicable to early papers. According to Fritz (2001: 70), early German papers do not exhibit an established system of genres / text types, but are characterised by the occurrence of text prototypes, i.e. textual building blocks that form the nucleus of later text types. The source of these text prototypes may ultimately lie in the chronicle writing style going back to medieval annalistic history, which influenced handwritten newsletters and through them the first weekly newspapers (Fritz 2001: 81). It is the model of letters, however, that leaves the clearest visual traces in newspaper texts, in the form of text-initial indication of location and date,

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which remains more or less unchanged in German newspapers until the nineteenth century (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 39). The four basic types of text identified by Fritz (2001: 74–75) in early German papers are (i) the basic news item, (ii) the description of a state or event, (iii) the narration of an event and (iv) the reprint of official documents; (i) to (iii) would be contained in correspondents’ letters. Linguistically (iv) clearly stands out from the rest. These were joined by advertisements as a textual type from 1622 onwards (ads were present from the beginning in English papers). What was completely or largely missing in the early stages were textual chunks of an editorial nature. On the whole, the situation in the earliest English papers seems to have been similar, with the news report being the smallest unit around 1700 (Studer 2008: 176). The basic news item or report was usually very short (often less than 50 words or less than four sentences) and dealt succinctly with the “what, when, where, who” of one event only; it could be expanded into a larger item by various elements, such as the indication of the news source, explanations, additional details and predictions (Fritz 2001: 75–78). Full-blown narrative pieces are rare in early German newspapers, but more common in the biannual news collections and also in pamphlets (Fritz 2001: 79). Studer (2008: 217) notes a development towards greater length and complexity in English political news reporting over the course of the eighteenth century, the latter aspect showing partly in the rise in the use of modality. While the text (proto)types just described reflect the orientation of the early press towards bare factual information, opinion, argumentation and thus political commentary were gradually becoming more important. Editorials were an important feature of the English press by the mid-eighteenth century, and German newspapers followed the same development at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century (Haß-Zumkehr 1998: 23, 39; Studer 2008: 92). According to Haß-Zumkehr (1998: 39), German newspaper commentaries in the nineteenth century showed similarities in their argumentation patterns to the text type of scientific treatise. Growing attention to opinion and discussion no doubt also encouraged the genre of letter to the editor, which had emerged in English papers by 1741 (Studer 2008: 172). Another genre that is linked to opinion is the essay, which seems to have been an important part of English newspapers. Some papers during the eighteenth century were essentially two-page essays (Black 1987: 105). The text classes used in ZEN – which generally includes whole newspaper editions – give a succinct overview of the range of texts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers. Fries and Schneider (2000: 10) provide the following list: foreign news, home news, ship news, crime, accidents, review; births, weddings, deaths; letter, essay, address, proclamation, announcement; advertisement, lost and found. It has to be noted that these terms are not necessarily all established genre or text-type labels, but are in some cases dependent on content. But the list clearly includes texts of a primarily reporting/informative nature, those of an argumentative/persuasive kind as well as official texts. Furthermore, Fries and

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Schneider (2000: 9) mention some few text types found in papers that they excluded from ZEN, namely stock market reports, lottery figures (both because of their exclusively numerical nature) and poetry. This fits Black’s (1987: 145) statement that eighteenth-century newspapers were often a vehicle for a wide range of material. The Rostock Newspaper Corpus, which covers the period 1700–2000, unfortunately does not enable a genre/text type survey beyond ZEN, as it only includes “prototypical” news reports, by which is understood foreign and home news (Schneider 2002: 53). The development of two particular newspaper genres has received more detailed scrutiny, namely news reports by Ungerer (2000a, 2002) and editorials by Westin (2002, 2003). Ungerer (2002) discusses the origin of the top-down approach in modern news articles, which is essentially based on the principle of decreasing importance and leads to a non-chronological storyline. This means that it presents such conceptual or thematic categories of the story as history, previous events, circumstances, main event, consequences, (verbal) reaction and evaluation, and expectation in a criss-cross manner, starting from the main event (cf. Ungerer 2000a: 178–182 for an example). While newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preferred using conventional, i.e. chronological, narratives in their reporting, the top-down structure emerged around 1900; it was first used by popular papers in so-called soft news (Ungerer 2002: 91, 102). Ungerer (2002: 94–102) identifies three textual strategies as possible precursors and/or influential types for this new approach, namely (i) institutionalised retrospection, (ii) the fact-collecting approach and (iii) multi-deck headlines, all three of which are found between 1860 and 1930. Institutionalised retrospection has its origins in reports on legal proceedings, where the reporting of the trial in sequence automatically leads to a reversal or disruption of the chronology of the original event. The fact-collecting approach was found in articles that listed various aspects of a story in a non-chronological order, perhaps because the time aspect was not the most important point as, e.g., in the damage produced by a storm. Multi-deck headlines use the principle of important-things-first as one of their organising guidelines. Westin (2002, 2003)7 investigates the language of editorials published in The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Times between 1900 and 1990, basing her method loosely on Biber (1988). She traces the features connected to the discourse types of involved production, informational production, narrative discourse, argumentative discourse, impersonal style and explicit in editorials (2003: 3, Table 1). The majority of features under investigation exhibit more or less linguistic continuity, but ten features increase over time, while twelve decrease, both groups in a statistically significant manner (2003: 9, Table 2). Overall, her results point to editorials being marked over the century by increasing informality, increasing informational density and precision, and by decreasing narrativity (2003: 10–14). Greater informality is especially shown by the increase in the use of questions, imperatives and contractions (2003: 10). Greater informational density is indicated

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by the rise of such features as nouns, nominalisations, attributive adjectives, present participle whiz-deletions and word length (2003: 12). A decreased use of verbs in the past tense and perfect as well as fewer third-person pronouns indicate fewer narrative passages (2003: 8).

6.

Some typical features of news discourse

The aspects to be treated here are restricted to features that are typical of newspaper language in particular, not necessarily of any other form of news discourse. The status of newspaper language as a specific register (or register cluster) in modern English and German has been shown by a number of studies (e.g. English: Biber 1988; Bell 1991; Jucker 1992; Conboy 2006). In the following section, three areas will be treated: (i) the development of headlines, (ii) source attribution/evaluation and speech presentation and (iii) lexical choices and combinations. 6.1.

Headlines

Headlines are a very striking feature of modern newspapers, but apart from being a register characteristic they are also clearly interactive in nature. Headlines are there to attract readers to the newspaper itself (front page headlines), to guide a reader through the paper or article so headed and to arouse his or her interest in individual articles. Headlines have not always been a hallmark of this publication type. Early newspapers had no or few headlines, or at least not something that we would necessarily regard as a headline. This shows again that early newspapers may have had a different attitude towards their readers than modern ones, helping them less, but also perhaps influencing them to a lesser extent. Three historical studies of headlines are available (Simon-Vandenbergen 1981; Schneider 2000; Studer 2008), each with a different focus. Studer (2008) concentrates on eighteenth-century headlines, based on papers published in 1701, 1741 and 1791. A potential drawback of his study needs to be mentioned before presenting the results, namely the fact that advertising and news were not distinguished but simply treated as one type of discourse. The difference is important, as Studer himself states that ads almost always carried a headline, whereas few news reports had one (2008: 129). Studer found an increasing use of headlines when he compared 1701 and 1741 (1.5 times as many in 1741 than in 1701), but a decrease of about one-quarter in 1791, which he puts down to less advertising. He provides both a formal and a functional classification of headlines. The formal classification relies on layout features like display lettering, display layout, line spacing, use of single line and ending signals. The types are (i) major headlines (spaced off from text, larger and heavier type), (ii) minor headlines (part of the opening line of text, but separated by a full stop), (iii) integrated headlines

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(layout emphasis in commencing phrase of a news item, but not separated in any way), (iv) combined headlines (major plus integrated headline), and (v) embedded headlines (display lettering spread throughout the whole text). These types develop from typographical uniformity to more experimental outputs. Combined and embedded headlines are not found in 1701, while integrated and minor headlines decrease after 1701, the latter very strikingly. The most common type of headline is minor ones in 1701 (55 per cent of all) and major ones in both 1741 (37 per cent) and 1791 (60 per cent). The increase of major headlines must be due to the rise in news headlines. From a functional perspective, there are also five classes of headlines: (i) attributive headlines, which give information about source, date, sender, addressee of the news (e.g. January 8, 1740, Extract of a letter from Paris, To the Worthy Liverymen of London), (ii) thematic headlines, which announce a topic (e.g. Foreign News, Bankrupts, An account of the Present Royal Line of England), (iii) performative headlines, which both announce the topic and provide further details (e.g. This is to give Notice, To all Gentlemen and Others, that YOU may have good Druggets, Sagathie, and Duroy; On Monday, the 2nd of February, will begin A course of Anatomy) and (iv) structural headlines, which fulfil a text-structuring function by establishing a hierarchy of news in a section (e.g. Also; Containing; Where may be had). A last, fifth class contains hybrid instances, which in some way combine features of the other four types; this type occurs only in 1791, but then with a fairly substantial 14 per cent. This type reflects a development towards greater textual complexity. Attributive headlines make up the great majority in 1701 at 72 per cent, but decrease drastically to 33 per cent in 1741 and 28 per cent in 1791. Thematic headlines do not show a clear development; they vary from 25 per cent of all headlines in 1701 to 17 per cent in 1741 and 31 per cent in 1791. Performative and structural headlines are very rare in 1701 but make up substantial portions in 1741 and 1791; in 1741 performatives are in fact the most common type (35 per cent). Performative headlines are especially common in advertisements, but apparently this type also became more popular in news headlines in the later part of the eighteenth century. As to the link between formal and functional types of headlines, attributive headlines are most often minor, performative types are usually combined or embedded, and structural headlines are often major ones. Regarding the internal structure of headlines, the nominal type of headline is the most common type (c. 70 per cent), but early forms and forerunners of verbal headlines are found. They are present in very varying proportions in different publications (e.g. London Chronicle: 50 per cent of all, Public Advertiser: 30 per cent, London Gazette: 3 per cent). Most verbal headlines found in 1791 actually occurred in ads. Most headlines (c. 90 per cent) are syntactically integrated into the news texts, e.g. died in DIED, Sunday, at his house in the Minories … Two features that are commonly found in eighteenth-century headlines are topicalisation (fronting, inversion and discontinuity) and dislocated forms with resumptive use in the text. Both of those are common in ads and notices.

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Schneider (2000), who investigates headlines in the Rostock Corpus from 1700 to 2000, uses a different classification system from Studer. She distinguishes the three major types of headlines, crossheads and headings, the last of which is further subdivided into report headings and section headings. Headlines contain information about the contents of a newspaper article that they precede (e.g. Croc Kills Royal Aide’s Girl), while crossheads appear in the middle of an article, where they may head paragraphs (e.g. Strange). Headings do not provide specific content information but serve the purpose of locating and grouping the news; while report headings indicate place and date of the news (e.g. Rome, Dec. 21), section headings provide the general content of one part of the newspaper containing more than one report (e.g. Port News). In the eighteenth century, mainly report headings are found, but very few section headings. (In contrast to this, Studer [2008: 180] claims that the latter were an integral part of news discourse by 1741.) Schneider found the first real headline in the above sense in 1730 (The Eating Taylor), but they remained rare in the eighteenth century. With the gradual establishment of headlines, the status of report and section headings changed. Crossheads, however, only appear around 1900. She concludes from this chronological development that there was a shift in the organisation and presentation of news material, from the arrangement according to source (report headings) via arrangement according to general topic (section headings) to arrangement according to concrete topic (headlines and crossheads). Popular papers are in the lead in these developments. Schneider also looked at the quantitative development of headlines, showing that the proportion of newspaper text taken up by headlines increases from 1800 to 1930, with the pronounced peak in that year being due to the fashion of multi-deck headlines, and then decreases somewhat again. The average length of headlines also increases from just below three words in 1800 to somewhat more than seven words in 2000. With regard to the internal structure of headlines she deals with regional vs relational types (which is a cognitive-grammar adaptation of the distinction nominal vs verbal), the former being characterised by common and proper nouns and the latter by verb-like qualities expressed by deverbal nouns, adjectives, prepositions and verbs. The year 1800 shows a slight majority of regional headlines (56 per cent), which dwindles to a proportion of only 8 per cent in 2000. Relational headlines, which passed the 50 per cent mark already in 1830, are thus clearly the dominant type. Most relational headlines are in fact characterised by the presence of a verb rather than one of the other relational elements. The idea is that relational types are more appealing. Simon-Vandenbergen (1981) studies headlines from The Times between 1870 and 1970. In line with Schneider’s results, she finds that headline length increases over time, but also that complexity increases, both with regard to hierarchical linguistic structure and ease of comprehension. Like Schneider, she also identifies a development from nominal to verbal headline style, with sharp rises of the latter type being noticeable in 1914, 1938, 1958 and 1970. She also remarks on the use of

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more than one verb per headline, thus producing complex sentences, which is a rather modern development. The verbs used were increasingly active rather than passive ones, making the language sound less formal and more conversational. Simon-Vandenbergen also treats a number of other features, finding, for example, that there is a steady decline in the use of articles from 1914 onwards (ellipsis), that the use of adjectives decreases after 1960 (thus diminishing subjectivity?) and that quotation marks are increasingly used as a means of compression and clarification. 6.2.

Speech presentation and source attribution or evaluation

These features are interesting for various reasons. The inclusion of (indirect) speech makes a report potentially more vivid (cf. also section 4 above on dialogue in pamphlets), but it also increases authenticity, and thus has an effect on the degree of news credibility (cf. also Grice’s quality maxim). Various types of speech presentation and source attribution can be more explicit as to the degree of certainty or likelihood of a reported piece of news being true. This can also be done by evaluating the source, for example. While these features have been investigated both for English and German historical newspaper discourse, it has been done with different foci, which do not necessarily highlight the above points. Haß-Zumkehr (1998) looks at what she calls “Neben- und Zusatzprädikation” (minor and additional predications) in German newspapers from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, i.e. those linguistic parts of a newspaper report that are not concerned with talking about the news event proper. One of her main concerns is the identification of phraseological traditions, i.e. the use of more or less fixed phrases, due to time pressures in the newspaper production process, repetition via periodicity and the distribution of patterns via published language. Once established, such formulae might also help the reading process. Among the functions of such phrases/clauses are reflection about the credibility, topicality and recency of the sources and getting the reader to form his own opinion (1998: 18). She treats six types of such additional predications, namely (i) source attributions, (ii) characterisations of the main proposition as mere opinion, (iii) evaluation of the main proposition, (iv) identification or introduction of an instance of speech/text presentation, (v) comment on the credibility of a report and (vi) speculations (1998: passim and 198–212). Only two types, source attributions and speech presentation, have a completely continuous history from the beginning, while others are present over a shorter stretch of time or exhibit clear breaks in the formulaic tradition (1998: 211–212). Source attributions are overall the most frequent type. In the time before 1770, the relevant occurrences are often descriptions of mediated knowledge rather than true identification of the sources (which remain mostly anonymous), as is visible in formulations like ist auch die sage, aus X wird geschrieben, man berichtet ‘it is said/purported, they write from X, it is reported’. After 1770, source identification partly mutates into a text-structuring element (text-initiating

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place-date-line) and the source is now explicitly named in more than half of all instances. After 1850, the source, again often anonymous, is usually given in a standardised form at the beginning or end of an article. As long as verbs are used in this type, they form an increasingly small group, e.g. melden, verlauten, schreiben ‘report, announce, write’. The type speech or writing presentation is rare before 1700 and restricted to written material; the latter remains in the majority for a long time, often representing borrowings from other papers. Speech presentation becomes important later for parliamentary reporting. The type has many different realisations and does not show much standardisation; only after 1850 does a small group of verbs (e.g. berichten, schreiben, verlauten ‘report, write, announce’) become common. In contrast to the above, the other types mentioned by Haß-Zumkehr are concerned with evaluating and commenting on the degree of certainty of a piece of news. Evaluation can be directed at the event reported (e.g. betrübte Nachrichten ‘sad news’) or at the source; the former is found from 1700 onwards, the latter only after 1770. The custom to confirm or relativise the reliability of news is common after 1700 and is recognisable by frequently used words like sicher, versichern, confirmieren (‘certain, affirm, confirm’) and Confirmation. Another type characterises the main proposition as an opinion instead of as a fact, which develops from the late seventeenth century onwards; commonly this is marked by glauben ‘believe’ and semantically similar verbs. The last type, speculation, emerged after 1700 as a blend between source attribution and reliability marking and is marked by the occurrence of, e.g. vermuthen, muthmassen, vermuthlich, unvermuthet, Muthmassung ‘suspect, suppose, probably, unexpected, conjecture’). Except for the two first-mentioned types above, all of them merge into a kind of supertype, called topicalisation of communicative strategies by Haß-Zumkehr, sometime after 1850. For the English context, both Jucker (2006) and Studer (2008) have investigated the same or similar phenomena on the basis of subparts of ZEN. Jucker (2006) found that three-quarters of speech presentation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are realised as indirect speech, whereas this type amounts to only one-third in modern newspapers. Reported speech, whether direct or indirect, in the past is used for two different reasons, namely (i) to comment on or affirm the credibility of the reported events and (ii) to provide a quote of a newsworthy statement of a newsmaker, i.e. an important public figure (e.g. a minister). (i) thus also contains more or less precise source attributions (e.g. place: they write from Cadiz; our letters from Milan say) and comments on the travel route, means and communication bearers (e.g. three ships arrived at Ragusa from Constantinople affirm). The place from where the news originated is mentioned in 42 per cent of all cases, but even more commonly (46 per cent) the source is left unidentified (e.g. ’tis said). Means of transport and communication bearers (letters, news reporter) only occur fairly infrequently. In (ii), the original speech act is important in itself. This type includes the narrative reporting of speech acts without (in)directly quot-

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ing the words (e.g. The Pope has summoned the Bishop of Saluzzo), and it can include the source(s) of the speech. In the great majority of cases (87 per cent) this source is a newsmaker (e.g. The King has declared); the remainder name (anonymous) officials (e.g. The states likewise gave orders: 4 per cent) or leave the source completely unspecified (e.g. all the military officers are ordered: 10 per cent). Jucker found a wide variety of forms introducing speech presentation, of which the most common ones are say, hear, advice and various nominal forms. With the exception of would make us believe, there are no counter-factual verbs, such as claim, used that might indicate doubt – this may contrast with the type speculation identified by Haß-Zumkehr in German papers. Interestingly, thought presentation is also found quite frequently in ZEN, which was used for introducing opinions into the news reporting. According to Studer (2008: 92) “quoting and announcing direct speech had become a conscious stylistic technique by 1741”. He treats the topics of speech presentation and sources under the larger category of modality (2008: chapter 8), where they fall under the two epistemic categories of hearsay, which makes reference to news sources, and confidence, which concerns the reliability and credibility of the news. Investigating newspapers from 1701, 1741 and 1791, he finds hearsay markers to be more common in 1701 and 1741, while 1791 shows a higher number of confidence markers. Generally, both epistemic modality categories are common in war reports. Hearsay markers either foreground the receiver (e.g. we hear that) or the sender (e.g. letters from X advise that). Confidence markers in 1701 and 1741 are mostly phrased in an impersonal way (e.g. the report of X is augmenting every day), but more personal formulations like we can only suppose that occur as well. Finally, it is also possible to combine the two forms in one formulation (e.g. advices from very good hands give us room to believe that). Schneider (2002) and Brownlees (2006a) treat the phenomena under discussion here from somewhat different angles. Brownlees (2006a) is interested in direct speech and oral discourse in news publications with regard to their power “to reinforce the communicative impact of an ideologically charged message” (80–81). Looking at corantos and newsbooks between 1620 and 1660, he finds speech and orality to be relatively rare overall and more common in editorial comment and opinion pieces than in straightforward reportage. While quoted speech is found in narrative and in reporting parliamentary proceedings, and can render both more dramatic, it is often formal speech, not much different in style from the surrounding written discourse. An interesting aspect concerns the question of who is quoted and how: the more directly and verbatim a person is quoted, perhaps the more likely they are to gain the readers’ sympathy. Orality as an overall way of writing is described as a specific feature of Gainsford’s style (coranto editor from 1622–1624), who used it to create a more intimate relationship with his readers, and thereby a consensus about the positive value of news publications (often seen in an unfavourable light at the time). A more oral style is also common in highly

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charged times, such as 1643–1645 during the Civil War, when Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus entered into a competitive and confrontational dialogue in order to persuade readers more forcefully. Schneider (2002) deals with “reference to authors” under the umbrella of personalisation strategies. She finds the following general development: (i) self reference to the newspaper (e.g. we learn) from 1700, (ii) self-reference to author (e.g. I hope) from 1760, (iii) unspecific reference to author (e.g. our correspondent) from 1800, (iv) specific personal reference to author (correspondent’s name, e.g. Mr. Beckles Wilson) from 1900 and (v) specific personal reference to author and picture from 1960. In each case, more popular papers led the development by about 30 years. Most of the types above can be seen as a kind of source attribution (except (ii)), which often also contain the place of origin. With regard to the unspecific source statements in (i), Schneider also provides the point that the self-referential phrasing was disfavoured by the official paper London Gazette, which instead preferred the impersonal it is said. Within the context of personalisation, Schneider also looked at the incidence of first-person direct-speech quotations in newspapers. She finds the first of these in 1760 (in the Rostock Corpus), but they remain almost non-existent in the eighteenth century and are rather infrequent in the nineteenth century. They only become common at the end of the twentieth century. Again this development is carried mostly by popular papers. 6.3.

Lexical choices

The lexical make-up of newspapers is linked both to intelligibility (cf. also Grice’s manner maxim) and to the stylistic impression on the reader, making for more or less interesting and pleasant reading. Fries and Lehmann (2006) have investigated lexical diversity in ZEN, which may shed light on stylistic differences between (parts of) papers. Using the typetoken ratio method, which is not completely unproblematic, they manage to show some interesting, albeit tentative, trends. The London Gazette as the official paper (“published by authority”), for instance, stands out against all other papers with regard to the type-token ratio, having consistently (except for the first corpus decade) lower ratios than the rest of ZEN; while the ratio for the London Gazette decreases further over time, the ZEN type-token ratio increases somewhat (cf. Fries and Lehmann 2006: 102, Figure 1). This is attributed to the “meagre and formal style” (2006: 97) of the Gazette, and its official information content, which by nature is more repetitive. The increasing type-token ratio of the other papers is due to an increasing range of topics covered and perhaps also a development reacting to the (perceived) increased literacy of newspaper readers. Compared to other publications and types of language, namely the contemporary Spectator, the modern Times and the modern British National Corpus demographic speech section, ZEN comes out in a middle range of diversity (cf. 2006: 103, Figure 2). It is surprisingly

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more lexically diverse than The Spectator, but it is less diverse than The Times. Interestingly, both historical sources (ZEN and Spectator) are found between The Times and the spoken part of the British National Corpus, putting them between modern oral and literate genres. Looking at the ratios of the text classes covered by ZEN shows clear differences (cf. 2006: 99, 104, Figure 3 and Table 6) and points to the fact that “there is no such thing as a uniform newspaper language” (2006: 100). If calculated for a text length of 2,500 words, text classes can be listed in the order of decreasing type-token ratios and thus less diversity in the following way: advertisement, crime, home news, essay, letters, review, deaths, foreign news, ship news, miscellaneous, lost and found, accidents, weddings, announcements, proclamation and address (note that as type-token ratio is text-length-sensitive, the order may change with increasing text length). It is certainly relevant that the more formal and official text classes come last in this list, but why home and foreign news are thus differentiated or why ship news, for example, lies in the middle range might need further investigation. Schneider (2002) was interested in reading ease, which she chose to investigate (among other aspects) by looking at word length and the distribution of shorter and longer words in newspapers across paper types and time (Rostock Corpus, 1700–2000). Excluding function words, abbreviations, numbers and exclamations from the data, she calculated the percentage of short (1–5 letters) and of long (10 and more letters) lexical words, and the average word length in quality and popular (mid- and down-market) papers (cf. section 3 above). Popular papers overall tend to use more short words, a tendency that is fairly pronounced in the eighteenth century, not really visible in the nineteenth century, but very clear in the twentieth century. Partly, this may have to do with reasons of space and layout, but of course it also represents a stylistic decision. The use of long words is rather similar for quality and popular papers alike for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with the exception of 1730), but in the twentieth century a clear divergence sets in with qualities using increasingly more and populars increasingly fewer long words. If one looks at average word length, one sees fairly small differences between papers (again with the exception of 1730), but mostly a lower average for popular papers, which becomes much more pronounced in the twentieth century. The lexical characteristics of seventeenth-century German papers have been documented by Gloning (1996b). Early German papers are apparently not greatly differentiated by their lexical usage, showing only a small number of idiosyncratic lexical choices for each paper. On the whole, 20 per cent of the words in any issue consist of strictly speaking topic-bound vocabulary, while 80 per cent are function words, structural words (e.g. those used in source attribution, cf. previous section) and general lexis. Among the topic-bound vocabulary there is a considerable amount of technical terminology from the fields of politics/diplomacy, military, administration, sea-faring, etc., some of which are also foreign words (these can make up as much as 9 per cent). Although it cannot be assumed that readers were

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familiar with these terms, there was generally no attempt in the newspapers to explain unknown or specialised words; the notable exception in this respect is only the newspaper Mercurius (1667). The expectation seems to have been that readers would acquire the necessary knowledge through continuous newspaper reading. Another very common lexical component was proper names of persons reported on, or titles, such as Landhofmeister or Nuntius; again there was, as a rule, no explicit attempt to introduce or explain the terms. Biber (2003) also noticed the prominent occurrence of noun + proper noun sequences including titles used as premodifiers, e.g. Cardinal, Lord, in early English newspapers. At least for German papers, it can be concluded that they did indeed expect quite much from their readers in terms of background knowledge.

7.

Outlook

The above treatment has been highly selective and eclectic. This is due to the fact that no comprehensive study of (the) historical (evolution of) news discourse exists to date. A fairly neglected period in news discourse history is the nineteenth century, for example. It is also due to the fact that some features, e.g. headlines, have received much more attention than others. Another point is that truly pragmatic investigations of historical news discourse are rare. They are somewhat more common for the interactive and polemic pamphlets than for newspapers, but then also often shade into other areas than news discourse proper. Classical pragmatic topics are thus largely absent. Politeness has been touched on in Fritz’s work on controversies and been treated by Levorato for a specific controversy, for example; but its use in pamphlet literature as such has not received a full treatment. Presupposition, a potentially fruitful aspect for press coverage, has been looked at in modern, but not in historical news discourse. The role of non-literal and indirect language use, though rhetorically relevant, has also not received attention. A further problem is that research is fragmented according to national traditions, whereas a more European perspective, comparing and synthesising English, German, French, Spanish, etc. news discourse, might provide interesting insights. Much remains to be done in this area.

Notes 1 The definition of what counts as recent/new of course varies over time, depending on the technical means to make news available with more or less speed (cf. also section 3). 2 Clearly, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science was not as specialised as modern science and thus did reach a somewhat wider audience. Nevertheless, the distinction seems sensible for diachronic research into both registers.

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3 The first editions of The Tatler contained a news section, which was dropped after a few months, however (Sommerville 1996: 128). 4 Pamphlet controversies are found in various fields of discourse; Fritz (2002), for example, deals with the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy on the question of free will. This means that many controversies fall outside the area of news discourse as defined here. 5 These early publications are usually treated as newsbooks (cf. section 4.2), not true newspapers, in the English literature. Whether this is really adequate needs further research. 6 The results are in press, cf. Hardie, McEnery and Piao (2010), and also the project website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/newsbooks/. 7 The 2003 paper summarises the results of her 2002 book, based on her PhD thesis.

Corpora referred to Lampeter Corpus of English Tracts (LC) 1999 Compiled by Claudia Claridge, Josef Schmied and Rainer Siemund. In: Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg and Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.), ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-Rom), 2nd edition, the HIT Centre, University of Bergen, Norway. Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus 2001–7 Compiled by Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie. Available through the Oxford Text Archive. Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC) 2000 Compiled by Kristina Schneider and Friedrich Ungerer. Not published. Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, Version 1.0 (ZEN) 2004 Compiled by Udo Fries, Hans Martin Lehmann et al. Zürich: University of Zürich.

References Bach, Ulrich 1997 Englische Flugtexte im 17. Jahrhundert. Historisch-pragmatische Untersuchungen zur frühen Massenkommunikation. Heidelberg: Winter. Behringer, Wolfgang 2006 Communications revolutions: A historiographical concept. German History 24.3: 333–374. Bell, Allan 1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell. Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas 2003 Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs economy. In: Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis (eds.), New Media Language, 169–181. London: Routledge.

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Black, Jeremy 1987 The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. London/Sydney: Croom Helm. Brinton, Laurel 2001 Historical discourse analysis. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 138–160. Oxford: Blackwell. Brownlees, Nicholas 2006a Spoken discourse in early English newspapers. In: Joad Raymond (ed.), News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe, 67–83. London: Routledge. Brownlees, Nicholas (ed.) 2006b News Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Selected Papers of CHINED 2004. Bern: Peter Lang. Burger, Harald 2005 Mediensprache. 3rd ed. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Cecconi, Elisabetta 2009 Comparing seventeenth-century news broadsides and occasional news pamphlets: Interrelatedness in news reporting. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), 137–157. Claridge, Claudia [1999] 2002 Life is Ruled and Governed by Opinion: The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. Manual of Information. http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/ manuals/index.htm. Claridge, Claudia 2000 Pamphlets and early newspapers: Political interaction vs news reporting. In: Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 25–43. Claridge, Claudia 2005 Questions in Early Modern English pamphlets. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.1: 133–168. Clay, C. G. A. 1984 Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conboy, Martin 2006 Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community through Language. London: Routledge. Cressy, David 1980 Literacy and the Social Order. Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, Andreas, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.) 2002 Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries. Tübingen: Narr. Fries, Udo, and Hans Martin Lehmann 2006 The style of 18th-century newspapers: Lexical diversity. In: Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), 91–104. Fries, Udo, and Peter Schneider 2000 ZEN: Preparing the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. In: Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 1–24. Fritz, Gerd 2001 Text types in a new medium: The first newspapers (1609). Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2.1: 69–83.

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Fritz, Gerd 2002 Dialogical structures in 17th century controversies. In: M. Bondi and S. Stati (eds.), Dialogue Analysis 2000, 199–208. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Fritz, Gerd 2005 First person singular in 17th century controversies. In: Pierluigi Barrotta and Marcelo Dascal (eds.), Controversies and Subjectivity, 235–250. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fritz, Gerd, and Erich Straßner (eds.) 1996 Die Sprache der ersten deutschen Wochenzeitungen im 17. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Gieseler, Jens, and Thomas Schröder 1996 Bestandsaufnahme zum Untersuchungsbereich ‘Textstruktur, Darstellungsformen und Nachrichtenauswahl’. In: Fritz and Straßner (eds.), 29–69. Gloning, Thomas 1996a Verständlichkeit und Verständnissicherung in den frühen Wochenzeitungen. In: Gerd Fritz and Erich Straßner (eds.), 315–340. Gloning, Thomas 1996b Bestandsaufnahme zum Untersuchungsbereich ‘Wortschatz’. In: Gerd Fritz and Erich Straßner (eds.), 141–195. Grabes, Herbert 1990 Das englische Pamphlet I. Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521–1640). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Griffiths, Dennis (ed.) 1992 The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992. London: Macmillan. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm 2004 Deutsches Wörterbuch. Elektronische Ausgabe: Der Digitale Grimm. Zweitausendeins Verlag. Hardie, Andrew, Tony McEnery and Scott Songlin Piao 2010 A corpus-based approach to text reuse in the newsbooks of the Commonwealth. In: Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe. Ashgate Publishing. Haß-Zumkehr, Ulrike 1998 “Wie glaubwürdige Nachrichten versichert haben”: Formulierungstraditionen in Zeitungsnachrichten des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Narr. Jucker, Andreas H. 1992 Social Stylistics. Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, Andreas H. 2006 ‘but ’tis believed that …’: Speech and thought presentation in early English newspapers. In: Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), 105–125. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 2009 Early Modern English News Discourse. Newspapers, Pamphlets and Scientific News Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. Forthcoming Pragmatics and discourse. In: Laurel Brinton and Alex Bergs (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English, (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, HSK). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Levorato, Alessandra 2009 ‘From you, my Lord, professions are but words – they are so much bait for fools to catch at’: Impoliteness strategies in the 1797–1800 Act of Union pamphlet debate. In: Andreas Jucker (ed.), 159–185. Nevalainen, Terttu 2002 English newsletters in the 17th century. In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.), 67–76. Porter, Roy 1990 English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin. Prentice, Sheryl, and Andrew Hardie 2009 Empowerment and disempowerment in the Glencairn Uprising: A corpusbased critical analysis of Early Modern English news discourse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.1: 23–55. Raymond, Joad 1996 The Invention of the Newspaper. English Newsbooks 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schneider, Kristina 2000 The emergence and development of headlines in English newspapers. In: Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 45–65. Schneider, Kristina 2002 The development of popular journalism in England from 1700 to the present: Corpus compilation and selective stylistic analysis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Rostock. Schröder, Thomas 1996 Maximen des Informierens. In: Gerd Fritz and Erich Straßner (eds.), 286–314. Schwitalla, Johannes 1999a Flugschrift. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Schwitalla, Johannes 1999b The use of dialogue in early German pamphlets. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 111–137. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins. Simon-Vandenbergen, A. M. 1981 The Grammar of Headlines in The Times, 1870–1970. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën. Sommerville, John C. 1996 The News Revolution in England. Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Studer, Patrick 2008 Historical Corpus Stylistics. Media, Technology and Change. London/New York: Continuum. Ungerer, Friedrich 2000a News stories and news events – a changing relationship. In: Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 177–195. Ungerer, Friedrich (ed.) 2000b English Media Texts: Past and Present. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Ungerer, Friedrich 2002 When news stories are no longer stories: The emergence of the top-down structure in news reports in English newspapers. In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann (eds.), 91–104. Weber, Johannes 2006 Strassburg, 1605: The origins of the newspaper in Europe. German History 24.3: 387–412. Westin, Ingrid 2002 Language Change in English Newspaper Editorials. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Westin, Ingrid 2003 Linguistic change reflected in newspaper editorials. Moderna Sprak 97.1: 2–16.

20.

Courtroom discourse Kathleen L. Doty

In the past four decades the study of legal language has been carried out by scholars in a number of academic disciplines including law, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science and sociology. Research has often been pursued by scholars affiliated with the social sciences, since legal language is a socially-situated phenomenon. The law, as a social institution expressing the rules and regulations of a society, governs a special relationship between the individual and the society. Generally, laws are codified in legal documents that are created and implemented by legal professionals. These professionals are part of a society’s legal infrastructure, which is focused on organizing and regulating the system of penalties for breaking laws, or, from another perspective, on pursuing justice. As legal scholars have pointed out, the drafting of laws and regulations is a linguistic matter, since one must neither say too much, resulting in an overly strict legal code, nor say too little, which may result in unacceptable behaviors (Gibbons 1994: 3). The system that begins with the creation of laws and up through any sort of enforcement in a court of law operates entirely through language, and this is one of the reasons that the law is an attractive topic for linguists. The complex links between language and society, and the form and content of law hold special interest for linguists interested in pragmatics. When we turn to the language of the courtroom in particular, it is obvious upon reflection, for instance, that the term “courtroom discourse” encompasses many different kinds of spoken and written language: the verbal interaction in a trial among all participants (judges, lawyers, witnesses, defendants, etc.), judges’ instructions to juries, sentencing, lawyer talk, depositions, testimonies, evidence, etc. Whether the focus is on spoken language in the courtroom or on its attendant written documents, the idea of the courtroom assumes interaction among participants. The legal domain, and especially courtroom discourse, thus offers linguists a wide arena for carrying out pragmatic and contextually-oriented research, and this line of work has blossomed over the past two decades. Rather than attempting to cover the large field of language and the law, this chapter surveys representative articles and monographs that explore various aspects of courtroom discourse from a historical pragmatic perspective. Of course, even the field called historical pragmatics is large and contains diverse approaches and foci (for recent overviews, see the introduction to this handbook, as well as Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007; Jucker 2008). Thus, the inclusions are selected on the basis of their examination of pragmatic aspects of interaction and the focus on either diachronic changes or synchronic exploration of particular discourse fea-

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tures. No language or culture was excluded from consideration but the majority of the scholarly research available in English concerns historical courtroom discourse in the Anglo-American or European traditions. As Jucker and others have pointed out, the field of historical pragmatics is quite young, and the majority of research is biased toward English and other Indo-European languages (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 12–15; Jucker 2008: 895, 902). Furthermore, studies of current (contemporary) trials tend to focus on some element of discourse (such as leading questions) or on the power dynamics within a courtroom. A recent example of the latter approach is Janet Cotterill’s Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O. J. Simpson Trial (2003), which is not discussed in this chapter since it lacks a historical perspective. Studies of contemporary courtroom discourse may also incorporate audio or video recordings into the analysis, something unavailable to the historical pragmatist. (Following the conventions of delineating time periods within historical linguistics, my use of “historical” or “premodern” refers to language before 1800, approximately.) The legal domain certainly includes more than courtroom discourse (for instance, statutes, binding documents such as wills or warrants, written briefs, judicial opinions, etc.) but the primary focus of the inclusions in this chapter is on the language used during trials (also called “hearings” or “examinations” in some instances) held before a judge or magistrate and, sometimes, a jury. Even the notion of what constitutes a “courtroom” varies greatly across time and across cultures. Clearly, the setting and structure of the events portrayed in some of the trial records discussed in this chapter do not look like the Anglo-American or European courtrooms of the twentieth-first century. For historical studies, however, the glue that binds the admittedly unstable category of a courtroom together is that of face-toface verbal interaction between individuals within a legal setting. Additionally, courtrooms may be concerned with criminal, civil or ecclesiastical matters, among others, which will then influence the structure and types of interaction between participants.1 Even with these working parameters in mind, some of the studies included herein force us to stretch the usual boundaries of the term “courtroom discourse”. One example is depositions, which, because they were usually taken down before a trial proper, were not technically a part of the verbal interaction in some premodern trials; yet they could become a part of the written record when they were read out during a trial. As a result, depositions are often studied as a part of courtroom discourse and a few representative studies are included in this chapter. The historical milieu of the documents studied by linguists is an important aspect of historical pragmatics, and so it is imperative that researchers educate themselves about the social, cultural and religious contexts in which courtroom discourse occurred. The evolution of a judicial system, for example, will vary across historical periods and by country or area of location. A case in point is the European tradition in which trial by battle, ordeal or inquisition preceded trial by magis-

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trate and then later by jury. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the development of legal formats and practices in each country or area studied in articles and books covered here, though the linguist can consult the work of legal or social historians (for example, Langbein 1999, 2003; Kadri 2005) for useful information. A full description of courtroom discourse across time, place and type of trial is necessary, however, if the historical pragmatist wants to understand accurately the language used in those courtrooms and how the forms of language and social conditions interact. I shall return to some of these topics in the conclusion. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of background studies within language and the law, followed by four sections and a conclusion. The four sections cover research questions and methodology; orality, reliability of texts, scribal practices and corpora; core pragmatic approaches; and specific linguistic strategies used in courtrooms.

1.

Background

Since research that takes a historical pragmatic approach often draws from earlier work in more general linguistic studies of legal discourse, a brief survey of such work helps set the context for the discussion to come. A classic work that focuses on the legal code is David Mellinkoff’s (1963) The Language of the Law, which remains a helpful overview of the characteristics of legal language, particularly its lexis. It also provides a helpful overview of the history of the language of English law, from before the Norman Conquest up through early twentieth-century America. Another early survey of legal language is found in William O’Barr’s (1981) overview, wherein he argues that research on the language of judicial processes will help identify assumptions about language that operate in the legal system, that empirical studies need to be employed, and that the findings of research may play a role in altering or remedying perceived defects of legal systems (O’Barr 1981: 402–404). O’Barr’s subsequent book on courtroom discourse (1982) provides a full empirical investigation of language in trials in North Carolina, USA, (using data from the 1970s) focusing on the effects of speech styles in testimonies on legal decision making (61–111.). The results show that “presentational styles”, with a contrast between powerful and powerless modes of speech, influence how jurors judge the credibility of witnesses; this study and others like it have import for later studies on questions of power and power dynamics in courtrooms, including those that look at historical records of courtroom interaction. Another important early collection of essays is Judith N. Levi and Anne Graffam Walker’s Language in the Judicial Process (1990). The book begins with Levi’s comprehensive overview of the various approaches to studying the language of law. Her discussion notes that research in law and language can be grouped into three large areas: spoken language in legal settings, law and its

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written language, and language as a subject of the law (Levi and Walker 1990: 13–14). At the time she wrote her overview, the four areas with the most published work were (i) conversational analysis of language in legal settings; (ii) linguistic factors affecting eyewitness testimony; (iii) studies on “plain English” and legal documents, written and spoken; and (iv) presentational styles and attitudes about language in testimony (Levi and Walker 1990: 12). While these approaches are still taken by researchers, the object is usually contemporary legal settings and documents. In contrast, the more recent work from a pragmatic historical perspective has shifted to an emphasis on discourse structures and extra-linguistic contexts (discussed below). Levi also points out three areas that have, as we will see below, significance for historical approaches: the myth of “verbatim” transcripts; the pragmatic issues that arise in courtroom discourse; and written legal language studied from a discourse analysis perspective (12). In 1994, Gail Stygall published Trial Language: Differential Discourse Processing and Discursive Formation, which examines the legal language in a civil trial from the perspective of critical language analysis and social theory derived from the work of Michel Foucault. I mention it here because her division of the existing research into three broad categories is useful for the historical pragmatist. Stygall describes research in the first category, “language as object”, as focused on descriptions of the various specific features of legal discourse, such as vocabulary, performative verbs, formulaic language, etc. Representative early studies include Mellinkoff (1963), Charrow and Charrow (1979) and Danet (1980). Stygall’s second category, “legal language as process”, emphasizes research that uses discourse analysis as its perspective, characterized by the work of O’Barr (1982), Levi and Walker (1990) and Philips (1985). All of these studies utilize modern language and settings, so while they may not always directly concern the historical analyst, their approaches and findings have helped shape some later work undertaken in historical pragmatics. Walker’s discussion, for example, of the importance of verbatim reports within modern legal contexts (and their implied dominance of the written over the spoken) directly informs the discussion of verbatimness by researchers of premodern written texts (discussed below in section 2). Finally, Stygall’s third category, “legal language as instrument”, covers research that examines how power is established (or reduced) through language, and, as well, how social goals are reached (1994: 20–28). The assumptions of this category, while sometimes not explicitly connected to the study of historical documents, do provide a way to examine the sociocultural contexts of premodern written texts more theoretically, drawing, as some do, on the work by Tiersma (1993) and Solan (1992) among others. More recent studies include Tiersma (1999) and Conley and O’Barr (1998), the latter exploring the politics and power of legal discourse and including a chapter on historical documents and the insights we can gain through their analysis.

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Historical pragmatic study of courtroom discourse: Research questions and methodology

A diachronic approach to written texts from earlier historical periods is a relatively recent development, often recognized as beginning with Andreas H. Jucker’s (1995) Historical Pragmatics, which ushered in more systematic studies of pragmatic issues in written documents across different historical periods. Before embarking on any specific pragmatic analysis of a historical legal document, a number of major issues must be acknowledged. First, there is the so-called “data problem”, which refers to the problems inherent in drawing conclusions about language behavior from written artifacts instead of direct observation (for discussions of the problem, see Jucker 1995; Kytö and Walker 2003; Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007). In historical records, the language forms are generally all that are available for analysis. As we will see below, scholars have responded to this methodological obstacle in different ways. A second issue is the “uniformitarian doctrine”, which posits that changes occurring in the past can be integrated with those occurring in the present (Labov 1972: 161, 1994). Romaine (1982: 122), in her related but softened “principle” (not doctrine), argues that linguistic forces that operate today parallel those that existed in the past. Though the debates over the uniformitarian doctrine or principle are not settled, all diachronic studies make a basic assumption of this sort, an assumption that has been borne out by much historical language data revealing important similarities between modern and older language forms. The third central issue for the analyst concerns the nature of the written language and how well it reflects the spoken language of the time. Some scholars assert that the degree of orality present in the written text is a predictor of its faithfulness to spoken forms (Culpeper and Kytö 2000; Kytö and Walker 2003). This question has led to numerous studies concerning orality, verbatimness and the role of the individuals (clerks or scribes) who transcribed courtroom proceedings, which will be discussed below in section 3. The final, fundamental concerns for historical analyses of courtroom discourse are the linguistic reliability of the editions used for analysis and the use of various electronic corpora. A number of scholars have addressed these two related problems through, for example, examination of the scribes and the shorthand system used in the seventeenth-century trials at England’s Old Bailey (cf. Huber 2007; Shoemaker 2008) and in the development of annotating systems for corpora (Archer 2005, 2007). These topics will also be taken up in more detail in section 3. Turning now to the specific foci of current published research on courtroom discourse from a historical perspective, I have organized it into three broad areas. The first category takes up the questions raised about the nature of the written text, the notion of “verbatim” language and its relationship to oral language, and the practices of the scribes or clerks who recorded the courtroom language. Included in

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this section is a discussion of corpus-based studies. The second category is termed “core pragmatic approaches”, since studies in this group focus on some of the phenomena most associated with pragmatics: speech acts, indirectness, politeness, Grice’s cooperative principle, power and solidarity, relevance, etc. The third category could be seen as a subset of the second, though taking a more micro-analytic stance; I call this group “strategies in the courtroom”, since the research specifically examines, for example, questions and answers (yes/no and wh-), turn-taking, discourse markers and the like. However, these three areas should not be seen as discrete since many of the articles and books discussed below overlap the divisions of this chapter.

3.

Orality, the reliability of “verbatim” texts, scribal practices and corpus-based approaches

The question of the relationship between oral language and written language is central to understanding courtroom discourse from a historical pragmatic viewpoint. This chapter looks at orality and legal language only. I begin with an important early article, “Orality, literacy, and performativity in Anglo-Saxon wills” by Brenda Danet and Bryna Bogoch (1994), even though its focus does not fall squarely within the traditional definition of courtroom. The authors investigate the transition of Anglo-Saxon oral wills to written texts, which then serve as the “performers” of willing property. They make the point that this move is a shift from a high context-dependent oral language to a lower context-dependent setting, i.e. a written document wherein contextual details must be specified rather than assumed. Danet and Bogoch point out that the shift from oral to written wills was not complete in Anglo-Saxon England, and that as a result the standardization of legal formats was incomplete as well. However, from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense that the speech act functionality of the written will increases greatly, although not in a strictly linear manner. A stable text type, such as a written will with its codified form and language, begins to perform certain sociocultural functions (such as willing property). Danet and Bogoch conclude that full examination of the performativity of subsequent written legal texts is impossible without acknowledging this preliterate stage. Danet and Bogoch also include a short discussion of how the modern practice of video recording of deposition, trials and wills allows for the revival of those context-dependent factors of Anglo-Saxon oral wills (including face-to-face interaction, the personal and kinesthetic relationship of participants, use of visual aids, etc.). The shift from oral to written language underlies, even when not explicitly discussed, much of the work on the texts of courtroom discourse, as we will see in the discussion below (section 5) of linguistic tactics in the courtroom. The written evidence in legal documents gives us an idea of the forms used but often the context

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has to be reconstructed and recontextualized, which are not easy tasks. Several scholars have approached this topic from various perspectives. Turning first to the question of whether courtroom documents can be considered as verbatim records of the oral language in the courtrooms, some basic theoretical issues are taken up by Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö’s article, “Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken interaction (re)cast as writing” (2000). While this essay discusses trial records as only one of four speech-related text types – fictional prose, dramatic dialogue, trial records, witness depositions – their conclusions have significantly influenced subsequent studies of courtroom discourse. By asking how various written forms are linguistically similar to those of oral face-toface speech and by examining specific features (such as first- and second-person pronouns, repetition, questions and answers), Culpeper and Kytö demonstrate that written text types such as trial proceedings filter aspects of oral conversation for various reasons, including both the desire to dramatize interactions and to make the document official by highlighting its written nature (194–195). This study includes a diachronic exploration of changes in the text types from 1600 to 1720, noting a shift towards linguistic features typically associated with spoken interaction (195). Another article, “The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: How ‘bad’ can ‘bad’ data be?” (Kytö and Walker 2003), also focuses on the reliability of trial discourse and witness depositions as representative of speech in the early modern period. The authors point out that historical texts, especially from the sixteenth century onward, are available in many formats: manuscripts, early imprints, later imprints, facsimiles and reprints, text editions and, now, electronic corpora such as A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760) (221–222). Such a cornucopia of material forces the researcher to assess carefully the choice of texts studied and their reliability, bearing in mind especially the evidence for whether they are representative of past speech forms and the editorial complications inherent in textual transmission over time (Kytö and Walker 2003: 222). These two topics are thoroughly examined, with the authors arguing that certain witness depositions and trial proceedings are “fairly reliable records of spoken interaction of the past” (241) and that certain text formats are preferable to others – usually manuscripts or early imprints providing data that have less editorial interference than later versions or editions (241–242). Kytö and Walker remind us that our use of the words “verbatim” or “faithful” to describe the language of trial proceedings is conventional, and that our analyses are usually rather narrowly focused on the lexical items and grammatical structures conveyed (224). An emphasis on the pragmatics of language use will raise additional questions, and the compilers of corpora designed for linguistic study, rather than legal or historical research, must be careful in their choice of text (e.g. manuscript, early imprint, etc.). The authors assert that early imprints are the best format for corpus compilers but that endusers must also be ready to compare and check with other formats when necessary so as to best study the spoken interaction that occurred (241–242). Additional use-

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ful articles that take up questions of corpus compilation and choices of texts for analysis are Merja Kytö, Terry Walker and Peter Grund’s “English witness depositions 1560–1760: An electronic text edition” (2007) and Peter Grund, Merja Kytö and Matti Rissanen’s “Editing the Salem witchcraft records: An exploration of a linguistic treasury” (2004). Any reader of courtroom discourse in premodern documents will be struck by the use of both direct speech forms (that is, courtroom interaction presented in dialogue format) and reported speech forms (third-person, written summaries of what witnesses, defendants or magistrates said), with the latter understood to be further from the norms of face-to-face orality discussed by Culpeper and Kytö (2000) and Kytö and Walker (2003). Daniel Collins’ full-length study, Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective (2001), examines such speech-reporting strategies in trial transcripts written in Old Russian (chancery variety) during the early Muscovite period (c. 1410–1505). Collins explores how scholars can “reanimate” the voices of premodern writers (286), and that by doing so we can arrive at an approximation of the “emic” framework of the communicative event. His investigation, as a genre-based study of lexical and syntactic forms, highlights how formto-function matching can take place. Collins’ conclusions highlight the importance of studying the context-sensitive nature of reported speech, for instance, and its essential purposive uses (287). His extensive study of sixteenth-century trial transcripts suggests that written texts utilizing reported speech are correlated with the degree of control the scribes had over the interpretative process (297). He further claims that changes during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the norms of cooperation are the result of changes in trial structure. A shift from verbal confrontations in the courtroom to the use of memoranda and petitions emphasize the corroboratory nature of the transcripts rather than the “undigested testimony” given in records rendered in direct speech (Collins 2001: 297–298). Collins extends this topic in his 2006 article, “Speech reporting and the suppression of orality in seventeenth-century Russian trial dossiers”, through a study of 17 dossiers compiled in the Moscow Slave Chancery between 1620 and 1630. He shows how the balance of direct and reported discourse shifted during this time so that the dossiers come to be predominately in reported speech. As such the records represent a “suppression of orality”, but they also reflect a change in the legal institution of the period and the ascendancy of written forms (2006: 285–287). Another discussion of orality, Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky’s “Representations of orality in Early Modern English trial records” (2000), focuses on the degree of orality traceable in this time period. Using the data from two trials in 1685 (The trial of Titus Oates and the trial of Lady Alice Lisle), the author discusses turn-taking and questioning strategies in general terms, developing a notion of direct and indirect questioning, the former being closer to coercive questioning in the modern sense, and the latter appearing to be a kind of vague questioning that prompts a re-

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worded direct question from the defendant, e.g. “What does your Lordship ask me?” (Kryk-Kastovsky 2000: 221–222). Kryk-Kastovsky also explores how power relations between what she calls the “interrogators” and “the interrogated” can be understood in various discourse markers such as pray, prithee, ay, and hark. She examines forms of address used by the participants, showing the various uses of your Lordship, friend, and good Woman and their function according to the Gricean cooperative principle (Kryk-Kastovsky 2000: 224–225). Like Collins and Kryk-Kastovsky, Colette Moore (2002) takes up the issue of direct speech and orality in her study of defamation cases in the Early Modern English period. She points out that court depositions of defamation cases are of particular interest to researchers examining topics in orality, since the alleged crime in these instances is a speech injury, and so it seems that the precise presentation of utterances would be critical. The records she examines are written in Latin and English, with the former language used for reporting the legal requirements and the latter for the alleged utterances. Moore argues that the English words should not be interpreted as “verbatim”, but that they do “originate-in-speech” (Moore 2002: 413) and are more speech-based than reported discourse. The scribes conformed to a definition of defamation of the time, and thus rendered the witnesses’ speech more “in sense” than in exact words (Moore 2002: 413). Moore suggests that earlier conceptions of what constitutes direct speech differ from modern notions. In a second article on depositions, Moore turns her attention to the process of grammaticalization of a discourse marker in “The use of videlicet in Early Modern slander depositions” (2006). Moore argues that the use of videlicet (literally “one is permitted to see” or “namely”) developed a quotative sense as it was borrowed into English and that this sense developed in legal records only (247–248, 256). Through a study of 120 depositions given between 1245 and 1645, she shows how it is used in slander depositions to organize the discourse and, more importantly, that it developed as a specific written marker rather than an oral marker. Her data show how videlicet operates to move from the discourse of the deposition itself to the reported speech of the witness, and, sometimes, at the same time as a codeswitch from Latin to English; for example, she gives an excerpt from the King’s Bench, 1550: “hec verba scandalosa opprobriosa et diffamatoria de prefato Alveredo publice et aperte dixit retulit et propalavit videlicet Thowe arte a theffe and so I wyll prove the” (Moore 2006: 249–250, emphasis added). Moore’s article suggests the need for further research into how external pragmatic factors of different genre types such as legal documents influence the grammaticalization of forms (257). She concludes that studying written discourse markers such as videlicet will improve our understanding of how they differ from oral discourse markers in modern English, from well, um, you know to new quotative markers such as be+like (as in “So then, I’m like, let’s go …”) (257–258).2 Until recently, overt study of the individuals who transcribed courtroom interactions was scant even though scribes played significant roles. This is changing,

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however, and the processes of recording and publishing trial proceedings and the scribes’ role in written trial records are taken up in five recent articles. Three of the articles explore the witchcraft trial documents from 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, (Grund 2007; Doty 2007; Hiltunen and Peikola 2007) while two others (Shoemaker 2008 and Huber 2007) focus on trials held in England’s Old Bailey in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Turning first to those examining the Salem material, it should be noted at the outset that many of the Salem “trial” records of 1692 could be better described as records of “preliminary hearings”. That is, some of the records present face-to-face oral examinations by magistrates of individuals accused of witchcraft. After such examinations (which were rendered in both direct discourse and reported discourse formats), more formal trials by jury were held and for those trials some extant records remain, while for others they are missing. In other words, the “trial” records are sometimes of formal trials and sometimes not. Discussing the events in Salem is a case where our use of legal terms is imprecise by modern standards: the idea of the “courtroom”, for instance, is fluid since most examinations were held in the Salem meeting house, a building designed and primarily used for Puritan church services (though civil gatherings were allowed to be held there), while other examinations were held in taverns.3 The important point is that the pragmatic force of the events and the language used therein contained immense legal power at the time regardless of the physical setting and the formal parameters of the interactions. Turning to the first article, “From tongue to text: The transmission of the Salem witchcraft examination records” (2007) by Peter Grund focuses on examination records for which there are two or more versions. He compares the different versions in light of their textual and linguistic differences, concluding that the recorders (scribes) of the examinations were concerned with the substance of the hearings rather than the exact spoken interaction (145). Grund uses the same term, “reconstructions”, as Collins to point out that the Salem examination records both approximate the spoken language of the time and serve as an indication of what the scribes themselves considered spoken interaction, resulting in a “mixture of the original characteristics of the proceedings and the recorder’s reconstructed courtroom features” (145). Kathleen L. Doty’s (2007) article, “Telling tales: The role of scribes in constructing the discourse of the Salem witchcraft trials”, also utilizes the Salem examination records in an attempt to pinpoint the extent of scribal influence. She is interested in exploring how scribal beliefs and values, as representative of the historical and religious context, are encoded in the texts. In order to study this aspect, Doty coded 68 records, first for their use of evaluative comments by the scribes, and secondly for expressive adjectives and adverbs that reflect the scribes’ attitudes and values as well as the pragmatic context. Evaluative comments are much like stage directions in dramatic texts and describe the actions, events or words of those in the Salem meeting house during examinations; they provide a kind of con-

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textual commentary from the scribes (Doty 2007: 27). Such commentary is usually in the third person, past tense, and can occur at any place in the record including interspersed within the dialogue. One of the examples of scribal commentary, which shows how the scribe posited agency behind actions in the meeting house, is found in the record for the examination of Bridget Bishop: “She shake her head & the afflicted were tortured” (Doty 2007: 31) The author also coded adjectives and adverbs that suggest subjective interpretation and expression; examples include amaz’d condition, grievously vexed, sober witnesses, suffered greatly. Doty’s quantitative data suggest that the records presented in direct discourse and during the early period of the trials contain the highest number of instances of both contextual commentary and expressive adjectives or adverbs (Doty 2007: 39). She speculates that as the trials wore on and details were repeated from examination to examination, reported discourse came to be the choice of the scribes, and there was less impetus to provide commentary. Risto Hiltunen and Matti Peikola, in “Trial discourse and manuscript context: Scribal profiles in the Salem witchcraft records” (2007), emphasize the importance of using original manuscripts and the contexts of their production in any discussion of scribal influence. The authors use two legal genres, depositions and indictments, as case studies and show how linguistic and paleographic analysis helps to build profiles of the scribes. The article also highlights one of the problems with research on the Salem material and its reliance on the 1977 printed edition of the documents (cf. Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977). Because Hiltunen and Peikola are associate editors of a new compilation of the Salem material that relies on a fresh review of original manuscripts (cf. Rosenthal 2009), they are able to conclusively show the “scribal layers” of some documents (wherein more than one individual had a hand in the composition of the record), and also in some cases to identify the scribes. The identification of scribes and their roles in the legal documentation processes in this infamous episode substantially increases our understanding of the sociocultural contexts of Salem. The importance of taking into consideration the contexts of historical texts, especially the reliability of their composition and their public reception, is emphasized in two studies of documents from trial proceedings at the Old Bailey (London’s central criminal court) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “The Old Bailey proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London” (Shoemaker 2008) and “The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th- century spoken English” (Huber 2007). The first article describes the compilation of the trial proceedings and the complex social contexts of their publication. Shoemaker analyzed 30 trials between 1720 and 1778, arguing that scribes presented only partial accounts (based on a linguistic analysis of the shorthand system used for note-taking) and that the published versions were highly compressed. For example, some

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sessions (as the proceedings were called) that lasted three to six days were shortened to printed pamphlets of eight to twelve pages (560); in one instance – the murder trial of Richard Savage – the actual trial lasted about eight hours yet the testimony given in print consisted of only 2,447 words, and they could be spoken in less than an hour (560). Shoemaker describes the social context of these popular trial proceedings, noting that in 1778 the City of London tried to regulate the publication of the proceedings as they became larger and more detailed by claiming they were a “true, fair, and perfect narrative” (562), even though there were at the same time sustained complaints that they were unreliable. The printers, who had substantial influence on the content and format of the materials, relied on shorthand takers present at Old Bailey for their text but then they (the printers) shaped the proceedings under the conflicting desires to both entertain their readers (by highlighting thefts, robberies, rapes and murders) and convey an image of authority and accuracy (563–564). While giving more emphasis to historical research than linguistic study, Shoemaker’s article nonetheless sheds light on concerns of the historical pragmatist such as the complexities of the printed documents themselves, questions of reliability and accuracy, and their contexts of creation. Indeed, Shoemaker directs the “Old Bailey Proceedings Online” project, which is the subject of the next article under consideration. Magnus Huber begins by describing the Old Bailey Corpus as consisting of the records of over 100,000 trials that took place from 1674 to 1874; there is also a digitized version of 52 million words. The corpus is based on the published trial proceedings and serves as a document of spoken English from the 1720s onward. Huber points out, however, that the electronic corpus was not designed with linguists in mind, which results in some methodological problems such as the design of searches (3). On the other hand, the corpus also presents socio-biographical characteristics of speakers, such as age, sex and profession, which can be useful for the historical pragmatist. Regarding the question of the reliability of the Old Bailey corpora, Huber outlines the genesis of the documents as follows: the speech event (trial) itself; its recording in shorthand or written notes by scribes; the preparation of the manuscript for the printer (i.e. the notes are expanded into texts); proofreading; and typesetting and printing (12). He argues that additions or alterations to the linguistic utterances could be made at any of these stages by scribes or the printer. Thus he warns that linguists analyzing the documents as valid representations of spoken language should make themselves familiar with stenographic writing as a part of assessing the questions of reliability and faithfulness (15). Only then would the researcher be able to evaluate confidently the data used to make generalizations about historical language use (cf. Kytö and Walker 2003). To test if the Old Bailey Proceedings are reliable as a linguistic source, Huber compares a trial from the Proceedings to an alternative account and carries out a quantitative study of negative contraction to test the internal linguistic consistency (8–32). On the basis of his detailed analysis, Huber concludes that the language of the Old Bailey Pro-

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ceedings is “arguably as near as we can get to the everyday language predating the invention of audio recording technology” (36). Dawn Archer takes a similar perspective on using historical corpora in her article “Developing a more detailed picture of the English courtroom (1640–1760): Data and methodological issues facing historical pragmatics” (2007). Archer argues that a comprehensive understanding of courtroom discourse in the Early Modern English period will only be achieved when the linguistic researcher embraces the work of historians, both legal and social, and draws from corpora (210); in this sense she agrees with Huber. After a useful overview of the most essential corpora of historical documents available in English, her essay describes the annotation system she developed (Archer 2005; see section 5 for a discussion of this publication) for the Sociopragmatic Corpus (1640–1760), a subsection of the Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760). In addition to the standard markers of gender, age and status, the text is coded for three features: form (lexical, prosodic and grammatical aspects), force (speech act aspect) and interactional intent (discoursal aspect), with the third feature relating to the purpose and position of the utterance in a discourse (Archer 2007: 194–195). Archer’s essay provides a strong counterpoint to Jucker’s warning that corpus studies, on the basis of using search strings, run the risk of losing the ability to tag or note some pragmatic features such as implicitness or functional categories, or contextual information (Jucker 2008: 902). Her basic claim is that the annotated Sociopragmatic Corpus is “potentially more representative of the English historical courtroom” (194) than the previous analyses, which cover a single specific crime (such as witchcraft in Salem), a particular time frame such as Early Modern trials, or state trials. Admittedly, her emphasis on the quantitative approach to studying courtroom discourse may lead some to question whether she slights the qualitative nature of much historical pragmatic research. Archer, however, acknowledges that qualitative analysis must still be done so as to consider the importance of findings (210), and she emphasizes that both micro- and macro-level analysis will help us see similarities or differences between trials; furthermore, careful consideration of the type of trial and the time period will allow scholars to understand how these aspects influence the norms of discourse that appear in trial documents (210–211). Taken together, the seven articles discussed in this section highlight issues of orality and the key role played by scribes and recorders of oral courtroom discourse before the advent of electronic recording devices. As the researchers surveyed here recommend, further study of scribal reconstructions will help us situate these documents more precisely in their linguistic, pragmatic and historical-social processes of production. As Collins (2001, 2006) notes, the context-sensitive nature of the different speech forms used in courtroom discourse reflects changes in legal structures of different time periods. Likewise, the questions of orality must be strongly linked to scribal reconstruction processes, especially in different types of trials: chancery (Collins 2001, 2006), criminal (Kryk-Kastovsky 2000; Moore

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2002), and witchcraft (Grund 2007; Doty 2007; Hiltunen and Peikola 2007). It seems that the urge to view written and printed legal records as a constructed artifact with improvements or alterations to the “verbatim” spoken word has a long historical genesis.4 Another study in this section (Moore 2006) explores the grammaticalization process at work and suggests the need for further study into the relationship between genre types (such as legal forms) and the grammaticalization of oral forms into written markers. Chapter 4 of this handbook offers a comprehensive discussion of grammaticalization across genre types and historical periods. The use of corpora for data is also helpful to the historical pragmatist, though the scholars working in this area all warn that the contents of the corpus must be carefully evaluated and placed in their social and cultural context (Huber 2007; Archer 2007; Shoemaker 2008). These studies also highlight how the design and construction of electronic corpora can aid or hinder precise pragmatic research. Chapter 2 of this handbook provides a further discussion of the importance of corpora in historical pragmatics.

4.

Core pragmatic approaches

4.1.

Speech acts

This section examines research in some of the core areas of pragmatics such as speech acts, the cooperative principle and politeness theory. Perhaps because of the performative nature of much legal language, speech-act theory has been an important influence on historical studies of courtroom discourse, with four recent articles utilizing concepts from speech-act theory in their analyses. These articles provide an affirmative answer to the basic question of whether a synchronic category such as speech acts can be used to adequately describe historical data. Daniel Collins’ essay, “Indirectness in legal speech acts: An argument against the Out of Ritual hypothesis” (2009), affirms a foundational assumption – the uniformitarian hypothesis – through a careful rebuttal of Marcel Bax’s (2002) “out of ritual” hypothesis. Bax argues that pragmatic indirectness is relatively recent, arising only in the late Middle Ages, coming out of ritual language use, and it is the result of a cognitive shift rather than cultural factors. Collins notes that the corpus used by Bax consists of narrative and dramatic texts, and he questions the usefulness of such texts for analyzing features of oral language of the times. Collins tests Bax’s claims by studying legal speech acts in various languages in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, noting that legal language is a blend of ritualized, formulaic language but at the same time is emblematic of Searle’s “direction of fit”: from world to words (Collins 2009: 434). He concludes that indirectness is older than is claimed by the out of ritual hypothesis. For a fuller discussion of the research in rituals, see Chapter 16 in this handbook.

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Wojciech Kwarcin´ski’s essay, “A diachronic speech act analysis of sworn testimonies in Polish criminal trials” (2006), traces the development of sworn testimony from medieval testimony in Old Polish to a selection of recorded modern criminal trials. The data used – several thousand records – are unusual since the documents are written in Latin with only oaths and sworn testimony written in Old Polish (or the language of the defendant). At the time, trials were conducted in Old Polish, but the Polish language was not accepted as a part of the written records until the sixteenth century. Such a situation highlights the importance of thoroughly examining the sociohistorical conditions of courtroom discourse. In his study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records with comparisons to modern criminal trial records, Kwarcin´ski demonstrates how the legal speech act of sworn testimony and its illocutionary force has altered over time. For example, preparatory conditions (as defined by Searle 1969) for the medieval oaths differed considerably from the modern context wherein speakers can give an oath only about matters known to them. In medieval sworn testimony, a witness could serve as a subsidiary oath-taker and thereby reinforce words spoken by the primary oath-taker (306). Kwarcin´ski demonstrates that constitutive rules, such as those operating in legal contexts like sworn testimony, cannot be analyzed if divorced from their sociohistorical context (312). A proper interpretation of the function attributed to a speech act can be made only through historical analysis of such function or functions. Both the medieval and the modern oath, however, relies on certain phraseology and contextual conditions to be felicitous. The formulaic nature of legal speech acts is also explored in Kathleen L. Doty and Risto Hiltunen’s “Formulaic discourse and speech acts in the witchcraft trial records of Salem, 1692” (2009). They look at formulaic discourse in indictments, depositions and examinations, noting the characteristic speech acts in these three legal genres. The authors show that the three genres exist along a continuum, with indictments at the most formal end, since they consist of prefabricated formulations with distinct wording and phraseology. Failure to follow the formula precisely could risk the charge being dropped on legal grounds. The “institutional voice” of legality prevails in indictments, and as such they are termed as nearly “frozen” (Doty and Hiltunen 2009: 464) In the middle of the continuum are the depositions that exhibit formulaic elements – most notably the three-part structure of opening, narrative and closing, as well as the formulaic legal language within the opening and closings – while more variety appears in the narrative voices of the deponents. Finally, the examination records can be placed on the continuum as the most informal, since they exhibit a higher degree of speech-relatedness; those in direct discourse, for example, suggest the turns taken at the hearing, and the words, phrases and narratives told by the examinees show more individualized phraseology and fewer formulaic utterances than those in depositions and indictments. Different types of speech acts come to dominate the different genres, with, for instance, the acts of accusing and charging foregrounded in indictments through

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specific formulae, such as the word pr’sents in the Commencement. The authors find that the Salem depositions and examinations, wherein the narrative voices of the accusers and defendants are heard most clearly, contain more constative speech-act verbs, resulting from the use of recorded discourse rather than direct discourse (468). In “Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials” (2009), Barbara KrykKastovsky revisits the issue of the degree of orality present in trial documents and the theoretical foundations of diachronic analysis of speech acts. Her article explores precisely how the structure of the speech-act formulae of magistrates, defendants and witnesses can be mined to understand both the illocutionary act and the attendant perlocutionary effects. Kryk-Kastovsky develops the concept of “speech act networks” to study complex discourse sets which consist of interrelated illocutionary acts and their corresponding perlocutionary effects. These discourse sets include questioning or cross-examining a witness, cross-examining a defendant, and questions from judges to both counsel and witnesses. Kryk-Kastovsky argues that perlocutionary effects can be retrieved rather confidently as long as the researcher articulates the interdependence of speech acts with the sociohistorical and cultural conditions of the times and the specific characteristics of a particular genre (450). Her examples from two well-known trials in England (Titus Oates on trial for perjury and Lady Alice Lisle for high treason) during the year 1685 show, for instance, how the question and answer adjacency pairs, so predominant in courtroom discourse, have greater perlocutionary effects in the courtroom than when used in everyday, ordinary discourse (442). The above four articles discussing concepts from speech-act theory provide detailed analysis of illocutionary acts and their specific features. The authors all agree that differences in text type (for instance, trial, deposition, questions from legal counsel or judges, etc.) will influence which type of speech act comes to be predominant. Some attention is given to perlocutionary effects and the concepts of speech-act networks (Kryk-Kastovsky 2009), which both warrant more study in the future and which offer scholars another direction of research. The study of perlocutionary effects and networks highlights the importance of linking linguistic description and analysis to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts since we cannot surmise confidently the effects of speech acts without such understanding. (For additional discussion of speech acts from a historical pragmatic perspective, see Chapter 13 of this handbook.) 4.2.

Politeness and impoliteness

The verbal interactions among participants in a courtroom are governed by quite specific legal norms and behaviors. Courtroom “rules” of interaction have a complex relationship to larger cultural norms of polite behavior, with courtrooms being more formal and dependent upon genre-specific language than everyday verbal in-

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teraction (see Chapter 19 of this handbook for a full discussion of politeness as an area of historical pragmatics). Linguists have examined the norms of verbal politeness (or conversely, impoliteness) within the framework of politeness theory (cf. Grice 1975; Brown and Levinson 1987). Two recent articles explore questions of politeness and impoliteness from a diachronic perspective. Using concepts from Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987), Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen (2007) explore the conversational strategies used by the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials in “The sullen and the talkative: Discourse strategies in the Salem examinations”. Unlike the legal system of twenty-first-century America, the legal context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692 drew heavily from a presumption of guilt rather than innocence. The authors ask whether features of negative politeness should have appeared in the confessions of the accused individuals, and they use eight case studies to offer a tentative answer. Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen find that in four cases the accused individual mounted a successful defense through cooperation (that is, they confessed to witchcraft), while in the other four cases denial and uncooperative strategies resulted in a death sentence. The four who resisted did not use negative politeness strategies and instead directly challenged the magistrates, asked questions, and in general did not “save the face” of the authorities (15). Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen conclude that principles such as politeness, which are worked out by synchronic pragmatics, may not always be able to be applied directly to premodern texts. They agree with other researchers, however, that politeness principles can help to elucidate particular features of historical courtroom discourse as long as these principles are not uncritically accepted. Conclusions about politeness by Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen are taken up in Krisda Chaemsaithong’s “Re-visiting Salem: Self-face and self-politeness in the Salem witchcraft trials” (2009), which develops the notion of self-politeness as a strategy or expression used by defendants in the Salem trials to “mitigate self-face threats” (63) and to save their own face. He points out that those accused of witchcraft had lost their self-face as a result of the accusations against them, and interprets both denial and shifting the blame as the two ways to restore self-face (64). In his analysis of 15 trial records, all presented in direct discourse, Chaemsaithong concentrates on how the accused balance self-politeness with other forms of politeness within a courtroom setting of unequal power relations. The accused could respond to threatening questions from the magistrates in different ways, and the author argues that the strategies used by the accused in Salem do not align with the usual assumption that a less powerful participant in the courtroom will always show politeness to the more powerful (81). For example, Chaemsaithong presents four possible paths the examinee could (and did) take when responding to facethreatening questions. First, the examinee could shift the blame to another person, a strategy he classifies as maintaining both self- and other-politeness since it avoids challenging the judge’s presupposition that witchcraft was present in Salem; secondly, the examinee could show other-politeness only by offering an

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outright, immediate confession; third, when the examinee offered a denial of the accusations, he or she saved self-face only; and fourth, the strategy of simultaneously maintaining and destroying self-face occurred when the examinee laughed or argued with the magistrate, since these actions are socially unacceptable in court but provide a strong response to the magistrate. The author suggests that in the Salem witchcraft trials, life and death issues were closely linked with public image – especially that of proper Christian belief and behavior – which was very much on display during the trials. As a result, the strategies of self-politeness warrant more attention from the researcher of courtroom discourse, though Chaemsaithong acknowledges that his study is small and focuses only on the trial records of one witchcraft episode. He recommends further study of self-politeness in historical courtroom discourse on other types of trials and across different cultures and times (81). In her article, “Impoliteness in Early Modern English courtroom discourse”, Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (2006) also explores whether notions developed for synchronic pragmatics can be fruitfully utilized in diachronic approaches. Like Chaemsaithong, and Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen, she offers a qualified affirmative answer, noting that contexts of language use have changed and that different dimensions of analysis are needed. Kryk-Kastovsky analyses two records of Early Modern English court trials from the perspective of Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann’s (2003) notion of impoliteness, using the legal texts to explore how both overt and covert impoliteness is manifest. The notion of overt impoliteness is relatively straightforward, as, for instance, in “bald-on-record” impolite utterances (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003), name-calling, swearing or insults. Kryk-Kastovsky argues that covert impoliteness can be seen in three aspects of courtroom discourse: various forms of address, for instance epithets like Sirrah, Blockhead, you vile Wretch, and in sarcastic uses of lexical items such as friend or Good Woman; questioning strategies (utilizing both yes/no and wh-questions); and discourse markers such as pray and prithee (230–239). She also gives careful attention to the importance of social power and status in these two trials and how it intersects with instances of verbal impoliteness. In contrast to the conclusions of Chaemsaithong (2009), Kryk-Kastovsky asserts that magistrates are freer than other courtroom personae to engage in multiple forms of linguistic impoliteness. And while both authors give attention to the power dynamics in the trials examined, the differences in their conclusions may hinge, in part, on the very different trial contexts and the more structured nature of the Early Modern English courtroom in contrast to the more chaotic setting of many of the examinations in Salem. In general, all three articles examining politeness and impoliteness highlight the challenges inherent in analyzing the perlocutionary force of courtroom utterances in historical documents. They suggest that the historical study of polite or impolite forms in courtroom discourse must not uncritically accept modern politeness norms or definitions as its basis, nor should we take up current conceptualizations

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of power relations and the social status of participants without question. Both of these topics certainly warrant further study, making use, when possible, of additional historical periods and types of trials, and within cultures not heretofore examined.

5.

Linguistic strategies in the courtroom

A number of studies have offered detailed examinations of different linguistic strategies used in the courtroom, such as questions and answers by different participants, as well as questions of power asymmetries and social relationships that are manifest in linguistic forms. This section discusses four key works that take a more micro-level analysis of specific features of courtroom language. The earliest publication on questions and answers from a historical pragmatic perspective is Risto Hiltunen’s 1996 article, “‘Tell me, be you a witch?’: Questions in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692”, which provides a careful analysis of the opening question and answer sequences in 26 examinations of the Salem trials. Hiltunen studies the examination records that are presented in direct discourse, focusing on the kinds of questions asked and their functions. He divides the cases into two groups: first, the individuals who denied the accusations of witchcraft and, secondly, those who confessed. Hiltunen points out that the questioning strategies of the magistrates rested on a foundational belief that there was indeed witchcraft present in Salem Village, and that their questions assumed a bias of guilt, unlike the modern American judicial system which is predicated on “innocent until proven guilty”. Hiltunen outlines three types of questions used by the examiners: (i) wh-questions that are “leading”, that is they carry a negative presupposition (e.g. “How long hast thou been a witch?”) (25); (ii) open wh-questions which carry a neutral presupposition by asking what the accused has to say in her or his defense (e.g. “What say you to this charge?”) (26); (iii) alternative questions in which two alternatives are given to the defendant (e.g. “Are you guilty, or not?”) (26). The data show that questions are used by the defendants less often, and that rhetorical questions, when they do appear, occur near the end of a defendant’s answer and then only by those individuals who denied the accusations. Hiltunen points out that since rhetorical questions presuppose their answers, the accused used them as a way of drawing attention to the contradictions of the examiners, of being uncooperative, and of challenging the authority of the prosecutors – all indicating the important aspect of power in courtroom proceedings (29–31). When examining the tactics of those who readily confessed to the charges of witchcraft, Hiltunen notes three major strategies at work, showing up first in the defense of Tituba, whose testimony he deems as prototypical: (i) the accused minimizes the confession and tells the court no more than what is necessary; (ii) the accused plays down her or his involvement, stating that the devil is the source of evil deeds; and (iii) the accused

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offers overt repentance (35). Hiltunen notes that all those who confessed made use of at least one of these techniques. The topic of confessions is taken up more fully in a subsequent article by Kathleen L. Doty and Risto Hiltunen, “‘I will tell, I will tell’: Confessional patterns in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692” (2002). The authors analyze 29 individual records of examinations held between March and September 1692 (the height of the crisis), both those rendered in direct discourse and reported discourse. The two different forms of their data lead to different methods. The records in direct discourse, for example, are scrutinized for the pragmatic strategies of the examiners in their questioning and the accused in their answers. The examiners made extensive use of presuppositions, and the accused responded by confessing readily or by first denying the charge and then later confessing. The authors reaffirm Hiltunen’s earlier claim that Tituba’s testimony (she was the first to be examined and her records are given in direct discourse) serves as a prototype for subsequent confessors, since she makes strategic moves in providing information and finally confessing (Doty and Hiltunen 2002: 312–315) that are followed by others in their confessions. According to the authors, the records given in reported discourse are fruitfully studied by using William Labov’s model of narrative to read and interpret the confessions (Labov 1997). The authors provide careful analyses from the perspective of narrative structure to argue that, while the records do not present temporally organized narratives, they offer implicit narratives, which are pragmatically and psychologically coherent. The stories in these records present vivid representations of the sociohistorical context, the accused and the devil. Doty and Hiltunen point out that Labov’s concepts of orientation and complicating action in particular help to understand the individuals’ struggles to present a credible confession and narrative, with various details suggesting social, religious and personal concerns coming to be accepted and repeated by many confessors (319–320). The authors’ multilayered approach to the examination records of the confessors, who ultimately survived the crisis because they confessed, provides a useful example of how both form and function of courtroom discourse must be situated in a solid understanding of the sociohistorical context. Confessions in the Salem material are also the focus of Dawn Archer’s “‘Can innocent people be guilty?’ A sociopragmatic analysis of examination transcripts from the Salem witchcraft trials” (2002). In her study, Archer analyzes records from twelve individuals accused of witchcraft and shows how the magistrates’ presumption of “guilty but unwilling to confess” had significant influence on the structure and function of their questions as well as the answers they elicited (28). For instance, their presumption made many questions into accusations, and the magistrates could also decide not to infer when the accused flouted a maxim so as to imply that they were not guilty. Archer uses Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and the four attendant maxims to discuss the answers of the accused, and finds Grice’s theory most relevant when the accused took an indirect approach to a ques-

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tion. However, at times, the magistrates ignored the defendants’ unwillingness to cooperate and continued to pressure them to abandon their own reality perspectives and to adopt that of the magistrates: guilty, and, eventually, willing to confess. The most comprehensive study of questions and answers appears in Dawn Archer’s book, Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis (2005). This study draws on 16 trial documents from a subsection of the Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760), a computerized database of five speech types (prose fiction, comedy drama, courtroom proceedings, witness depositions, handbooks in dialogue format) compiled by Merja Kytö and Jonathan Culpeper. Archer focuses on the use of questions and answers by judges, lawyers, witnesses and defendants, and positions her study as “historical sociopragmatics”, which takes into account the sociological context of the language used in a particular setting such as a courtroom (Archer 2005: 3). She blends this approach with corpus methodology, allowing her to provide solid quantitative descriptions of discourse forms and functions. In addition, Archer’s book examines how question and answer sequences highlight the unequal power relationship between examiners and their respondents; it also provides evidence that the use of questions changed over the time period she studies. The beginning of Archer’s book takes up the necessary topic of how questions and answers are defined from a theoretical perspective (chapters 2–3), finding that questions are generally recognized by three features: form (lexical, grammatical, prosodic elements), force (the speech-act aspect) and discourse structure (Archer 2005: 70), while answers are less a speech-act type and more a discourse function; answers can carry a wide range of forces beyond a confirmation or denial, for instance (71). In her discussion of questioning procedures in the Early Modern English courtroom, Archer points out that questions and answers were used strategically much as they are in modern courtroom settings, with some important exceptions: defendants in the early modern period were allowed to question witnesses and examiners, thus upsetting the usual understanding of “power/powerless” status (103). As well, judges were not the only participants who used imperatives or “tell me” forms, as sometimes, such as in the Salem witchcraft trials, defendants used such forms, leading Archer to conclude that questions and answers are not the only sequences that warrant examination by researchers (103–104). The fourth chapter in the book offers an annotation system by which questions and answers are identified by three features: interactional intent (the purpose), force (the speaker’s intention) and form (the grammatical question or answer type) (cf. 120–134). Chapters 5–10 provide the data and results of using the annotation system on the discourse of all the participants (judges, lawyers, defendants, witnesses) in the trial texts. Each chapter provides quantitative and qualitative data with conclusions. Following her own suggestion that discourse forms, in addition to questions and answers, should be examined by the historical pragmatist, Archer uses her penultimate chapter to study “requests”, “requires” and

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“counsels” by judges, lawyers and defendants. She reiterates that there is much to be gained by further research into this area for a fuller understanding of the language of the Early Modern English courtroom (Archer 2005: 279). Archer’s book draws a number of conclusions that are important for understanding premodern courtroom discourse. First, the period of 1640–1760 in England was one of important linguistic change in legal contexts; for instance, near the end of the time period, judges began less and less to ask questions of witnesses and defendants, and the function of questions shifted to clarification-seeking rather than confirmation-seeking (Archer 2005: 282–283). Archer makes a connection between this shift and the emergence of a more adversarial system used by defense and prosecution counsels, who essentially took over the questioning by judges (282–283). Second, as noted above, studying other forms of elicitation in addition to questions and answers will help us develop a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of the courtroom especially for certain kinds of trials and during times of crisis (287). Each of these studies takes a micro-analytic stance toward courtroom discourse and looks closely at principle linguistic features such as questions and answers and their varied functions, such as manipulation (through presupposition and indirection), confession or denial. In addition, all the authors emphasize the central role of the sociohistorical and legal context of any trial. This is particularly important for Archer (2002, 2005) and Doty and Hiltunen (2002), since the legal and social contexts of Salem, Massachusetts, and England (while quite different) were key participants, so to speak, in the discourse exhibited in the documents.

6.

Conclusion

Although the books and essays surveyed in this chapter are disparate, they share a passion for the discourse of historical courtrooms, and they share a number of concerns about the study of discourse from a historical pragmatic perspective. Some of these shared concerns suggest directions for future research as well. First, the importance of careful study of the social, historical and legal contexts cannot be underestimated. Some of the essays or books represented here provide solid contextual information and offer models for further research (cf. Archer 2002, 2005, 2006a; Doty and Hiltunen 2002; Kryk-Kastovsky 2006; Kwarcin´ski 2006; Doty 2007; Shoemaker 2008), and as such their work falls under the “broad” conceptualization of historical pragmatics as outlined by Jucker (2008: 895). Their work shows that researchers must have a thorough understanding of the sociopragmatic context of premodern documents in order to arrive at illuminating and accurate insights. Indeed, if the historical pragmatic approach is to remain true to its focus “on language use in past contexts” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 13) and the making of meaning, there is much to be gained from exploring the work of social

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and intellectual historians, for instance, as they may help us see the general principles underlying change. The rise of literacy and the growing importance of written and printed legal documents is just one example of how social history can intersect with historical pragmatic analysis. Similarly, the articles in this chapter that explore the nature of “verbatim” texts (Culpeper and Kytö 2000; Kryk-Kastovsky 2000; Kytö and Walker 2003; Collins 2006; Grund 2007) point to the necessity of a solid understanding of the sociohistorical context. Likewise, the evolution of judicial systems in different eras and countries needs more attention from researchers since the constraints of the legal framework in place at a particular time and place will influence the type and content of discourse in the courtroom. The notion of the “courtroom” is a part of the judicial context and we would do well to re-examine our basic assumption of what constitutes a courtroom. Studying how the idea of a courtroom was defined in premodern eras and in different countries and cultures, especially in terms of how this most basic contextual factor appears, eventually, in written documents describing legal transactions, could be useful in developing cross-cultural diachronic linguistics. How were laws codified in action and word, for example, in ancient cultures? For instance, in the ancient Hebraic tradition, legal matters were decided at the city gate and presided over by elders. As practices such as this altered over time, do traces linger in particular linguistic features? In other words, it would be productive for linguistic scholars to revisit the work of legal historians in order to study the evolution of the law since its early stages, looking again at the transitional periods and the shift from oral to written forms (following Danet and Bogoch 1994; see also Kadri 2005). Similarly, looking at the rise of juries and how their presence affects courtroom interaction would be useful, as would exploring the rise of advocates (attorneys) for defendants (cf. Archer 2006b). Second, a number of scholars suggest that we move beyond our focus on questions and answers in courtroom discourse and explore other aspects of verbal interactions (cf. Archer 2005, 2006a). And certainly this suggestion could be applied to the study of courtroom discourse in any time period. For the historical courtroom, however, it could be fruitful, for instance, to study the directions given by judges to juries, though such an approach can only be taken for the centuries following the rise of juries. Notions from modern linguistics, such as perlocutionary effects and politeness theory, may also lead us to look more precisely at language interaction in the courtroom, such as that between judges and attorneys or judges and witnesses. Archer (2006b) has argued that we should begin to study the language of a complete trial, rather than only excerpts that support our working hypotheses. And although this chapter does not include studies of modern (contemporary) courtroom discourse, historical pragmaticians may want to undertake comparative studies of historical legal contexts with those of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. If one chooses to begin these kinds of studies, new factors would quickly arise, such as the differences in the judicial systems in force, different roles

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for attorneys and judges, and even how the presence of cameras and video recorders in contemporary courtrooms affects the language used (as contrasted with historical trials or in proceedings where they are prohibited). Studies such as these could lead us in new directions, especially if we examine how language can be directed at third-party listeners, not simply the participants in trials and those serving on juries. At the same time, they too must emphasize the importance of providing full descriptions of the sociohistorical contexts. A third topic that appears repeatedly in this chapter is the careful use of corpora. Many of the articles and books discussed use historical corpora (i.e. the Salem Witchcraft Papers, the Old Bailey Corpus, etc.), and three articles discuss some of the major problems of corpora, notably the sources and design of the corpus and the transparency of how it is put to use (cf. Archer 2005, 2007; Huber 2007; Shoemaker 2008). The use of quantitative data does not preclude qualitative analysis, as Huber (2007) and Archer (2007) point out, and there are recent important advances in the sociopragmatic annotation of historical corpora (Archer 2007; Archer and Culpeper 2003). These annotation systems will help alleviate the risk of losing the sophistication of traditional philological or qualitative analysis, although they may not entirely allow for the marking of multiple or implicit meanings, contextual information, or functional categories. Historical corpora highlight the tension between the frequency and distribution of language forms in a text and the inferences about language use and function, the latter serving as the traditional emphasis of pragmatic analyses. These methodological problems will need to be taken into account in future studies relying on corpora. (See Chapter 2 of this handbook for a more in-depth discussion of corpora.) The fourth and final topic shared by some of the texts covered here is the question of power dynamics in the courtroom. We could do more in this arena by expanding our understanding of power relations among participants in a courtroom. In Stygall’s conceptualization, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, she presents three categories of approaches to legal language: as object, as process and as instrument of power. All of the works surveyed in this chapter focus on either courtroom discourse as process or as instrument of power. While her research focuses on the twentieth-century American civil courtroom, her use of a Foucauldian perspective on power is instructive. Instead of looking only at the powerful and powerless roles within a courtroom, which often use rather simple definitions of power (as do some of the studies included here, e.g. Archer 2002; Chaemsaithong 2009; Doty and Hiltunen 2002; Kryk-Kastovsky 2006), Stygall urges linguists to consider Foucault’s conceptions of discourse and power, since our linguistic analyses, she argues, have been hampered by the lack of a social theory to help explain legal discourse in context and its continuing and constitutive power in society (1994: 192–193). Stygall takes up Foucault’s notion of speaking roles, or “modalities”, to illustrate how this might work, and she makes good use of legal historians such as Thomas Green (1985) and Harry Kirk (1976); she also provides a brief dis-

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cussion of Lawrence Rosen’s (1989) analysis of speaking roles in Islamic courts in Morocco (Stygall 1994: 197–198), which could serve as an example of a cross-cultural approach to the thorny topic of power. Much of what Stygall presents is very similar to work by discourse analysts or anthropologists using contemporary legal settings (e.g. Kurzon 1986, 1994; Conley and O’Barr 1998; Philips 1998), including those interested in critical discourse analysis. While not having the potential influence to actually change power asymmetries within legal contexts – the way that research on current courtrooms has (such as studies on rape trials, for instance) – it could be instructive for the historical pragmatician to examine this research to see how modern social theory might illuminate historical documents. As Conley and O’Barr state, “when we look to the past, we find the antecedents of some of the most significant sociolegal issues in our own world” (1998: 128). Our interest in the historical courtroom may lead us at times to more recent centuries, since when exactly does “history” begin?

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the editors of this handbook and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter. It has benefited greatly from their suggestions. Needless to say, any remaining infelicities or omissions are my responsibility.

Notes 1 For a thorough and lively history of the development of the criminal trial format in western countries, see Kadri (2005). 2 For a full discussion of the grammaticalization of like in contemporary English usage, see Romaine and Lange (1999). 3 The sociohistorical context of the Salem witchcraft trials is described in Doty and Hiltunen (2002), Archer (2002) and Rosenthal (2009). 4 Interestingly, as Slembrouck (1992) points out in his study of the practices involved in creating the printed minutes of British parliamentary debates, many contemporary transcriptions of trials or government hearings are not truly verbatim. His article describes the process by which the records of the British parliamentary oral debates are edited, modified to adhere to norms of standard English, and even proofread and edited by the speakers themselves (Slembrouck 1992: 104) – a process seen as acceptable practice within our dominant representational culture. Similarly, Walker (1990) claims that a transcript which is the result of a reporter’s conscious interventions is more readable than its verbatim version; as such, contemporary court transcripts, like some of the historical documents discussed in this chapter, suggest a balance between adequacy and readability.

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Online sources of corpora A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560–1760), compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University), http://www.engelska.uu.se/corpus.html. Old Bailey Corpus (OBC), http://www.oldbaileyonline.org. Salem Witchcraft Papers (SWP), http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/.

References Archer, Dawn 2002 ‘Can innocent people be guilty?’ A sociopragmatic analysis of examination transcripts from the Salem witchcraft trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.1: 1–30. Archer, Dawn 2005 Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Archer, Dawn 2006a (Re)initiating strategies: Judges and defendants in Early Modern English courtrooms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 181–211. Archer, Dawn 2006b Tracing the development of advocacy in two nineteenth-century English trials. In: Marina Dossena and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English, 41–68. Bern: Peter Lang. Archer, Dawn 2007 Developing a more detailed picture of the English courtroom (1640–1760): Data and methodological issues facing historical pragmatics. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 185–217. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper 2003 Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics. In: Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery (eds.), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, 37–58. (Lódz´ Studies in Language 8.) Bern: Peter Lang. Bax, Marcel 2002 Rites of rivalry: Ritual interaction and the emergence of indirect language use. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 6–105. Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum 1977 The Salem Witchcraft Papers, Vol. I–III. New York: Da Capo Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaemsaithong, Krisda 2009 Re-visiting Salem: Self-face and self-politeness in the Salem witchcraft trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.1: 56–83.

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Charrow, Robert P., and Veda R. Charrow 1979 Making legal language understandable: A psycholinguistic study of jury instructions. Columbia Law Review 79: 1,306–1,374. Collins Daniel E. 2001 Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Collins, Daniel E. 2006 Speech reporting and the suppression of orality in seventeenth-century Russian trial dossiers. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 265–292. Collins, Daniel E. 2009 Indirectness in legal speech acts: An argument against the Out of Ritual hypothesis. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 427–439. Conley, John M., and William M. O’Barr 1998 Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cotterill, Janet 2003 Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O. J. Simpson Trial. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö 2000 Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken interaction (re)cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 175–199. Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield and Anne Wichmann 2003 Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1545–1579. Danet, Brenda 1980 Language and the legal process. Law and Society Review 14: 445–464. Danet, Brenda, and Bryna Bogoch 1994 Orality, literacy, and performativity in Anglo-Saxon wills. In: John Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law, 100–135. London: Longman. Doty, Kathleen L. 2007 Telling tales: The role of scribes in constructing the discourse of the Salem witchcraft trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.1: 25–41. Doty, Kathleen L., and Risto Hiltunen 2002 ‘I will tell, I will tell’: Confessional patterns in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.2: 299–335. Doty, Kathleen L., and Risto Hiltunen 2009 Formulaic discourse and speech acts in the witchcraft trial records of Salem, 1692. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 458–469. Gibbons, John (ed.) 1994 Language and the Law. London: Longman. Green, Thomas A. 1985 Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and John L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III: Speech Acts, 41–58. London: Academic Press. Grund, Peter 2007 From tongue to text: The transmission of the Salem witchcraft examination records. American Speech 82.2: 119–150.

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Grund, Peter, Merja Kytö and Matti Rissanen 2004 Editing the Salem witchcraft records: An exploration of a linguistic treasury. American Speech 79.2: 14–66. Hiltunen, Risto 1996 ‘Tell me, be you a witch?’: Questions in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 9.25: 17–37. Hiltunen, Risto, and Matti Peikola 2007 Trial discourse and manuscript context: Scribal profiles in the Salem witchcraft records. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.1: 43–68. Huber, Magnus 2007 The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin and Arja Nurmi (eds.), Annotating Variation and Change: Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1: 1–39. On-line at: http://www.helsinki.fi/variengljournal/volumes/01/huber. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2008 Historical pragmatics. Language and Linguistics Compass 2.5: 894–906. Kadri, Sadakat 2005 The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson. New York: Random House. Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena, and Matti Rissanen 2007 The sullen and the talkative: Discourse strategies in the Salem examinations. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8.1: 1–24. Kirk, Harry 1976 Portrait of a Profession: A History of the Solicitor’s Professor, 1100 to the Present Day. London: Oyez. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 2000 Representations of orality in Early Modern English trial records. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 201–230. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 2006 Impoliteness in Early Modern English courtroom discourse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 213–243. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 2009 Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 440–457. Kurzon, Dennis 1986 “It is hereby performed …” Explorations in Legal Speech Acts. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kurzon, Dennis 1994 Linguistics and legal discourse: An introduction. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 7.19: 5–12. Kwarcin´ski, Wojciech 2006 A diachronic speech act analysis of sworn testimonies in Polish criminal trials. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 293–314.

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Kytö, Merja, and Terry Walker 2003 The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: How ‘bad’ can ‘bad’ data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31.3: 221–248. Kytö, Merja, Terry Walker and Peter Grund 2007 English witness depositions 1560–1760: An electronic text edition. ICAME Journal 31: 65–85. Labov, William 1972 Sociolinguistics Patterns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labov, William 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labov, William 1997 Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1–4: 395–415. Langbein, John H. 1999 The prosecutorial origins of defence counsel in the eighteenth century: The appearance of solicitors. Cambridge Law Journal 58.2: 314–365. Langbein, John H. 2003 Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levi, Judith N., and Anne Graffam Walker (eds.) 1990 Language in the Judicial Process. New York: Plenum. Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little Brown. Moore, Colette 2002 Reporting direct speech in Early Modern slander depositions. In: Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, 399–416. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Moore, Colette 2006 The use of videlicet in Early Modern slander depositions: A case of genre-specific grammaticalization. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7.2: 245–263. O’Barr, William 1981 The language of the law. In: Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath (eds.), Language in the U.S.A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Barr, William 1982 Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press. Philips, Susan U. 1985 Strategies of clarification in judges’ use of language: From the written to the spoken. Discourse Processes 8: 421–436. Philips, Susan U. 1998 Ideology in the Language of Judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics, and Courtroom Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Romaine, Suzanne 1982 Socio-historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Romaine, Suzanne, and Deborah Lange 1999 The use of ‘like’ as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech 65: 215–217.

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Rosen, Lawrence 1989 Islamic “case law” and the logic of consequence. In: June Starr and Jane Fishburne Collier (eds.), History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, 302–319. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Rosenthal, Bernard, General (ed.) 2009 Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John 1969 Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shoemaker, Robert 2008 The Old Bailey proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London. Journal of British Studies 47: 559–580. Slembrouck, Stef 1992 The Parliamentary Hansard ‘verbatim’ report: The written construction of spoken discourse. Language and Literature 1.2: 101–119. Solan, Lawrence 1992 The Language of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stygall, Gail 1994 Trial Language: Differential Discourse Processing and Discursive Formation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methodological Issues in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tiersma, Peter M. 1993 The judge as linguist. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 27.1: 269–283. Tiersma, Peter M. 1999 Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walker, Anne Graffam 1990 Language at work in the law. In: Judith N. Levi and Anne Graffam Walker (eds.), Language in the Judicial Process, 203–244. New York: Plenum.

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Correspondence Minna Palander-Collin

1.

Introduction

Over the past fifteen years or so, letters have been used for a considerable number of historical linguistic studies encompassing historical pragmatics, and entire volumes and journal issues have been devoted to studies on various aspects of letters and letter writing (e.g. Barton and Hall 1999; Dossena and Fitzmaurice 2006; Dossena and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg [eds.] 1996; Nevalainen and Tanskanen [2004] 2007; Palander-Collin and Nevala 2005; Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin 2009). Recently, the field has expanded to such an extent that it is not possible to cover existing research on correspondence comprehensively in an overview article. Instead, I shall focus on central social, discursive and linguistic aspects of letters in the historical context to provide basic coordinates for the conditions shaping the genre. I shall then survey recent linguistic research carried out mostly on English letters, discussing the variety of research purposes that letters have been used for. The survey concentrates on “historical pragmatics” as understood in the neutral and fairly broad sense suggested by Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007: 13), who define historical pragmatics as a branch focusing on language use in past contexts and examining how meaning is made. Consequently, the discussion is organised around the types of contexts that letters have been used to reconstruct. These range from macro-societal to microinteractional contexts and include sociolinguistic studies that employ personal correspondence to provide the social context for linguistic variation and change, and studies that explore letters for their identity and relational meanings and situationspecific pragmatic meanings. These studies employ various frameworks, such as variationist sociolinguistics, network model, audience design, accommodation theory, politeness theory and speech act theory, and partly focus on different but complementary levels in their analysis of the interplay of the individual, language and society. Moreover, letters feature prominently in literary and cultural studies and they are edited as a scholarly pursuit; these aspects of epistolary scholarship are left outside the scope of this survey. The popularity of letters as research material is understandable, as letter writing has always been a situated activity and letters are written interaction between identifiable individuals in most cases. Consequently, letters provide intriguing possibilities for a variety of sociolinguistic, sociopragmatic and pragmatic approaches that rely on the social and/or situational contextualisation of language use. In spite of clearly recognisable universal genre characteristics such as: “a

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letter consists of written communication typically addressed to one or more named recipients, and identifies the sender and conveys a message” (Nevalainen 2004: 181), letters are, nevertheless, somewhat difficult to define. The letter genre is heterogeneous, as letters can be both conventional and unconventional, formal and informal, public and private, and they can have mixed purposes (Görlach 1999: 141). Similarly, the language of letters is often placed in the oral category, but letters in fact show linguistic variation that relates, for instance, to the social background of the writer, the writer-addressee relationship and the purpose of the letter. Moreover, the conventions of the letter genre and the language of letters have changed over time.

2.

Private, public and personal letters

Letters are often classified into private and public correspondence, although the division is not always a straightforward one. To begin with, public and private letters are not sharply distinguished in letter-type classifications proposed by classical authorities or Renaissance humanists that served widely as models for letter writing in Western Europe (Chartier 1991: 163–164; Nevalainen 2001: 211; Perelman 1991: 98–99). Erasmus ([1522] 1985: 71), in his De conscribendis epistolis, divides letters into persuasive, demonstrative and judicial types. He also separates familiar letters as a category of its own, but the subject matters in these letters vary greatly, as they can be informative, announcing public or private news, narrative, congratulatory, mourning, instructional; expressing gratitude, offering assistance, or humorous. Moreover, it has been shown that, in practice, the organisation of English public and private letters was quite similar in the fifteenth century as both types drew on the medieval tradition of ars dictaminis (Nevalainen 2001: 211). The division between public and private letters, however, became the concern of many later manuals, such as Formula Literarum (c. 1665: Rule 24v) warning readers not to mix “private businesse wth publick~” (cited in Nevala 2004: 40; Chartier 1991: 163). Also from the perspective of social practice, the division between public and private was somewhat blurred as the literate upper ranks of early modern society typically wrote letters both in their private and official roles. Personal and public/ official matters could also be mixed in the same letter, as, for example, diplomatic letters were used to convey foreign news and diplomatic business together with personal news and greetings; merchants’ letters could contain both business and family news; and a wife’s letter could inform the husband of estate management and offspring at the same time. Letters were also used as means of intellectual discussion in the early modern period, and the intense correspondence within the intellectual community of the Enlightenment period, known as the Republic of Letters, contributed to the emergence of other clearly public genres like newspaper

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articles and scientific articles (Bazerman 1999; Goodman 1994). From the midseventeenth to the early nineteenth century, letters were an important form of scientific writing and a way of creating and maintaining a new scientific community where private and personal as well as public and social faces of discourse were mixed (Valle 2004; Gotti 2006). These letters were typically circulated among a correspondence network of scientists and contained both personal and family news, and scientific information. Such letters were also presented to the Royal Society and published in the Philosophical Transactions. Even a genre like nineteenth-century business correspondence turns out to be rather indeterminate in terms of the private–public dichotomy. The level of formality and the degree of personal involvement in these letters seem to depend on the pragmatic needs of the “encoder”, who assumes a different social role when writing to clients or business partners (Dossena 2006). Similarly, private letters exchanged between family members, friends and acquaintances often became public as they were circulated and read aloud in social gatherings, or even edited for publication by the writer in some cases (Austin 1999; Fitzmaurice 2002a: 4–6; Henderson 2002). Finally, the term “personal” has also been used to avoid the strict and often impossible distinction between the private and public aspects of letter writing. Personal correspondence thus entails letters that were written between identifiable individuals on a personal basis but are not necessarily strictly private (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996: 40, 54). The fact that the correspondents can often be identified makes personal correspondence a particularly useful genre for pragmatic studies and facilitates contextualisation on many levels, as will be discussed below.

3.

Letter writing as a social practice

To understand the external conditions shaping letters, we shall first survey the background on which the discursive action of letter-writing took place. The social aspects of letter-writing most clearly include macro-societal issues like the distribution of literacy and power, relevant social distinctions like social hierarchies and gender, and dominant ideologies like religion (for Fairclough’s model of social and discursive context and its application to the contextualisation of letters, see Wood 2004, 2009). The letter seems to be a very basic way of communicating over distance, as letters can be found among the first extant written texts of ancient cultures. This allows explorations into the development of the genre in many geographical, social and historical contexts. For example, we can still read letters written in the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina (c. 1307–1070BC ) or in the ancient Mesopotamian city and kingdom of Mari (1774–1760BC ) (Nissinen 2003; Toivari-Viitala 2004). The earliest remaining Mesopotamian writings on clay tablets, dating from

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around 3100BC , are administrative records pointing to a complex administrative system and the need to regulate official and business matters, but also family letters were common in this context from the first centuries of the second millennium onwards. The records found in family archives show that in some Mesopotamian population groups it was common to correspond with family, friends and business partners, and even a considerable number of letters written or received by women remain in the archives (Trolle Larsen 1989: 137–139). Moreover, Latin letters from the first and second centuries AD, written on papyri, ostraca and wooden tablets, have survived from Egypt and Northern Britain. They include letters written by different people for various purposes, such as letters by and to ordinary soldiers, officers, civilians and slaves, and include official military correspondence, business correspondence and private correspondence (Halla-aho 2008). In addition, Russian birchbark letters provide a unique source of medieval Russian and the Novgorod dialect from the eleventh to the fifteenth century (see e.g. Vermeer 1995). As suggested above, letter-writing is a social practice requiring some level of literacy. This means that the majority of extant letters provides access to the writings of members of literate elites of the past, although letters, unlike many other written genres, are also among the texts written by lower-class writers, including farmers, soldiers, artisans, housemaids and paupers (Austin 1999; Fairman 1999; Vandenbussche and Elspass [eds.] 2007). The distribution of literacy depends on the provision of education and wealth and the structures of power in society. Attitudes towards the necessity and usefulness of literacy have also varied, and it has often been the privilege of boys from upper social ranks to learn more advanced written registers, in particular. Basic literacy skills could be learned at home, at school or during apprenticeship. Scholars have estimated the levels of literacy in earlier periods. For instance, analysing the social structure of illiteracy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, Cressy (1980: 118–119) concludes that “the gentle and clerical elite were well distanced from the yeomen and tradesmen, who in turn maintained a solid superiority over the husbandman and labourers” as far as literacy skills were concerned. Geographical differences in the level of literacy also occurred, and the London population in general was more literate than the inhabitants of rural areas (Cressy 1980: 121). Women’s illiteracy was on a par with that of the lowest-status men. The level of literacy increased from an estimated 10 per cent for men and 1 per cent for women in 1500, to 30 per cent for men and 10 per cent for women by the mid-seventeenth century (Cressy 1980: 177–176). This means that letters written by women or by the lower social ranks in earlier periods are scarce in comparison to those written by high-ranking men. The levels of literacy in Europe rose from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, particularly with the growing availability of schooling for the masses, but still a great deal of variation occurred between geographical locations, social classes, and between men and women (Maynes 1985: 13–14).

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Moreover, letters are explicitly tied to social organisation, as they overtly recognise the writer and the recipient. In the Mesopotamian documents, the persons involved become clearly designated by way of titles and personal names that establish routines, standardised behaviour and levels in the hierarchical structures (Trolle Larsen 1989: 137). Similarly, notions of social hierarchy are strongly present in the medieval European ars dictaminis tradition, as in order to follow the standardised form the writer’s first question was “What is the rank of the person to whom I am writing this letter?” rather than “What am I going to say?” (Perelman 1991: 102). Linguistic coding of hierarchical relationships is also evident in the recommendations of early modern conduct literature and letter-writing manuals (Bryson 1998; Nevala 2004: 41). For instance, one of the earliest English manuals, Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586: 13), advised readers that the first thing to consider when writing a letter was “the estate and reputation of the partie, as whether he be our better, our equal, or inferiour”. The norms of speech and writing were, thus, central to the civility of the early modern period and apparently a form of cultural and symbolic capital. Issues of power and social organisation are evident in letters on the very local level as letter-writers write in various roles that may change from one situation and recipient to another. These may include family roles such as younger brother writing to elder brother, or mother to daughter; professional roles such as writer to publisher, or master to servant; or more vague and informal social roles such as friends. The relationships between the correspondents can be established on the basis of internal evidence (e.g. address forms), information provided by secondary sources (e.g. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and sociohistorical research (e.g. social ranks, family relations, gender roles, forms of education). This process does not always allow specific characterisations of the correspondents, even such vague ones as friends; instead, more general, but at the same time more reliable, classifications like noblewoman to noblewoman have to be used. Personal information about people of lower ranks is particularly scarce. Finally, the role of religion was important in the development of medieval letter-writing conventions as religious dogma was distributed through letters, and the medieval ars dictaminis was developed for ecclesiastical and secular administrative purposes (Bazerman 1999; Perelman 1991). But religion is also evident in the conventional language of letters, as, for instance, God and Jesus were evoked in many early vernacular formulae and letters were conventionally finished with a brief closing prayer (see e.g. Austin 1973; Davis 1965; Sánchez Roura 2001; Wood 2009). Social and discursive aspects of letter-writing are thus interrelated, as the discussion of letter-writing manuals in the following section further illustrates.

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Discursive aspects of letter-writing

This section focuses on factors concerning the writing, sending and reading of letters. The production, distribution and consumption of letters entail many physical aspects resulting from the fact that letters are communication at a geographical and temporal distance. Barton and Hall (1999) and especially Hall (1999) provide thorough discussions of the materiality of letter-writing in the nineteenth century, from choosing a pen and paper to posting the letter, as well as various accessories available for letter-writers like inks of different colours, travelling inkwells, pen racks, pen cleaners, stationery racks, writing cases, letter-trays and letter-openers. (For the material aspects of eighteenth-century letter-writing, see Baker 1980; for a summary of earlier periods, see e.g. Nevala 2004: 43–50.) Many material choices were socially just as important as the language of the letter. For example, de Courtin (1671: 136–141) advises the reader that small-size paper shows “familiarity or indifference” and large-size paper “reverence and esteem”, and that the size of the blank space left between the address form “my Lord, Sir, or Madam” and the body of the letter should be “greater or lesser, according to the quality of the person to whom we write”; moreover, to put the date and place of writing “at the top when we write to a person of quality, is something presumptuous”. The handwriting was an important indicator of schooling, social standing and professionalism. Dury (2008) identifies the period from 1680 to the end of the eighteenth century as the heyday of the writing master, when the main dispute concerned the use of simple style as opposed to decorative calligraphy, which was mostly abandoned in the nineteenth century. The postal system was formalised throughout the nineteenth century, and the increasing mobility of labour, the development of mass education and the evolution of a fast railway system together with the introduction, in 1840, of a national penny post system in Britain contributed to the dramatic increase in the number of letters posted (Hall 1999: 88). Early postal services, however, were unreliable, as carriers could be attacked, or letters intercepted by the state and opened en route. Also, private messengers were used. For security, letters were carefully folded and sealed; the modern envelope appeared only at the end of the eighteenth century and more rapidly with the penny post (Hall 1999: 99; Nevala 2004: 46–47). Thus, some manuals advised readers to send copies of the letters in case they were intercepted or otherwise lost during the voyage (Nevala 2004: 47), and writers were wise to restrict the contents of the letter or occasionally resort to cipher, as the privacy of the message was not guaranteed. Perelman (1991: 98) suggests that, due to the expense and insecurity, letters became almost exclusively the domain of political and ecclesiastical discourse, especially in the early Middle Ages. The first English private letters are dated to the early fifteenth century; and it has been deemed that in the eighteenth century the letter was the most important text type (Goodman 1994: 137; Görlach 2001: 211). Fitzmaurice (2002a: 4) sug-

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gests that the letter was the most common kind of document written by literate adults in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As illiteracy was widespread, letters were also dictated to, or written by, professional scribes and amanuenses or by other (at least partially) literate persons who happened to be available. However, the fact that a letter was written by a scribe does not necessarily erase the original writer’s voice. Wood (2009) argues that, although Margaret Paston’s fifteenth-century letters were written by various other people on her behalf, the language they contain can still be considered hers (see also Davis 1972 for a similar conclusion). As a written genre with its own conventions, phraseology and a proper order of words, letter-writing had to be learned. Normative letter manuals with instructions, formulae and model letters circulated widely and were used in schools. However, the impact of manuals on actual letter-writing is not entirely clear, as writers seem to have had plenty of room to express their attitudes and dispositions (as discussed further in section 5.2 below). It may be the case that early letters are more formulaic, as it has been suggested that letters developed properly as a medium of selfexpression only from the late seventeenth century onwards (Fitzmaurice 2002a: 177–178; Fludernik 2007: 242). The origins of the medieval art of letter-writing, ars dictaminis, as a specialised branch of rhetoric go back to the Papal administration in eleventh-century Italy, but its history and sources of influence can be traced back to Greco-Roman Antiquity (Murphy 1974: 203; Perelman 1991: 99–100; Stowers 1986). Ars dictaminis emphasised the salutation, identifying and giving respect to the social role and status of the sender and the receiver, placing both within institutionalised social relations. Moreover, it was important to build a bond of good will with the recipient and to explicitly narrate the situation necessitating the letter and what was hoped for from the recipient (Bazerman 1999: 19–20, see section 2.5.2 on captatio benevolentiae). Murphy (1974: 226) suggests that after the twelfth century three somewhat distinct geographical and national developments occurred, these were called the FrenchEnglish, the German and the second Italian phase. Richardson (2001) argues that the influence of dictaminal treatises on middle-class English citizens in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was limited, as their needs centred on business; consequently, business formats, such as the letter of credit, served as models. English letter-writing manuals started to appear in the sixteenth century (Bryson 1998; Robertson 1942; also Nevala 2004: 265–268 provides a list of manuals). Many of these manuals were translations of Continental treatises, and they are related to the framework of polite discourse in general. During the seventeenth century, in particular, didactic manuals become less concerned with the academic form or practical purposes of letter-writing and more concerned with the criteria of politeness (Bryson 1998: 156). With the expansion of education and middle groups, the emergence of the familiar letter in the eighteenth century called for a new type of manual intended for the middling sort. If earlier business- and polite-letter man-

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uals had emphasised such formalities as proper titles and style for social superiors, equals and inferiors, the familiar letter was supposed to be written with conversational warmth and heartfelt sincerity (Dierks 1999: 31–34). From the perspective of the modern scholar, letters are a patchy source, like many texts from the past. For one thing, letters have been haphazardly preserved due to physical conditions like dampness, fire and bookworms, as well as human interference. As letters were apparently felt to be the property of the sender, they were often returned after the recipient’s death, and in their wills writers also often desired the destruction of their letters (for examples, see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005). Thus, it is common that only the out-letters or only the in-letters (or some of them) survive. This often makes it impossible for a modern scholar to analyse the correspondence in terms of consecutive “turns”. It may also be somewhat difficult in many cases to define the purpose and topic of writing, particularly if entire correspondences are not available. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2005: 114–116) identifies three factors affecting letters’ chances of survival in the eighteenth-century context. First, there might have been a sentimental reason for preserving letters, e.g., as a memento of a person. Second, it was important that the recipient was able to store the letters he received, which was possible if the recipient had a fairly fixed residence and enough space. Third, the chances of survival increased if the letters were perceived to be important from a literary or cultural-historical perspective. Whatever has remained from earlier periods, modern readers often access these records through editions rather than by reading the original manuscripts in public libraries or private family archives. In this case, the modern editor is a mediating author who makes sense of old texts and chooses what, and how, to present to modern readers. In the process, the editor may change the original letters in various ways, such as by modernising the spelling, adding punctuation or cutting sensitive or uninteresting material to make the text suitable for readers. Ideologies of more recent times affect the selection of letters available as editions – it is easy to find editions of eighteenth-century letters by literary and political figures of the period, for example, whereas editions containing letters by ordinary people are still rare.

5.

The language of letters

5.1.

Orality, variation and change

The language of letters is usually characterised as informal and closer to spoken language than the language of many other written genres. The studies by Biber and Finegan place personal letters in the oral or “involved” category, which contains features like first- and second-person pronouns, that deletion, contractions, present-tense verbs, private verbs, discourse particles and general hedges, among

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others (Biber 1988, 1995; Biber and Finegan 1989a, 1989b, 1992, 1997). In contemporary English, the linguistic characteristics of personal letters are close to face-to-face conversation, whereas professional letters are an informational genre closer to academic prose. A cross-linguistic comparison of personal letters in English, Tuvaluan, Korean and Somali shows that interactive and involved linguistic features cluster in personal letters (Biber 1995: chapter 7). In these four unrelated languages, important interactive features include first- and second-person pronouns, questions and imperatives (Biber 1995: 259, 275). Letters are also marked for the use of personal stance features in the four languages, but they are not integrated or elaborated structurally in any of them (Biber 1995: 275–276). These cross-linguistic similarities seem to stem from similar situational characteristics of the genre, as letters “represent a kind of written interaction produced by a single writer” (Biber 1995: 276). Studies also show that the language of English personal letters has changed diachronically towards a more involved and oral expression (Biber 1995: chapter 8; Biber and Finegan 1989a, 1989b, 1992) with increasing stance-marking (Biber 2004). Using a keyword analysis to compare eighteenth-century personal correspondence with the language of literary prose, newspaper language and dialogue of the same period, Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008: 33–34) found that personal names, titles and kinship terms, as well as temporal expressions, are typical of letters. These categories of words relate, at least partly, to the conventions of the genre, as terms referring to people are often used in the opening and closing formulae and in the endorsements on the outside of the letters, while temporal expressions are used in dates. In comparison to dialogues in speech-related texts like trial proceedings, witness depositions, drama (comedy), didactic works, prose fiction and some other miscellaneous texts, personal letters abound with the pronoun I and the mental verbs hope and think, whereas the most salient features in dialogues in comparison to letters are third-person pronouns, he in particular, and the reporting verb said. These findings suggest that personal letters are a remarkably writer-centred genre. Letters are also linguistically heterogeneous, as they show register variation. This can be seen in many linguistic features including, for instance, spelling (Osselton 1984; Sairio 2009; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1996, 1998), the use of abbreviations (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006), progressive verb forms (Sairio 2006), code-switching (Pahta and Nurmi 2009), reporting (Palander-Collin and Nevala 2006) and first- and second-person pronouns and private verbs (Palander-Collin 1999, 2006, 2009a, 2009b; Nurmi and Palander-Collin 2008). The observed variation often relates to continuums characterising the interpersonal relationship between the correspondents, like private–public, informal–formal, family–nonfamily, intimate–distant, as well as power hierarchies that are relevant both in family and non-family contexts. For example, discussing the use of progressive verbs in the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu and her circle, Sairio (2006) observes register differences in the use of the new and developing progressive con-

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struction, as Montagu uses the form particularly with her friends – and they also seem to use it with her – to create a sense of immediacy at the time of writing. However, Montagu does not use the device to such an extent when she writes to family members. Thus, it seems that the styles adopted in eighteenth-century family letters and letters to friends are somewhat different. Different types of variation in the language of letters are further discussed in the following sections. 5.2.

Convention and innovation

Letters are a conventional genre in many ways. There are letter manuals that provide the norm of writing, and letters contain opening and closing formulae indicating the relationship between the letter-writers in conventional ways, as well as the epistolary structure. Moreover, formulae and conventions seem to be very similar in different European languages, including medieval epistles of the Hanseatic trading alliance that were written in the Baltic Sea area in Swedish, Low German and Latin as part of the operations of the league (Tiisala 2004). We can consequently ask to what extent letter-writers merely conform to conventional patterns, repeat fixed phrases and follow the prescriptive instructions of writing manuals, and to what extent they show free agency. Focusing on the part securing the recipient’s goodwill known as captatio benevolentiae in medieval rhetorical treatises, Sánchez Roura (2000, 2001) explores how fixed captatio is in fifteenth-century Cely letters. Although formulaic in nature, captatio, nevertheless, shows considerable variation in its length, form, content and position in the letter. Parameters of age, social distance and relative power of the correspondents seem to affect the writer’s choice. Sánchez Roura (2001: 337) concludes that “the more socially close the correspondents are, the more captatio is included of the shorter direct form, as if to get the formality out of the way quickly; the more socially distant they are, the less captatio is present, although such instances as occur are of the more winding indirect and deferential type”. Nevala (2004) provides a thorough discussion of address terms in English letters from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century employing the politeness framework. Again, she deals with a conventional and formulaic part of the letter, but concludes that the use of address was multi-functional, flexible and even negotiable (2004: 259). Moreover, formulae and conventional language change as address terms were simplified and became more positively polite over time. Such changes may also be socially embedded, as the more positively polite address terms were used in gentry families before they are found in families of the nobility (2004: 143–144). Fitzmaurice (2008) notes that individual writers’ letters are idiosyncratic to the point of distinctiveness, but they also share practices that amount to recognisable conventions. Conventions shared by the majority of eighteenth-century English writers include spelling, punctuation, abbreviation, and other physical fea-

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tures of presentation. The actual handwriting, however, provides a source of variation, partly due to varying instruction in penmanship. Sons of clergymen and gentry often attended grammar schools and were given instruction in handwriting, while the nobility did not often have such formal education (2008: 104). Fitzmaurice found that the purpose of the communication was an important source of variation in the use of conventional formulae. While a newsletter focuses less on the face wants of the writer and the addressee, a letter of petition or a request makes extensive use of conventional formulae and humiliative discourse (2008: 104–105).

6.

Linguistic studies and contexts created with private letters

Letters are written communication and authentic interaction between writers and recipients. As such, they contain interactive elements that construct an appropriate authorial self and negotiate accepted participant relationships, and they provide an important source for studies of earlier patterns of interaction. Since more contextual information is usually available for letters than for many other written genres, letters are a particularly good genre for linguistic studies where contextualisation is crucial in the interpretation of language use. In the following discussion, I shall explore types of studies carried out using personal letters in particular, focusing on their major questions and some findings. All the approaches discussed are oriented to the use of language in the social contexts of everyday life, but they are often inspired by somewhat different theoretical underpinnings and sets of research questions. The levels of contextualisation available through letters can be summarised as follows: (1) Psychobiography – the letter-writer’s individual psychological and person historical background (e.g. family and educational background, social and geographical mobility, personal attitudes and dispositions); (2) Situated activity – the current letter written to a certain recipient in a specific context for certain purposes; (3) Social settings – norms governing the letter-writing activity, institutional contexts, social roles available for the writers; (4) Contextual resources – society-wide distribution and ownership of resources such as goods, money, status, occupation and quality of life. These four levels are proposed by Layder ([1997] 2003: 2–5, 78) as domains of social life that are related to one another over time and space, and bound together by social relations and positions, power, discourses and practices. Layder’s domain theory provides a sociological perspective on mechanisms of face-to-face transactions, incorporating both the notion of systematic and objective knowledge and the

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analysis of subjectivity to understand social life in general and face-to-face encounters in particular. According to this model, the individual is an active agent who does things which affect social relationships, but within the confines of what the structure, i.e. the objective features of social life, makes possible for the individual to do. 6.1.

Macro-sociolinguistics of language variation and change

Due to their “orality”, personal letters are considered a good genre for mapping patterns of variation and change in language history, as language change typically emerges in spoken language, while written language is more resistant to change. Also, extant English personal letters have a long history – from the first decades of the fifteenth century up to the present – which enables long diachronic studies. Inspired by variationist sociolinguistic research on present-day languages and communities, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s (1996, 2003) work employs personal correspondence from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century to explore the socially-embedded diffusion of a set of well-attested morphosyntactic changes in the history of English. Among other things, they correlate linguistic forms with the situational variable of register and the social variables of region and gender by means of VARBRUL analyses. Of these variables, register proves to be the weakest, as the changes studied are driven either by gender or region or both. In the early modern period, the role of the capital city seems to have been decisive, as only changes originating in London were primarily driven by gender, otherwise region was a more significant factor. The upper ranks played an important role in the diffusion of forms that later became part of Standard English (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 154, 198–200). In line with Bell’s style axiom (2001), Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 200) suggest, on the basis of the language of personal letters, that “the degree of register variation does not exceed the degree of social variation” and that “within social variation the range of regional variation is usually wider than the range of gender variation”. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003), as well as Laitinen (2007), show that the role of various social factors may vary with the stage of change. Studying the development of common-number pronouns in English, Laitinen (2007: 283) further concludes that “statistically significant sociolinguistic patterning makes it more likely that a variable will end up in what sometimes may be a long period of social condemnation or praise”. These studies are based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), which has also been used in Nurmi (1999), which provides a social history of periphrastic DO and, with letter material, dates the rise of DO in the history of English more precisely than before; it is also used in Palander-Collin (1999), which explores the social embedding of grammaticalisation processes in the development of the evidential expressions I THINK and METHINKS from Middle English to Early Modern English.

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In broad terms, these studies are interested in the distribution of linguistic resources in a population and focus on the macro-social group memberships of the letter-writers as a factor contributing to changes in the language system. The social categories used are historically relevant, as they are based on research in social history. For example, social hierarchies are a salient feature of earlier communities that can be established on the basis of contemporary commentary and sociohistorical research (e.g. Burke 2000; Wrightson 2002, 2003) and letter manuals (e.g. Bryson 1998; Nevala 2004). To complement the macro-societal perspective, personal letters open up a window on an individual’s language use and allow for more specific and nuanced analyses of patterns of variation and change in context (Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin 2009). Raumolin-Brunberg (2009), for example, has studied three individual letter-writers to see whether they take part in ongoing morphosyntactic changes and change their language in adulthood. Change does in fact take place, but there is significant divergence between the individuals’ behaviour depending on age, ambitions, and geographical and social migration. 6.2.

Networks of letter-writers

Network studies focus on correspondence as communication and contextualise letters as interactions between writers in a network. The locus of language variation and change is placed on the individual. Thus, being able to locate individual writers and their connections to other network members is crucial. Social network analysis in the historical context was specifically inspired by Lesley Milroy’s (1987) work on the Belfast vernacular, and a network approach might help us explain why and how language changes (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000a). In the present-day context, closed networks have been shown to be a conservative force resisting language change, whereas open networks generally lack a linguistic norm of their own and are consequently more likely to adopt a new linguistic form (Milroy 1987, 2000). On the basis of the fifteenth-century Paston letters, Bergs (2000, 2005) suggests that a person’s loose-tie role in the Paston family network seems to correlate with the role of a linguistic innovator. The network approach allows a glimpse at an individual’s language practices, making it possible even to observe sources of linguistic influence. This is the case in Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s (2000b) study, which shows that Sarah Fielding’s spelling conventions were influenced by her densely structured, multiplex social network, making her sensitive to different styles of writing and to a need to adopt them according to her relationship with the recipient. In the historical context, extensive network studies of private letters have been conducted especially on eighteenth-century networks, including the Addison circle (Wright 1994, 1997; Fitzmaurice 2002b), the Sheridan and the Johnson circles (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994) and the Bluestocking network (Sairio 2009).

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As social network analysis was originally developed for ethnographically oriented studies of contemporary communities, Milroy (2000: 220) points out that in the historical context it is difficult to obtain “the kind of ethnographic information which enables contemporary sociolinguists to assess which ties are meaningful to particular communities and to assess the degree of connectedness of an individual to a local community”. Aware of the pitfalls in historical network studies, Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2008) provides a detailed discussion of how letters can be used to reconstruct a person’s social network with reference to Robert Lowth, the eighteenth-century grammarian. Sairio (2009) also offers a good example of careful network reconstruction in the eighteenth-century context. Focusing on the network of the Bluestocking hostess Elizabeth Montagu, Sairio reconstructs her connections and evaluates the strength of ties on the basis of private letters and other historical evidence. She then uses the reconstructed network to analyse linguistic variation and change in the letters of the Montagu circle at different points in time according to the strength and nature of network ties, Montagu’s changing position in the network, as well as classic sociolinguistic variables like gender and age. Her analysis provides a complex picture, where network ties, sociolinguistic factors and normative influence contribute to patterns of variation and change to varying degrees. 6.3.

Meaning-making in interaction

Letters are written interaction and they are also studied as such. Fitzmaurice (2002a: 1) treats the familiar letter “as a pragmatic act that is embodied in a text that responds to a previous text, whether spoken or written, and at the same time anticipates new texts. The familiar letter thus represents an exchange between the actors”. In her work (2002a), Fitzmaurice explores how meanings are generated and interpreted, what the act of making a compliment or complaint, or of self-presentation or self-revelation involves, and how it is received and responded to. In her analysis, she employs pragmatic tools and concepts including speech act theory, inference, pragmatic presupposition, implicature and non-intended meanings, and more recently relevance theory (Fitzmaurice 2009). Fitzmaurice’s (2002a: 7) methodology is grounded in historical knowledge, as she contextualises letters in various ways. Constructing the historical context of writing and receiving letters involves reflecting the letters and their writers against other documentary sources testifying to practices, events and activities of individuals and groups at a particular point in time. Understanding the linguistic code marking the discourses of the period is another part of the analysis. When dealing with manuscript letters, the context may even include the physical environment and appearance of the texts (Fitzmaurice 2000). Furthermore, Fitzmaurice (2009) develops a pragmatic procedure for identifying implicature and inference in sets of correspondences; the method in this case is applied to letters exchanged between Edward Wortley

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(1678–1761) and Mary Pierrepont, better known as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), during their difficult courtship. Uncovering the temporally distant meanings and references of the letters, which may also have been ambiguous to the correspondents, involves interpretation on several embedded contextual layers. The first layer is the discursive cotext of the letter, the second layer is the situational context, i.e. courtship, and the third layer is the broader historical context in which the correspondence is embedded. The Sociocultural Reality and Language Practices (SoReaL) research group based at Helsinki has been interested in letters as a locus for studying patterns of social interaction and meaning-making. Inspired by interactional sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics, audience design and accommodation theory, the group has studied how social roles are expressed and constructed in the language of personal letters. Pahta and Nurmi (2009) explore code-switching patterns, Palander-Collin and Nevala (2006) reporting practices, Nevala (2009a, 2009b) third-person reference and Palander-Collin (2006, 2009a, 2009b) self-reference and addressee inclusion. These linguistic phenomena contribute to the construction of writers’ and recipients’ situated roles and have meaning-making potential on different levels. Switching, for example, is frequently used with intimate correspondents; it can be used to organise discourse, express stance or as an index of the writer’s identity; moreover, it can be seen as a style indexing particular types of social memberships and relationships (Pahta and Nurmi 2009). Focusing on gentlemen’s linguistic choices in sixteenth- and eighteenth-century personal letters, Palander-Collin (2009a) additionally explores the identity and interpersonal functions of language from the point of view of change. Her work employs corpus methods to extract frequently occurring three-word clusters and shows that gentlemen’s letter-writing styles become more subjective and “involved” over time, which seems to relate to the intersubjectivity of building rapport with the recipient. 6.4.

Language history from below

Private writings including personal letters feature prominently in the language-history-from-below approach (Elspass et al. 2007; Vandenbussche and Elspass [eds.] 2007). In this approach, writings of the lower and lower-middle classes are studied as an explicit counter-reaction to language historians’ primary concern with unification processes and the idea that language histories develop towards standard languages (see Elspass 2007; Vandenbussche and Elspass 2007). As pointed out above, literacy was a rare commodity below the highest social ranks, particularly before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when massive literacy drives in various parts of Europe rapidly increased the literacy of “ordinary” people. In spite of this, lower-class writings have not particularly served as a basis for alternative or more varied interpretations of language histories, nor are they used as specimens in textbooks, which tend to portray “the best” authors as representatives of the national

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language. One reason for the relatively scarce research on lower-class writers is that many materials still remain in the archives to be unearthed (Elspass 2007: 4–6). Research on partly-schooled writers’ letters in different language communities in the past shows similar trends, as “lower-rank” writers seem to aim at a “standard” model but do not fully meet the requirements. Their actual written performance is, then, a stylistic mixture of normative elements on the one hand, and stylistic ruptures, repetition, prefabricated phraseology and informal conventions, on the other, reflecting taught norms and everyday language use (Dossena 2007; Elspass 1998; Fairman 2007; Nordlund 2007; van der Wal 2007).

7.

Letter corpora and corpus methods

Many of the studies described above are based on electronic corpora. Large electronic corpora have been primarily used for quantitative analysis, but quantitative and qualitative methods are increasingly combined. Quantitative analyses provide the baseline evidence if based on plentiful data, or they can be used to describe smaller data sets, while qualitative methods are used to interpret local meanings. Even for entirely qualitative studies, corpora provide structured data. Macro-sociolinguistic studies, such as those discussed in section 6.1 above, rely extensively on quantitative evidence, but quantification and corpus tools, like keyword or cluster analysis, readily available in corpus programs, offer new possibilities for interactional studies and style analysis. Culpeper (2002) provides a step-by-step description of how to apply keyword analysis and Conrad (2002) presents several possible corpus methodological approaches to discourse studies. Ideally, corpora would be based on original manuscripts, but this is hardly practicable in large-scale work. The compilation of the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, for instance, relies on letter editions, but suspect editions were checked against the original manuscripts. Other corpora in Table 1 are based on manuscript letters; for example the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence contains diplomatically transcribed and digitised editions of original manuscripts (Meurman-Solin 2007). The annotation system employed in the production of the corpus is also unique in that certain physical features of letters, including punctuation, paragraph structure, marked spacing, insertions, cancellations, and corrections are systematically coded in the corpus (Meurman-Solin 2007: sections 1.4 and 3.1). This information allows access to some of the physical features discussed in section 4 above, as well as to features of online processing like self-corrections. Moreover, Meurman-Solin (2007: section 3.4) takes steps towards incorporating a selective discourse commentary into the annotation system to facilitate pragmatic and discourse studies. In addition to single-genre letter corpora, multi-genre corpora like the Helsinki Corpus, ARCHER or A Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (CONCE) contain letters among other genres.

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Examples of historical letter corpora

Corpus

Brief description

Corpora of Early English Correspondence, 1403–1800

c. 12,000 letters from c. 1,200 writers representing different social and geographical backgrounds; intended for testing the applicability of sociolinguistic methods to historical data (5.1 million words) (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2007; http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/)

The Corpus of Late Eighteenthcentury Prose

Letters written to Richard Orford, a steward of Peter Legh the Younger at Lyme Hall in Cheshire, 1761–1790 (c. 300,000 words) (van Bergen and Denison 2007; http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/ subjects/lel/staff/david-denison/corpus-late18th-century-prose/)

Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence

Private and non-private (business) letters written by men and women of varying ages selected from the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland (under preparation; aims at 500,000 words) (Dossena 2004; Dury 2006)

Corpus of Scottish Correspondence, 1500–1730

Comprises diplomatically transcribed and digitised editions of original manuscripts of royal, official and family letters by both male and female writers originating from various areas of Scotland (MeurmanSolin 2007)

Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET)

A network-based 18th-century corpus of letters, fiction, prose drama and essays produced by Joseph Addison and the members of his social milieu (Fitzmaurice 2006, 2007)

8.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed social, discursive and linguistic aspects of letters and surveyed the use of letters as research material in historical linguistic studies that focus on social, interpersonal and pragmatic aspects of language. Letters have been widely used in such studies to provide environments for language variation and change and meaning-making in interaction, including the language of lower ranks and women who are often in the margins of historical linguistic accounts. Additionally, several electronic corpora comprising letters have been compiled to facilitate research. Letters are written interaction between individuals, who can often be identified and contextualised on several levels. The studies presented were discussed from

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the perspective of context types reconstructed through letters. Some reconstructions were oriented towards the macro-societal level, while others were geared towards the micro-interactional level. The macro- and micro-approaches in language studies are often seen as opposite or even incompatible ontological accounts, but Layder’s ([1997] 2003) sociological domain theory was mentioned as a model incorporating different levels of analysis. I hope to have shown that, applied to letters, both approaches and their combinations produce meaningful results. It may be an extremely complicated task to incorporate all the four domains within the same empirical study of language use, but domain theory might offer tools of contextualisation for linguists interested in language in society and help us incorporate various linguistic aspects and levels of use within the same model of language use, variation and change. References Austin, Frances 1973 Epistolary conventions in the Clift family correspondence. English Studies 54: 129–140. Austin, Frances 1999 Letter writing in a Cornish community in the 1790s. In: David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds.), 43–61. Baker, Frank 1980 The Works of John Wesley. Letters I 1721–1739. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barton, David, and Nigel Hall (eds.) 1999 Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bazerman, Charles 1999 Letters and the social grounding of differentiated genres. In: David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds.), 15–29. Beal, Joan C., Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds.) 2007 Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora. Vol. II: Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bell, Allan 2001 Back in style: Reworking audience design. In: Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, 139–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergs, Alexander T. 2000 Social networks in pre-1500 Britain: Problems, prospects, examples. European Journal of English Studies 4.3: 239–251. Bergs, Alexander T. 2005 Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters, 1421–1503. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Murphy, James J. 1974 Rhetoric in the Middle Ages. A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley/Los Angeles/Berlin: University of California Press. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 64.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevala, Minna 2009a Altering distance and defining authority. Person reference in Late Modern English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.2: 238–259. Nevala, Minna 2009b Referential terms and expressions in eighteenth-century letters: A case study on the Lunar men of Birmingham. In: Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800), 75–103. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu 2001 Continental conventions in early English correspondence. In: Hans-Jürgen Diller and Manfred Görlach (eds.), Towards a History of English as a History of Genres, 203–224. Heidelberg: Winter. Nevalainen, Terttu 2004 Letter writing: Introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.2: 181–191. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1996 The Corpus of Early English Correspondence. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), 39–54. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.) 1996 Sociolinguistics and Language History. Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Longman Pearson Education. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2007 Historical sociolinguistics: The Corpus of Early English Correspondence. In: Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds.), 148–171. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.) 2007 Letter Writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. First published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.2 (2004). Nissinen, Martti 2003 Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Nordlund, Taru 2007 Double diglossia – lower class writing in 19th-century Finland. Multilingua 26: 229–246. Nurmi, Arja 1999 A Social History of Periphrastic DO . (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 56.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nurmi, Arja, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.) 2009 The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Nurmi, Arja, and Minna Palander-Collin 2008 Letters as a text type: Interaction in writing. In: Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), 21–49. Osselton, N. E. 1984 Informal spelling systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800. In: Norman F. Blake and Charles Jones (eds.), English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development, 123–137. Sheffield: CECTAL. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004–2008 Online edition. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Pahta, Päivi, and Arja Nurmi 2009 Negotiating interpersonal identities in writing: Code-switching practices in Charles Burney’s correspondence. In: Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), 27–52. Palander-Collin, Minna 1999 Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 55.) Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Palander-Collin, Minna 2006 (Re)constructing style and language as social interaction through first- and second-person pronouns in Early Modern English letters. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen (eds.), Dialogic Language Use, 339–362. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 66.) Helsinki: Modern Language Society. Palander-Collin, Minna 2009a Variation and change in patterns of self-reference in early English correspondence. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.2: 260–285. Palander-Collin, Minna 2009b Patterns of interaction: Self-mention and addressee inclusion in the letters of Nathaniel Bacon and his correspondents. In: Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), 53–74. Palander-Collin, Minna, and Minna Nevala (eds.) 2005 Letters and letter writing. Special issue of European Journal of English Studies 9.1. Palander-Collin, Minna, and Minna Nevala 2006 Reporting in 18th-century letters of Hester Piozzi. In: Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds.), 123–141. Perelman, Les 1991 The medieval art of letter writing. Rhetoric as institutional expression. In: Charles Bazerman and James Paradis (eds.), Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities, 97–119. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Accessed online 16 December 2008, http://wac.colostate.edu/books/textual_dynamics/ chapter4.pdf. Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 2009 Lifespan changes in the language of three early modern gentlemen. In: Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), 165–196.

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Richardson, Malcolm 2001 The fading influence of the medieval Ars Dictaminis in England after 1400. Rhetorica 19.2: 225–247. Robertson, Jean 1942 The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: University Press of Liverpool. Sairio, Anni 2006 Progressives in the letters of Elizabeth Montagu and her circle in 1738–1778. In: Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds.), 167–189. Sairio, Anni 2009 Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Epistolary English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Sánchez Roura, Teresa 2000 Convention vs. choice in securing the good-will of the reader: The Cely letters. Selim 10: 77–100. Accessed online 10 December 2008, http://www.uniovi.es/ SELIM/SELIM_PDF/SELIM10.pdf. Sánchez Roura, Teresa 2001 What’s left of captatio benevolentiae in 15th-century English letters? A study of the Cely letters. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 102.3: 317–338. Stowers, Stanley K. 1986 Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36. (Topics in English Linguistics 52.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 1994 Eighteenth-century letters and journals as evidence: Studying society through the individual. In: Roger Sell and Peter Verdonk (eds.), Literature and the New Interdisciplinarity. Poetics, Linguistics, History, 179–191. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 1996 Social network theory and eighteenth-century English: The case of Boswell. In: Derek Britton (ed.), English Historical Linguistics 1994, 327–337. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 1998 Standardization of English spelling: The eighteenth-century printers’ contribution. In: Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (eds.), Advances in English Historical Linguistics, 457–470. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2000a Social network analysis and the history of English. European Journal of English Studies 4.3: 211–216. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2000b Social network analysis and the language of Sarah Fielding. European Journal of English Studies 4.3: 291–301.

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Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2005 Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular. Linguistica e Filologia 21: 113–146. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2006 Abbreviations as an index of politeness. In: Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds.), 229–247. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2008 Letters as a source for reconstructing social networks: The case of Robert Lowth. In: Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), 51–76. Tiisala, Seija 2004 Power and politeness. Languages and salutation formulas in correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.2: 193–206. Toivari-Viitala, Jaana 2004 Kirjeitä faraoiden Egyptistä [Letters from the Egypt of the Pharaohs]. Helsinki: Basam Books. Trolle Larsen, Mogens 1989 What they wrote on clay. In: Karen Schousboe and Mogens Trolle Larsen (eds.), Literacy and Society, 121–148. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Valle, Ellen 2004 “The pleasure of receiving your favour”: The colonial exchange in eighteenthcentury natural history. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.2: 313–336. van Bergen, Linda, and David Denison 2007 A Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose. In: Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds.), 228–246. van der Wal, Marijke 2007 Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters. In: Stephan Elspass, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth and Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), 83–96. Vandenbussche, Wim, and Stephan Elspass (eds.) 2007 Lower class language use in the 19th century. Special issue of Multilingua (2007 Supplement) 26.2. Vandenbussche, Wim, and Stephan Elspass 2007 Introduction: Lower class language use in the 19th century. Special issue of Multilingua (2007 Supplement) 26.2: 147–150. Vermeer, Willem 1995 Towards a thousand birchbark letters. Russian Linguistics 19: 109–123. Wood, Johanna L. 2004 Text in context: A critical discourse analysis approach to Margaret Paston. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.2: 229–254. Wood, Johanna L. 2009 Structures and expectations: A systematic analysis of Margaret Paston’s formulaic and expressive language. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10.2: 187–214. Wright, Susan M. 1994 The critic and the grammarian: Joseph Addison and the prescriptivist. In: Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard English 1600–1800, 243–284. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Wright, Susan M. 1997 Speaker innovation, textual revision and the case of Joseph Addison. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, 483–503. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Wrightson, Keith [2000] 2002 Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470–1750. London: Penguin Books. Wrightson, Keith [1982] 2003 English Society 1580–1680. London/New York: Routledge.

22.

Literary discourse Susan Fitzmaurice

1.

Introduction

It is possibly appropriate that this interrogation of the historical pragmatic treatment of “literary discourse” should close a handbook of historical pragmatics as it is necessarily concerned with examining a source of data that is markedly distinct from other discourse domains in seeking the designation of “literary”. Like religious discourse (chapter 19) and scientific discourse (chapter 20), literary discourse is historicised because its genres and styles change in form and character over time. However, unlike these discourse domains, literary discourse is arguably more diverse, not only collecting genres that are internally diverse but also collecting a diverse range of genres. Thus literary discourse encompasses verse genres, narrative fiction and dramatic literature in all their forms and historical exempla. It is obvious that this statement delimits, in a wholly pragmatic and convenient fashion, the domain of discourse that is the object of study for this chapter. The specification of what counts as “literary discourse” is made more fraught by the rules and conventions prevalent in different historical milieus, cultures, educational systems, and ideologies. Indeed, Toolan (1992: ix) observes that “literature” as a term “cannot be defined in isolation from an expression of ideology”.1 For the sake of making the present treatment manageable, I adopt a conventional notion of literary discourse, but I will draw upon non-canonical forms as appropriate. 1.1.

Literary discourse in historical pragmatics

Given the key roles of literary form and poetic convention in shaping the production, transmission and reception of literary discourse over time, it is reasonable that linguists might regard literary discourse as one of the least reliable sources of material for the investigation of ordinary communicative practices. That is, it is a truism in empirical linguistics research that the naturally occurring discourse of everyday communication rather than the fruits of literary work provides the ideal source of linguistic data for the analysis of communication. However, because the historical pragmatician does not have untrammelled access to linguistic evidence for the full range of human verbal communicative practices in history, she/he must rely on whatever material is available. Perhaps because literary discourse tends to bear high cultural value for the communities in which and for which it is produced, it has tended to be preserved more readily and with more care over time than the

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records of verbal communication that do not carry cultural significance; for example, the personal letters of ordinary people. Thus, literary discourse, however diverse and variable it might be, is an important accessible source of data that may be evaluated as evidence for the communicative practices among members of historical speech communities. But historical pragmaticians are interested in the forms, functions and contexts of literary discourse not only because they might be regarded as some sort of textual compensation for the absence of recorded evidence for the “authentic” communicative practices of real interlocutors. To be sure, literature is commonly regarded as a type of human communication. For example, Roger Sell (2000: 117), discussing the necessary attributes of historical literary pragmatics, declares that literature is sufficiently authentic as communication. It shares three key features with other forms of communication. Firstly, it is interactive: it is marked both by a “proliferation of ‘receiving’ contexts” and what he calls its participants’ (its writers’ and readers’) potential “resistance to context”. These are attributes of any form of verbal communication produced and received at different times, in different places, and read by more and different people than initially intended (or expected).2 Secondly, literary discourse is characterised by a perceived marked difference from ordinary verbal communication: its form tends to render it as strange, unfamiliar and thus remarkable to readers.3 Thirdly, add to these characteristics the cultural, social, literary, religious, political, stylistic and technological particularities of the historical contexts in which literary discourse is produced in earlier periods, and we have a highly complex set of conditions in which verbal activity that takes the form of literary discourse is offered and received. In other words, because literary discourse belongs to historical periods dominated by different though not unrelated linguistic codes, the functions of any one code will not necessarily be transparent across time. However, it is not necessary to require literary discourse to have a communicative function in order to submit it to historical pragmatic analysis. Historical stylistics studies attend to the ways in which linguistic features combine to stamp literary texts as exemplars of literary genres over time. In other words, linguistic features in texts may pattern to function as generic codes over time, exhibiting more or less variation to be distinguished as genres and subgenres (Taavitsainen 1998, 1997). Historical stylistics is also concerned with the interaction more broadly of change in language and change in literary form and fashion. For example, Adamson’s (1999) history of English literary style in the period 1476–1776 is a story of the “Literary Standard” and the canonical literary genres that promoted its formation and codification. She opens a window onto the complex political, philosophical and historical context of stylistic change, highlighting the impact of educational reforms in the early sixteenth century on the period’s understanding of the notion of “literature” and the use of English as a language for writing literature. Adamson discusses the inclusion of genres such as history, phil-

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osophy and theology, and forensic oratory together with poetry and drama within the early sixteenth-century western European academic category of “literature”, a category shaped by the renaissance of what the early moderns construed as classical intellectual, moral and aesthetic values and ideals (1999: 542–543). This study emphasises the extent to which the kind of discourse that might be counted as “literature” is actually a matter of historical inquiry. 1.2.

Literary discourse vs. historical pragmatics

The study of literary discourse as described here might be loosely termed “historical literary discourse analysis”, an approach that coexists with variations such as historical stylistics and historical literary pragmatics. These are approaches adopted by scholars whose backgrounds range from literary to rhetorical, and from philological to linguistic. Of course, these approaches have rarely been congruent or complementary. For the most part, linguists and literary scholars understand “pragmatics” quite differently and accordingly draw upon different scholarly and theoretical traditions in their research (see section 4.2 below for illustration). The most likely readers of this handbook will belong to a community of linguists whose approaches to historical pragmatics are grounded squarely in the agenda of historical pragmatics as pioneered and defined by Jucker (1995) and refined through pragmalinguistic and pragmaphilological studies using the tools of corpus linguistics as the data sources and techniques have themselves become increasingly sophisticated. However, any survey of the field of historical pragmatics and literary discourse must take account of a (perhaps parallel) community of scholars whose historical pragmatic study of literary discourse is informed principally and directly by the philosophical pragmatics literature instantiated in the work of Jürgen Habermas, Quentin Skinner, J. L. Austin and John Searle, as well as by the work of sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and M. M. Bakhtin. Although both communities consult the foundational work in pragmatics exemplified particularly in the work of Austin, Searle and, of course, H. P. Grice, they rarely venture outside the boundaries of their own perspectives to inspect the assumptions, methods and findings of one another’s domains.4 However, the two communities do share some basic assumptions. For example, linguistic and literary pragmaticians would agree that the literary text may be regarded as a site for the interaction of author and reader. The historical dimensions of the pragmatic analysis are located in the nature of the text’s interaction with its contemporary audience on the one hand and in the interaction of the text with recipients who are temporally displaced from the time of the text’s production on the other. To this extent, the literary text engages its reader/audience/recipient or consumer in the process of making literary meaning within a given historical context; it represents a particular aspect of the activities involved in verbal interaction.5 The two communities are also united in their desire to uncover the complex extra-linguistic (or super-linguistic) meanings and func-

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tions that literary texts in earlier historical periods could communicate to their readers, and the rich contextual meanings they held in earlier communities. The pragmatic analysis of literary discourse additionally involves the examination of the meanings of the interactions among the characters within the world of the text, and so literary discourse provides multiple opportunities for the ways in which meanings are constructed in a range of contexts, both real and imagined. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a rich range of terms, theoretical frameworks and methodological assumptions informs the historical pragmatic study of the complex domain of literary discourse. In this chapter, I try to provide a forum in which the work of these two communities might be examined and compared with the goal of making them more transparent and accessible to one another.

2.

Research topics

The principal research topics in the historical pragmatic study of literary discourse reflect a range of concerns. The review of linguistically oriented historical studies of literary discourse indicates that the boundary that separates the study of linguistic phenomena and features from that of literary or stylistic phenomena is quite porous. For example, micropragmatic topics invariably provide the foundation for the study of pragmaphilological matters. Thus the investigation of the changing meaning of specific grammatical constructions or patterns frequently underpins accounts of the linguistic construction of literary concepts such as point of view (e.g. Adamson 1995; Wright 1995). Below, I first examine the kinds of micropragmatic topics that provide the evidence for arguments regarding the linguistic structure of literary meaning in context in relation to the pragmaphilological concerns that issue from approaching literary discourse as special communicative events (2.1). I then consider some macropragmatic topics that focus on pragmatic issues at the level of discourse (2.2). 2.1.

Micropragmatic issues

Analysts are interested at the micropragmatic level in the pragmatic functions performed by linguistic features, both in the historical context in which the discourse is produced (see the chapters on Chaucer and Shakespeare in this volume for a wealth of examples), as well as across time as the discourse engages with readers in later historical periods. These questions concern the study of how the choice of particular linguistic features invites the inference of specific discourse meanings. This is a task that crucially involves the reconstruction of speaker meaning on the basis of the consideration of the changing grammatical functions of linguistic features over time. Accordingly, studies of the pragmatic functions of such lexico-

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grammatical categories as deixis, tense and aspect, discourse markers and complementation in historical literary texts necessarily imply a historical linguistic description of these categories. Parts of speech including pronouns, modal auxiliaries, adjectives and interjections also feature prominently in micropragmatic studies. Chapters 12, 13 and 14 above testify to the prominence of the investigation of discourse markers, interjections and address forms, respectively, in historical pragmatics study. The changing meanings of linguistic forms and categories over time motivate the investigation of historical form-function mapping in literary discourse. In this section, I consider selected representative micropragmatic studies to illustrate how scholars have used literary discourse as a source of data in historical pragmatic analyses of linguistic features. The historicity of the English modal auxiliaries has occasioned a number of studies that examine the nature of the modals’ contextual meanings in discourse in earlier historical periods, most commonly in non-literary discourse, frequently from a corpus-linguistic perspective (e.g. Krug 2000; Fitzmaurice 2002a, 2003; Biber 2004b). Studies of modal expressions and modal verbs in historical literary discourse are less common. Fitzmaurice (2000a) examined the historically specific semantic-pragmatic functions of modal auxiliary verb pairs such as will/would, can/could and shall/should in order to explore the ways in which the subjectivity of speaker expression was realised in modal expressions in seventeenth-century prose. The texts for scrutiny were drawn from CCXI Sociable Letters, a volume of fictional letters written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle in 1664. This study explores how subjective (speaker) meanings construed as tentativeness or insistence might be expressed in the pragmatic readings of seventeenth-century English auxiliary verbs whose modern grammatical meanings such as future time reference are not fixed by this time despite the fact that they exhibit the syntactic properties of fully-fledged auxiliaries. The findings of this study indicate how historical pragmatic analysis can illuminate the particular contextual meanings of linguistic expressions in the discourse of earlier historical periods that, because they do not differ in form from those of Present-day English, potentially generate anachronistic readings. The intriguing semantic-pragmatic history of personal pronouns in English also makes them particularly salient for the investigation of the ways in which meanings in context change over time. The loss of the distinctive English singular second-person pronoun thou/thee/thy/thine has been the subject of some of the most important and innovative historical pragmatic work on literary discourse. A great deal of this work has been conducted on Shakespeare’s drama (e.g. Brown and Gilman 1960, 1989; Busse 2002, 2003; Calvo 2003). Similarly, important historical pragmatics research on the meanings and use of the English second-person pronouns in letters has been undertaken (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996, 2003; Nevala 2004). Studies of the second person pronoun in the context of address forms in literary discourse outside Shakespeare and Chaucer are much

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rarer. Magnusson (2007) attends to the problem of interpreting the meanings conveyed by pronouns of address in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Inspecting the apparently anomalous choices of thou/you (if they were considered in the light of Brown and Gilman’s [1960] power-solidarity model) in the sonnets, she argues that Shakespeare actually “innovates by creating the private thought of his speaker out of the materials of socially situated dialogue” (2007: 172). Magnusson then examines the choice of the second-person pronouns in the sonnets alongside Erasmus’s strategies for expressing in-your-face familiarity in his Epistle on Matrimony. Accordingly, she pays specific attention to the interplay of literary style (“verbal artistry”) and sociohistorical context in the construction of the history of communicative practices and meanings. This approach allows the analysis of the role of pronoun choice in the expression of such “scripts” (as she calls them) as aggressive familiarity. She describes a subtle set of meanings that the switch between pronouns is recruited to deliver on the basis of a literary critical apprehension of the intertextual links between Erasmus’s advice on marriage and Shakespeare’s sonnets. In so doing, she argues for a careful examination of the linguistic evidence in the contemporary context, which will include the presence of high poetic registers as well as the “quotidian pragmatics of interaction shaped by historic contexts and influences” (2007: 178). Focusing on a different linguistic feature – discourse markers – but also attending to the role of literary form in the development of pragmatic meaning in earlier literary texts is Monika Fludernik’s (2000) study of narrative discourse markers in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. However, Fludernik’s approach is more clearly oriented towards the concerns of linguistic than literary pragmatics as she locates her study in the history of narrative form, specifically the oral narrative episode, and language change. This article is exemplary of Fludernik’s longer term research agenda on the historical development of narrative structure and the changing role of linguistic markers, such as discourse markers, the historical present tense and narrative clauses. In this article, she examines Malory’s narrative use of discourse markers in The Tale of King Arthur, A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake and The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones, showing how recurrent sequences of discourse markers serve to structure a narrative episode in terms of the development of the action, its climax, resolution and final result. These sequences (such as so (whan) … than … and anone … (and) … so), she argues, are critical in enabling the reader to extract the major plotlines from the multitude of tiny narrative episodes. A feature of the episodes in which these sequences occur is the presence of substantial amounts of dialogue. Fludernik suggests that the more dialogue the narrative episodes include, the more discourse markers occur in the narrative sequences in order to mark the distinguishing points in an episode; namely, incipit, incidence and result. She then goes on to argue that the explosion of discourse markers signals the beginning of the effective dissolution of the episodic narrative structure as the sheer number of discourse markers begins to obscure the underlying structure

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of the narrative. She remarks that the discourse-heavy “episodic model of conversational story-telling” gradually gives way to a “structure in which scenes alternate with report passages” (Fludernik 2000: 251), citing developments in Elizabethan and seventeenth-century prose. The emerging structure also exhibits markedly fewer discourse markers. Accordingly, she offers a pragmatic and narratological explanation for the unusually high frequency of discourse markers in Malory’s Arthurian narratives, which links “the demise of a morphological or syntactic form to a process of refunctionalisation, inflationary currency, subsequent devaluation and eventual disappearance” (Fludernik 2000: 257). Fludernik’s work is emblematic of a major development in historical pragmatic studies of literary discourse over the past decade that has garnered interest from medievalists and literary historians: uncovering the linguistic clues in piecing together the puzzle of how traditional orally oriented narrative structures disappeared gradually over time as the literary prose romance gained currency. Interjections belong to a word class considered to have a range of expressive communicative functions in spoken interaction, what Biber et al. suggest is “an exclamatory function, expressive of the speaker’s emotion” (1999: 1,083). The occurrence of interjections in historical literary discourse provides the opportunity to investigate their changing pragmatic functions over time. To this end, Taavitsainen (1998) examines a selection of prose romances, including the prose romances of Malory, the later romantic prose of Aphra Behn, the gothic novels of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, and the novels of Jane Austen. Taavitsainen’s analysis reveals that interjections are deployed as devices to express emphasis and personal affect sufficiently consistently to form a historical pattern of effects. Biber et al. identify discourse markers and interjections as features of what they call the grammar of conversation. Whereas Fludernik shows how discourse markers operate in the organisation of narrative, Taavitsainen shows how interjections are used to mark aspects of the structure of the narratives.6 For example, interjections are used to highlight aspects of the plot and to foreground information. As they tend to occur predominantly in the representation of conversation, they appear to contribute to the development of turn-taking in conversations between fictional characters. Taavitsainen also identifies ways in which interjections acquire new functions in prose fiction over time; for example, inclusion in the affective language associated with specific characters. Thus, she discusses Jane Austen’s use of interjections as a characterisation strategy. Interjections as distinctive indicators of the practice of spoken language may be argued to occur only rarely in written discourse. Their use to express subjective, affective, personal attitudes to what is being talked about and to one’s addressee make them useful tools in the written representation of spoken language. Accordingly, the investigation of the ways in which they have been used in historical representations of spoken language provides important insights into historical notions of the substance and function of expressive language as well as the extent to which these notions turn out to be reliable

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over time. Taavitsainen’s historical study of literary discourse has important implications for the account of a linguistic feature that is considered to be quintessentially characteristic of spoken language. These studies exemplify the investigation of the roles of particular linguistic features in the construction of pragmatic meaning in a variety of types of literary texts in a range of historical periods. It is evident that the results yielded by these analyses show how salient the features are both at the discourse level and at the phrase level. Unsurprisingly, because the features examined often tend to be ordinarily associated with language in spoken contexts, their historical interrogation in written texts that represent speech provides a way of considering the possibility that they performed similar work in the spoken language in earlier periods. 2.2.

Macropragmatic issues

The emergence of literary genres, diachronic change in generic forms and functions, the structure of narrative patterns over time and the history of discourse functions are among the macropragmatic issues that have engaged scholars of historical pragmatics interested in literary discourse. In this section, I sample a few different exponents of this work, eschewing comprehensiveness because these topics have generated substantial literatures of their own and it is impossible to treat them all within the scope of this chapter.7 Fludernik (2003) is an important contribution to the development of diachronic perspectives on narrative texts, which includes literary and historical genres. She urges the fresh examination from a diachronic perspective of the status and meanings of categories such as focalisation, person and tense in traditional narrative typologies, as well as the historical interrogation of plot structure, character introduction and description, and the lexical and structural management of setting. She illustrates the kind of approach she is advocating by tracking the history of the scene shift in English literature from Middle English to the early twentieth century. The method adopted in analysing this discourse-level structural phenomenon consists of finding metanarrative clues in linguistic expressions, which draw attention to a change or break in the narrative. In medieval literary texts, these expressions are formulae deploying deictic verbs and temporal adverbs (now let us leave X and turn to Y); in the nineteenth-century novel, they are expressed as temporal adverbials (e.g. meanwhile). In medieval literary texts, the formulae appear at the beginning of an episode; in the nineteenth-century novel, in contrast, the key linguistic expressions mark the beginning of a chapter. What is interesting here is the extent to which scene shifts become, over time, part of the architecture of the frame in which a narrative is presented. Fludernik also situates her observations of the development of narrative scene shift patterns in the light of Genette’s (1980) discussion of narrative analepsis in the French nineteenth-century novel, thus embedding her diachronic account in the standard scholarship on narrative. This orientation is

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highly illuminating for the development of questions about the history of pragmatic aspects of narrative. Adamson (1995) is a similarly instructive example of an approach to the diachronic study of literary form. She sets out to challenge standard accounts of the emergence of indirect free style in the nineteenth-century novel by adopting a linguistic method for the scrutiny of much earlier narrative texts. She utilises linguistic form, specifically particular tense-adverb combinations, as a forensic tool to address the problem of the origin of empathetic narrative. Mining a historical corpus of prose narratives, she focuses on the Puritan conversion narrative, a “narrative genre that was polemically committed to the representation of experiential memory” (1995: 205). She demonstrates persuasively that empathetic narrative is grounded in the conventionalisation of the combination of the first-person pronoun subject (I), past tense (was) and proximal deictic adverb (now) as the expression of experiential narratorial perspective. This study makes a major contribution to the scholarship on the history of point of view and narratorial perspective in prose fiction by illustrating how the diachronic study of literary form can be approached through the use of specific linguistic clues on the one hand and by investigating a range of prose narratives beyond a narrowly literary domain in the process of navigating the emergence of literary forms, on the other. Honegger (2000) looks at the depiction of the opening moves in “love interaction” in medieval and early modern courtly poetry to discover their role in plot development and the protagonists’ characterisation.8 While acknowledging the nonmimetic nature of romances, he asserts that they frequently show the interactional elements necessary for pragmatic interpretation. He looks at a set of textual parameters that promote the selection of particular linguistic strategies in the opening moves in four example texts. The parameters concern the type of relationship (“legal”/“emotional” or love/marriage), focus on plot or protagonists, and the relative length of the genre. He considers if and, if so, how lovers declare their love (on or off record, elaborate and scripted, etc.) and argues that the longer the text, the more complex, realistic and pragmatically persuasive the interaction between the protagonists is. This is an ambitious study that uses the toolbox of pragmatic analytical techniques in order to understand what would seem to be a conventional feature of love poetry. It illustrates how it is possible to home in on this critical element by stripping from the apprehension of the text the complexity presented by genre, period, language, history and style. The question is how illuminating such an attempt to construct a typology of opening moves in literary texts from a range of different periods can be. As an approach that abstracts away from historical factors, this contrasts quite starkly with Fludernik’s explicitly diachronic project study. It is reasonable to surmise that tackling macropragmatic issues in historical literary discourse is a tough challenge. One approach to this challenge is to rely on linguistic features as a resource for interrogating how larger functional and struc-

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tural units pattern and form over time. However, it is difficult to offer a comprehensive account of these patterns without risking decoupling the texts that exemplify the patterns sought from the literary, historical and material details in which they are first produced.

3.

Research Methods

The principal research methods reviewed here for the historical pragmatic study of literary discourse centre on philological and stylistic qualitative methods on the one hand and on corpus-linguistic analysis on the other. Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007) discuss how philological and stylistic qualitative methods and corpus-linguistic analysis have driven the agenda of historical literary discourse analysis within the loosely designated domain of historical pragmatics. These two approaches – qualitative methods and corpus linguistics – yield rather different accounts of literary discourse but they share “the principle that texts are products of historical contexts that must be recovered in order for the interpreter to negotiate meaning that will be intersubjective” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 25). Corpus linguistics provides the current most commonly practised method of collecting and analysing quantities of textual data in historical pragmatics to yield results that may be generalised to comparable datasets from different time periods or indeed extrapolated and tested in application to different literary genres. (See Kytö in this volume for a chapter-length survey of the issues.) One of the major advantages of using corpus-linguistic techniques for collecting and analysing literary discourse is that the analyst may collect large numbers of large texts, such as novels, in order to produce results based on more than a single instantiation of a genre. Such a method allows the researcher to look beyond the close analysis of a single exponent of a text type to seek results that may be more general. The multidimensional methodology developed by Douglas Biber and his associates for investigating variation in registers, both synchronic and diachronic, exemplifies this approach to textual analysis (Conrad and Biber 2001). Biber’s methodology involves the automatic analysis of the entire corpus for a raft of linguistic features, which the search program identifies via the tags attached to each item in the texts. This kind of automated procedure permits the researcher to take a wide view of the linguistic complexity involved in stylistic change. The application of these procedures to ARCHER, a corpus of “written and speech-based registers” sampled from British and American English texts produced between 1600 and 1900, yields studies such as Biber and Finegan (1989, 1992), which argue that the style of written registers such as essays, prose fiction and letters became increasingly distinct from conversation or more “literate” in the course of the eighteenth century and then, in an apparent reversal, consistently more “oral” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The labels “oral”/“literate” are given to particular patterns in

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which linguistic features co-occur to make up the dimensions “involved vs. informational production”, “situation-dependent vs. elaborated reference” and “nonimpersonal vs. impersonal style”. For example, “oral” styles are characterised by the predominance of linguistic features that indicate personal involvement and interaction and “on-line” or unplanned production circumstances, such as the presence of first- and second-person pronouns, contractions, questions, private verbs (e.g. think, know) and wh-clauses. In contrast, stereotypically “literate” styles exhibit evidence of careful, planned production, informational communicative purposes and minimal interactiveness. The linguistic features informing these values include a high type-token ratio indicating diverse vocabulary, a high frequency of nominals, attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases. These combine to give a strong impression of elaborated reference and informational explicitness. More pertinently to the topic of historical pragmatics, Biber’s (2004a) multidimensional analysis of literary genres from each century between 1600 and 1900 demonstrates historical patterns in the grammatical marking of stance; that is, speakers’ expression of personal attitudes to or assessments of what is being talked about. Stance markers include modal auxiliaries and semi-modals, modal verbs, factive and non-factive adverbials, as well as that and to complement clauses controlled by factive verbs, attitudinal verbs, adjectives, etc. The results of this study show that all stance markers increase in frequency over time and that particular registers such as drama and personal letters exhibit an increasing use and range of stance markers over time. Biber concludes that “these developments indicate a general shift in cultural norms: speakers and writers are simply more willing to express stance in recent periods than in earlier historical periods” (2004a: 130). From the linguist’s perspective this statement provides the basis for the more detailed, nuanced investigation of semantic-pragmatic changes in the stance markers considered in this wide-ranging but essentially pilot project or indeed the interrogation of the fit of the kinds of texts (and writers) considered with their material historical circumstances.9 However, there are hazards associated with this approach. From a literary scholar’s perspective, Biber’s concluding statement might raise specific difficulties when read outside of the context provided by historical or literary and cultural contexts. The reliance on an inventory of stance forms determined on the basis of the grammar of Present-day English for the diachronic discourse study of epistemic expressions whose meanings are highly contextual and thus both slippery and non-literal may present interpretative problems from a specifically historical literary perspective. For example, semantic-pragmatic change both underlines the uncertainty of interpreting the lexico-grammar of earlier historical periods and adds to the challenges to the linguist in construing the grammar of historical discourse. Thus it is possible for quantitative studies such as these to seem to “pull against nuanced readings of literary texts” and for “potentially relevant micro-contexts to drop out of sight” (Magnusson 2007: 171) in a large-scale corpus-based

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study. Exponents of the close analysis of linguistic features in their co-text argue that it is possible to lose the subtle shifts and variations in meaning in the mass of quantitative data. This observation brings us to the other principal method of analysis adopted in the historical pragmatic study of literary discourse, namely, qualitative study. This method consists of situating the discourse for analysis not in the larger quantitative context, but in the larger literary and historical context. Accordingly, the analyst draws upon special and specific information in order to reconstruct the precise historical conditions in which a text is produced and consumed. This may well include the assessment of the text with respect to the conventions of literary form or genre that arguably shape literary discourse in a particular period. Magnusson’s (1999) study of dialogue forms and letters in Elizabethan England argues that Shakespeare’s dramatic language exemplifies “a sophisticated rhetoric based not so much upon literary artifice as upon the potentialities of conversation” (1999: 2). Magnusson uses the tools of qualitative discourse analysis, Bourdieu’s and Bakhtin’s social theories of discourse, and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness as she attends to the relationship of writer and reader / addressor and addressee in constructing the texture of verbal exchange through historical discourse, both written and read. She then embeds her readings in relation to the theory and practice of Elizabethan letter-writing to ensure that Shakespeare’s verbal art is understood to be participating in the rhetorical complexity and sophisticated social creativity displayed by the language of Elizabethan letters. This study richly exemplifies the importance of deeply historicising the literary (and other) discourse analysis of language of earlier periods. Adamson (1999), too, utilises the theoretical apparatus and literary practices prevalent in earlier historical periods to investigate the structure and use of the literary language in those periods. She discusses the roles played by contemporary and classical texts, such as Erasmus’s De Copia and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in establishing stylistic models and comments on the textual and stylistic effects using current standard technical linguistic terminology to present a transparent and thoroughly modern analysis of the structure of earlier forms of discourse. These two examples of the qualitative approach illustrate the best practice of this kind of approach. As we will see in the discussion of the theoretical frameworks in section 4 below, the qualitative method is central to the study of pragmatic function in literary discourse. It is predicated on the assumption that pragmatic meaning can be inferred and extracted only as a function of reading meaning in a context, a context informed by the myriad conventional as well as situational factors that make up the world of historical, literary discourse. Considered in this light, quantitative methods may be seen to provide a means to situate the observed detail and pragmatic nuance in the bigger historical or discourse picture.

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Theoretical frameworks

Work in historical literary pragmatics is informed by diverse approaches and theoretical perspectives. The principal theoretical frameworks include relevance theory, politeness, conversation analysis, discourse strategies and, perhaps most prominently, speech-act theory. Relevance theory, conversation analysis, and politeness are approaches that tend to privilege the use of qualitative research methods, notably that of close reading, rather than quantitative research methods. Speech-act analysis has been conducted using both qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic approaches on the one hand and literary theoretical approaches on the other. The latter represent the literary-oriented work referred to in section 1. In this section, I examine the contribution made to the historical pragmatic study of literary texts by some of these research approaches. 4.1.

Linguistic historical pragmatic studies

Grice’s theory of implicature, together with its apparatus of the Conversational Principle and conversational maxims, has provided an effective framework for the study of literary texts. The deployment of the techniques and theoretical apparatus of conversational implicature for the study of contemporary drama (e.g. Bennison 1993; Lowe 1994) is well established. However, their use in constructing the socially and historically specific meanings of dramatic texts produced in more distant historical cultural milieus is less common. Fitzmaurice (2002b) remains one of the few historical pragmatic studies of drama that is not concerned with Shakespeare’s plays. This study examines whether and, if so, how the nature of the pragmatic procedures at work in reading comic drama varies across time and context, using the comic drama of Steven Berkoff, Ben Jonson and William Wycherley as test cases. Because comedy tends to be predicated on effects that are generated as a consequence of the situation of a text in the specifics of a particular cultural milieu, it is a genre that can be an effective test of an analytical approach. Fitzmaurice adopts a Gricean framework of analysis, drawing upon Horn’s (1989) reworking of Grice’s conversational maxims of Quantity and Relation as two interacting principles. He uses an R-principle (“Say no more than you must”), which collects Grice’s maxims of Relation, the second submaxim of Quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than required”) and submaxims 3 and 4 under Manner (3. “Be brief”; 4. “Be orderly”). He pairs this with a Q-principle (“Say as much as you can”) which collects Grice’s Quantity submaxim 1 (“Make yourcontribution as informative as required”) and the first two submaxims of Manner (1. “Avoid obscurity of expression”; 2. “Avoid ambiguity”). The study discusses the ways in which the status of implicature as straightforwardly conventional or as straightforwardly conversational may be threatened by parameters like time, culture and social milieu and argues that a historical perspective on the interpretation

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of comic drama may require a scale or continuum of implicature type. We may reasonably expect conventional implicature to provide a way of apprehending the meaning of an utterance that is repeated in different settings and at different times without losing its force because it is generally regarded as being detachable from the situation of utterance. Jokes, dead metaphors, and idioms are of this sort because they do not require the effort of fresh calculation (though they do rely upon knowledge of the conventions governing their use) in order to generate the same inference regardless of the occasion of utterance. The conventional implicatures associated with jokes and idioms are the products of conventionalisation over time. In other words, the regular combination of linguistic expression, speaker’s meaning and condition of use comes to generate a predictable implicature. As the implicature is generated by the use of the linguistic expression regardless of situation, context or speaker, it becomes conventional – detachable, uncalculable and invariable. Because conventionalisation takes place over time, there may be species of implicature that are neither completely conventional nor completely conversational. Historical drama provides an apt context for the investigation of how linguistic expressions may function in conventional as well as unconventional ways. This study represents an attempt to demonstrate that making sense out of historically distant, highly culturally specific texts requires considering whether the principles being appealed to are primarily hearer-oriented or speaker-oriented, and if they are neither of these, how they involve both speaker and hearer. This situation-based analysis renders useless an appeal to abstract, universal principles, and instead demands close attention to how principles of conversation interact with the specifics of time, space, culture and audience that situate socially marked dramatic texts. Two communicative processes are key in this regard. The first is the dramatic interaction of the characters in the text of any drama, an interaction that is highly constrained by the context created by the time, place and situation of the texts. The second is the process in which a third part – the audience – observes and apprehends the characters’ dramatic interaction. What is striking about the construction of comic drama in particular is that the playwright is able to manipulate and exploit the roles of character and audience in order to make (comic) meaning out of the presence or absence of shared understanding of what is going on. The study compares city comedies produced in the early seventeenth century (Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist [1610] and The Devil is an Asse [1616]), the late seventeenth century (William Wycherley’s The Country Wife [1675]) and the late twentieth century (Steven Berkoff’s plays East and West). This comparison yields the observation that the more distant the audience is from the idiom of the situation of utterance (for example, the sociolect or the temporal or cultural milieu of the play) the more reliance they must place upon the use of standard or conventional implicature. The consequence is that although situation-specific (conversational) dramatic meanings over time can certainly be apprehended by carrying out the same pragmatic

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procedures, this is not true of the conventional meanings that are not tied to their dramatic contexts or situations. Bharat Tandon’s (2003) monograph also draws upon Gricean pragmatics in his examination of the comedy of Jane Austen’s fiction. This study is important (and innovative) in situating Austen’s pragmatics in the communicative practices and theory of her own historical context. Accordingly, Tandon properly historicises Austen’s use of language as a transactional and rhetorical instrument by considering contemporary treatments of conversational manners as the critical context for the interpretation of Austen’s construction of conversational meaning. Tandon’s study also draws upon historical and modern literary theory in order to provide a rich analysis of Austen’s prose fiction. The lens of Gricean pragmatics allows close scrutiny of the highly situated meanings that issue from the “contingent yet binding circumstances of speech” (2003: 96). Tandon examines Austen’s jokes and their effects, both on her characters and her readers, by considering the manner in which she describes incidents “so as implicitly to ask why things are not otherwise” (2003: 95). For example, he argues that frequently, the sense of Austen’s jokes lies in conventionally flouting the maxim of quantity. For example, he suggests that the sense of Austen’s joke in the following extract from Pride and Prejudice comes from “an implicit comparison with what is imagined to be – at least for the purposes of comedy – the right quantity” (2003: 95): The sisters, on hearing this, repeated three or four times how much they were grieved, how shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked being ill themselves; and then thought no more of the matter: and their indifference towards Jane when not immediately before them, restored Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her original dislike. (Pride and Prejudice, 1813: 35).

Specifically, we get the joke by assuming that three or four expressions of concern (alone) do not imply great sincerity. Tandon implies that the reader will get Austen’s jokes as long as he/she is just as practiced at calculating conversational implicatures as Austen is skilled at inviting them. He comments that the “force of Austen’s comedy of implication resides in a reader’s spotting the possible intentions not only behind but in these knowing swerves of communication” (2003: 97). The historical pragmatic study of literary discourse is centrally concerned with how specific discourse meanings are realised linguistically or instantiated in particular structural forms. For example, the structure and functions of narrative in literary discourse have been investigated using episode structure (Fludernik 2007), event patterns (Ryder 1999) and point of view (Adamson 1995). Historical frame analysis is a different approach that has been applied in the historical pragmatic study of literary texts. Marcel Bax has conducted several studies of early modern drama that focus on aspects as varied as the mimetic depiction of ritual challenge (1999) and its comparison with dissimilar, more ancient forms of language performance (2000).

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Bax (2001) utilises Goffman’s notion of frame analysis in order to approach the problem of reconstructing the communicative significance of verbal “messages” in their original contexts of occurrence on the one hand, and the internal structure of what verbal behaviour means in these messages on the other. Despite the fact that Bax’s object of analysis is literary drama, he is actually interested less in the literary meanings of the discourse and more in the nature of what he terms the “semiotic codes” in the textual records of historical environments. Thus Bax examines the opening scene of an early modern Dutch farce using frame analysis in order to scrutinise its exostructural design and its endostructural perspective. He characterises the scene as a “theatrical play set overtly within a narrative framework” (2001: 58) that is cued straightforwardly in part by the author’s own foreword. The endostructural analysis of the speech event reveals the organisation of the “inner world” of the scene and the manner in which the exploitative hoax performed by one of the characters participating in the dialogue transforms the reality structure of the encounter. The latter part of the analysis involves the identification of the pragmatic manipulation of conversational discourse strategies by the hoaxer and therefore depends fundamentally on the application of discourse analytic and speech analytic techniques. The productive use of frame analysis in constructing the communicative significance of a particular verbal message in its original context of occurrence crucially depends upon the reliable and thorough apprehension of that context of occurrence. Clearly, in the case of a verbal message that may belong to a particular, highly specific literary and cultural type, the recovery and accurate analysis of such information will be crucial. So, for instance, the knowledge (a) that the farce’s author did not intend the farce for public performance, (b) that his dialect-speaking characters match his apparent passion for Netherlandish vernaculars and (c) that he included the work in a collection of belletristic works that were more literary than dramatic converge to critically inform the historical status of the speech event’s communicative significance. It is evident that the effective and explanatory use of frame analysis depends upon such rich historical information. Del Lungo Camiciotti (2007) also approaches historical literary discourse as communicative acts in which the author selects particular forms of expression in the context of the specific sociocultural environment in which the communication takes place. She approaches Osbern Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women, a medieval verse text composed in the tradition of saints’ lives, in order to elucidate the roles that directly reported speech performs in the text. Del Lungo Camiciotti demonstrates how Bokenham adapts the traditional saint’s life form for a new, increasingly literate audience by applying the medieval framing device in an innovative rather than formal manner. She also shows how dialogue is pressed into service as a narrative strategy and as a rhetorical device to make the text suitable for private consumption as well as for reading aloud in public. So dialogue has an array of functions; these include the textual functions of highlighting the complicating ac-

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tions in the narrative and demarcating speech from narration. Dialogue is also used for literary effect; it is used to manipulate reader/listener emotions, and its dramatic nature creates involvement in the narrated events. Del Lungo Camiciotti is particularly interested in grappling with the problem of how the study of interpersonal devices such as dialogue can illuminate both their enduring universal pragmatic functions over time and shed light on “questions of difference in textual conventions over time” (2007: 300). Similarly, historical speech-act analysis rests upon situating the text for scrutiny in a rich historical context. Historical speech-act analysis is a popular and highly effective approach to the reconstruction of pragmatic acts in texts representing or imitating ways of speaking prevalent in earlier historical periods such as courtroom discourse (see Doty, this volume). It has also been used highly effectively in examining the pragmatic meanings in literary drama, particularly in Shakespearean drama, and in performed narratives such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (e.g. Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Rudanko 2004). It has also been applied in the study of literary texts that have distinctive authorial personae, such as the early Middle English Ancrene Wisse (Petersen 2005), and Margaret Cavendish’s fictional CCXI Sociable Letters (Fitzmaurice 2002c). Petersen utilises speech-act analysis in order to explore the apparent contradiction between the punitive force of the Ancrene Wisse as the instantiation of an authoritative instructional and prescriptive genre and its author’s reluctance to assume the anti-feminist stance presupposed by the genre. Specifically, she argues that there is a gap between the stance presupposed by the generic classification of the text and the author’s actual stance. To demonstrate the nature of this conflict, Petersen conducts a study of speech-act types, as evidenced in the authorial voice’s choice of “verbs granting authority to, sharing authority with, and acknowledging authority within the women he writes for” (2005: 71). This study throws into sharp focus one of the critical challenges posed by historical speech-act analysis, namely the interference in historical pragmatic reconstruction of the present-day reception of and reactions to a verbal message (to borrow Bax’s term) that was first produced in an institutional, cultural and philosophical context markedly different (as well as temporally distant) from that in which it might now be visited and apprehended. For instance, it is anachronistic to characterise the tenor of the genre as “antifeminist” on the one hand and to hold onto the idea that the author might be struggling with his own sexism as a member of an institution defined by the patriarchy of the Church. Petersen does acknowledge the fact that the Ancrene Wisse is necessarily contextually determined and as such, cannot be called to account for the failings that twenty-firstcentury readers attribute to it. This study then richly exposes the challenges in historical pragmatic analysis of resisting giving explanatory power exclusively to contemporary theoretical explanations in place of the frequently more difficult and messier business of sorting through the detail that underpins the reconstruction of specific historical meanings.

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Other perspectives

While readers of this handbook will be familiar with linguistic pragmatic studies of the literary discourse from earlier historical periods, scholars in related or sister fields have also been interested in utilising the pragmatic theories we generally associate with linguistics frameworks in order to understand what discourses and texts mean in literary studies, in political theory and in history. In this section, I sample some of these treatments with the twin aims of making them more accessible to historical pragmaticians and assessing the extent to which they illuminate the texts they examine. Speech-act theory is the theory most frequently deployed by literary scholars in reading literary works, with rather different effects and implications from the linguistics work reviewed above. J. Hillis Miller concludes his preliminary critique of “speech acts” in the work of J. L. Austin, Jaques Derrida and Paul de Man with a demonstration of how “a prudent, circumspect, suitably refined awareness of speech-act theories may be helpful or even indispensable in interpreting literature” (2001: 155). Hillis Miller seeks to show how “speech acts work in literature by way of the passions that power them” by examining some brief passages from Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu as speech acts. To be sure, Hillis Miller adopts the notion of a speech act as a trope in the analysis of Proust’s narrative episodes, so he discusses an example in which Marcel’s telephone conversation with his grandmother occasions a meditation on the telephone as a strange new medium with a profound effect on human life. Hillis Miller argues that a “double performative” is necessary to effect the call; “the first performative utterance is to speak into the telephone and invoke the operator’s power. The second performative is effected by the operators who complete the call” (2001: 186–187). The puissance of the speech act for Hillis Miller consists of the performative’s transformative nature. He pays particular attention to the complex relationship between emotions or passions, such as desire or pain, and their utterance as one that is causal, thus drawing attention to the necessity of externalising or expressing a wish or an emotion in order to have it be realised. The speech act, then, is used loosely as a term of art rather than as a strictly pragmatic strategy. The historical element in Hillis Miller’s work consists of his reference to the potentially different meanings that speech acts (of the sort he describes) have, depending upon the external material circumstances in which the same act is performed. Thus he compares the way in which the telephone as a new technology projected a separate (telephone) self from one’s material self as a self in another medium with the manner in which the epistolary novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explore the “sort of self one becomes when writing a letter” (2001: 194). In more recent work, Fontana (2009) approaches the poems of the romantic Dante Gabriel Rossetti as “fictive speech acts that through the dramatic context they evoke and through their tone and degree of urgency implicate a matrix of

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meanings, not exclusively bound to static images and statements” (2009: 449). Thus he traces in Rossetti’s sonnets what he argues is the poet’s interest in firstperson exercitive speech acts. The notion of the speech act provides a means of itemising the exercitives as warnings, advice, directives and commands, and finally of arguing that Rossetti performs a “voice that is both authoritative in tone and skeptical in content” (2009: 457). The appropriation of the speech act for the purposes of this historical literary analysis is quite superficial in that it does not adduce any criteria for distinguishing among speech-act types as linguistic speech-act analysis tends to do.10 In contrast, in a treatment that owes as much to anthropology as to literary criticism, Molesworth (2006) draws on speech-act theory to approach black Atlantic writing of the eighteenth century. He argues that “the heightened awareness of speech acts and the ability of written text to produce locutions” evident in autobiographical narratives such as that written by Olaudah Equiano (1789) suggest that their writers see language as “essentially performative” (2006: 125). Molesworth asserts that speech acts have a potency, “a pseudo-magical quality” for these early black writers; their texts are full of curses, swearing, oath-making, blasphemy and praying, performatives that “summon danger or help, intensify wind or calm, and create fortune or misery” (2006: 125). Molesworth then extends the scope of what the illocutionary act can describe; he argues that by writing an autobiography and recounting his story in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano is acting to recruit the reader to bear witness to the evidence it presents. In other words, the act of reading creates Equiano’s subjectivity and, in the process, witnesses his symbolic shift from bewildered slave at the beginning to articulate narrator at the end. This account of the narrator’s transformation is particularly compelling in the light of the Narrative’s historical context; slaves were muzzled physically by iron muzzles as punishment, legally by their exclusion from the legal system, and linguistically by being denied education and literacy. Drawing upon the material historical detail of specific events, Molesworth mounts an argument (informed by Iser’s “act of reading” and speech-act theory) that engages the ethical and ideological stance of the reader. The philosophically oriented historical pragmatic study of literary texts in earlier historical periods is exemplified in an attempt to define the “grammar” of the libel in early modern England (Loxley 2006). Loxley rehearses recent characterisations of the libel as a speech act in Habermas’s sense of its being a “communicative practice, a specific habit, mode or convention of political exchange” (2006: 85). Loxley suggests that to approach the libel in terms of speech acts misses critical aspects of its taking place. He notes, “to call something a libel is more often to frame an accusation, with the implication that its status is not given or self-evident, that the accusation must be justified or refuted, and that grounds must therefore be adduced, authorities and schemata appealed to” (2006: 89). Therefore, despite all (juridical) attempts to capture the libel by the enabling and defining conditions of its pragmatic function, the true libel may too often “go about unrecognized, dis-

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seminating [its] poison until unmasked and named, necessarily after the fact” (2006: 90). The problem the libel presents is that an utterance can be defined as a libel only after it has been uttered or constructed; definition is an act performed by those who come after it. Loxley then attempts to negotiate a way of reconciling the utility of a pragmatic view of the libel as a speech act with the fact that the messy and contested historical circumstances in which an utterance is produced and then cast as a libel resist the straightforward application of a methodologically presupposed model such as the speech-act theory described by Austin, Skinner or Searle. This is a complex and compelling treatment of the potential clash of historiography and historical pragmatics in the study of contested literary genres. It would be particularly interesting to conduct a meta-analysis of speech acts hitherto examined from a historical typological perspective (cf. Archer, this volume) by assessing their speech-act status in a range of literary (and non-literary) instantiations in the light of highly specific material historical events in earlier historical periods. These might include insults (Arnovick 1999; Bax 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000) and curses (Arnovick 1999) as texts whose definition may well depend upon the recipient more than the speaker.

5.

The outlook for the historical pragmatic study of literary discourse

What would be an appropriate research agenda for historical pragmatics research on literary discourse, based on the foundations described and assessed in this chapter? It is evident that literary discourse has been a rich source of data for the study of past communicative practices with a view to reconstructing changes in their form and function over time. Linguists have been generally less interested in and less knowledgeable about the nature of the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which earlier literary discourse is produced and consumed, and more interested in extracting forms and functions that may be identified and examining them in and of themselves. This practice has resulted in linguistic accounts whose principal value lies in the generation of hypotheses (cf. Biber 2004a) that may be tested by other linguists drawing upon different (literary) discourse samples from different periods. Empirical studies conducted on this basis form a body of expertise on the forms and functions of linguistic and textual structures over time. The question is how relevant, appropriate or salient literary discourse (as opposed to other discourse types) is for this kind of study. At the same time, it is evident that literary approaches to the historical pragmatic analysis of literary discourse are similarly limited. They may use the terminology of pragmatics merely as a labelling tool without the necessary theoretical and technical apparatus to substantiate the analysis. It is arguable that the historical pragmatic study of literary discourse should aim for something different, asking different kinds of questions. Specifically, it is

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arguable that scholars can use historical pragmatics as a set of methods to produce accounts that illuminate the similarities and highlight the differences among communicative practices that are embedded in and produced by different literary historical contexts. For example, we should try to describe what the difference is between conventional meanings that cannot be calculated or apprehended by analysing the contexts in which they occur, and situational meanings and practices that can be uncovered through careful study of their situations. How can we do this kind of work? On the one hand, we need to ensure that we properly ground our pragmatic analysis in the material and intellectual history of discourse. In other words, we need to saturate our analytical perspectives with information about the specific conditions in which the texts we study were produced. These conditions include such materially specific factors as social, religious, political and educational institutions in which particular forms of literary expression have a place. These institutions are clues to discovering the traditions of literate practices, literary forms and narrative practices with which the literary discourses that we wish to study interact and rub shoulders. In order to be able to conduct such rich studies, we must take lessons from salient sister disciplines, such as anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric and history. On the other hand, we need to invest energy in questioning the efficacy of the theoretical frameworks we adduce for the analysis of historical texts. For instance, taking Loxley (2006) as a starting point, it would be worth considering the extent to which texts produced in the mess and muck of historical events can be apprehended by applying a theory that is not specifically designed for historical use. We should also take a cue from Fludernik’s (2003) advocacy of the diachronisation of narrative and consider extending the principle of diachronicity to the study of literariness. This work requires attending to the role of communicability and literary value in the history of genres as literary. Perhaps most of all, we need to pay attention to the specific literary scripts that shape the genres of historical discourse that we want to analyse in order that we do not overlook this rich seam of meaning in our studies.

Notes 1 The familiar letter is an example of a genre that has been treated as more or less literary in different periods in history; it is also a genre that has received a great deal of recent attention in historical pragmatics. This is not to say that the letter is or is not part of the domain of literary discourse, but that the notion of literature is necessarily contingent and therefore historically fluid. See Fitzmaurice (2000b) for a discussion of the familiar letter as literary text and as interactive register in the eighteenth century. For private letters, see Palander-Collin (this volume). 2 I will not rehearse here the range of criteria that have historically been used to distinguish literary discourse from non-literary discourse because they are eminently contestable.

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For a historically situated discussion, see Sell (2000: chapter 2). Pratt (1977) undertakes the task of refuting what she calls “the poetic language doctrine” (1977: xiv), a notion that encourages the belief that “literature is linguistically autonomous, that is, possessed of intrinsic linguistic properties which distinguish it from all other kinds of discourse” (xii). In so doing, she argues that literary discourse should be considered “in terms of its similarities to our other verbal activities rather than in terms of its differences from them” (xii). Attridge (1988) explores this aspect of literary discourse. Swirsky (1996: 69) comments on the challenges presented by interdisciplinarity thus: “literary study […] seems largely quaint and anachronistic, despite libraries of professional publications on methodology and theory. Literary critics, have of course, staged several ground-breaking forays into such domains as linguistics, structuralism, semiotics, statistics, and even information theory, in search of more rigorous analytic tools. Sadly, these superficial alliances with more established and rigorous disciplines have failed to produce much of substance”. Such an observation is rare. For extended discussion of the notions of literariness and communication, see Pilkington (2000: chapter 2). Also see Taavitsainen (1995), which explores the role of features of personal affect, interjections and exclamations in creating patterns of affect in four genres present in the Canterbury Tales, namely, the sermon, the saint’s life, the romance and the fable. The study of narrative in particular has considerable disciplinary scope, as indicated by the plethora of readers available that assemble approaches from structuralism, narratology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and history as well as literature and linguistics; for example, McQuillan (2000). See Rudanko (2004) for a more recent examination of the manner in which an amorous relationship is constructed in Chaucer’s poetry. He was apparently not aware of Honegger’s (2000) typological approach. For corpus-linguistic studies of stance that utilise historical semantic-pragmatic analysis, see Fitzmaurice (2002a, 2003). These studies examine stance in personal letters in eighteenth-century English. It is instructive that Fontana, like Hillis Miller, cites only J. L. Austin as the authoritative source for speech-act theory, suggesting that literary critics are either ignorant or dismissive of recent theoretical advances made in the domain of linguistic pragmatics.

References Adamson, Sylvia 1995 From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative: Stylization and (de)subjectivisation as processes of language change. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, 195–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, Sylvia 1999 Literary language. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume III: 1476–1776, 539–653. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Arnovick, Leslie 1999 Diachronic Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Attridge, Derek 1988 Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference, from the Renaissance to James Joyce. London: Methuen. Bax, Marcel 1999 Ritual levelling: The balance between the eristic and the contractual motive in hostile verbal encounters in medieval romance and early modern drama. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 35–80. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bax, Marcel 2000 Ritual discord and the contractual framework. An essay on a paradoxical framing device of the early modern theatre and its foundation in oral tradition and mimetic culture. Semiotica 132 (1/2). Bax, Marcel 2001 Historical frame analysis: Hoaxing and make-believe in a seventeenth-century Dutch play. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2.1: 33–67. Bennison, Neil 1993 Discourse analysis, pragmatics and the dramatic character: Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul. Language and Literature 2.2: 79–99. Biber, Douglas 2004a Historical patterns for the grammatical marking of stance: A cross-register comparison. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1: 107–136. Biber, Douglas 2004b Modal use across registers and time. In: Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 189–216. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan 1989 Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65: 487–515. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan 1992 The evolution of five written and speech-based English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 688–704. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan 1999 The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language. London: Longman Pearson. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1960 The pronouns of power and solidarity. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 253–276. New York: MIT Press. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1989 Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Language in Society 18: 159–212. Busse, Ulrich 2002 Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 106.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Busse, Ulrich 2003 The co-occurrence of nominal and pronominal address forms in the Shakespeare Corpus: Who says thou or you to whom? In: Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Diachronic Perspectives on Address Terms, 193–221. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 107.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Calvo, Clara 2003 Pronouns of address in As You Like It. Language and Literature I: 5–27. Conrad, Susan, and Douglas Biber (eds.) 2001 Variation in English: Multi-Dimensional Studies. London: Longman. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella 2007 Discoursal aspects of the Legends of Holy Women by Osbern Bokenham. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 285–305. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2000a Like talking on paper? The pragmatics of courtship and the eighteenth-century familiar letter. Language Sciences 22.3: 359–383. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2000b Tentativeness and insistence in the expression of politeness in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, Language and Literature 9.1: 7–24. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2002a Politeness and modal meaning in the construction of humiliative discourse in an early eighteenth-century network of patron-client relationships. English Language and Linguistics 6.2: 239–266. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2002b ‘Plethoras of witty verbiage’ and ‘heathen Greek’: Ways of reading meaning in English comic drama. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3.1: 31–60. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2002c The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fitzmaurice, Susan 2003 Margaret Cavendish, the Doctors of Physick and the language of advice to the sick. In: Stephen Clukas (ed.), Princely Brave Woman, 210–241. London: Ashgate Press. Fitzmaurice, Susan, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2007 Methods in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fludernik, Monika 2000 Discourse markers in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.2: 231–262. Fludernik, Monika 2003 The diachronization of narratology. Narrative 11.3: 331–348. Fludernik, Monika 2007 Letters as narrative: Narrative patterns and episode structure in early letters, 1400 to 1650. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 241–266. Fontana, Ernest 2009 Exercitive speech acts in the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Victorian Poetry, 449–458.

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Genette, Gérard 1980 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. [Translated by Jane E. Lewin.] Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hillis Miller, J. 2001 Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Honegger, Thomas 2000 ‘But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe’. Towards a typology of opening moves in courtly amorous interaction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 117–150. Horn, Laurence 1989 A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 1995 Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen 2000 Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1: 67–95. Krug, Manfred 2000 Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lowe, Valerie 1994 ‘Unsafe convictions?’: Unhappy confessions in The Crucible. Language and Literature 3.3: 175–195. Loxley, James 2006 On exegetical duty: Historical pragmatics and the grammar of the libel. Huntington Library Quarterly 69.1: 83–103. McQuillan, Martin (ed.) 2000 The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge. Magnusson, Lynne 1999 Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnusson, Lynne 2007 A pragmatics for interpreting Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1 to 20: Dialogue scripts and Erasmian intertexts. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 167–183. Molesworth, Jesse 2006 Equiano’s ‘loud voice’: Witnessing the performance of The Interesting Narrative. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2: 123–144. Nevala, Minna 2004 Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. Vol. LXIV. University of Helsinki: Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 1996 Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.

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Petersen, Zina 2005 Institution and individual in conflict: The early Middle English Ancrene Wisse and the authority of speech acts. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6.1: 69–85. Pilkington, Adrian 2000 Poetic Effects. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pratt, Mary-Louise 1977 Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rudanko, Juhani 2004 ‘I wol sterve’: Negotiating the issue of a lady’s consent in Chaucer’s poetry. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1: 137–158. Ryder, Mary Ellen 1999 Smoke and mirrors: Event patterns in the discourse structure of a romance novel. Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Studies 31.8: 1,067–1,080. Sell, Roger 2000 Literature as Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Swirsky, Peter 1996 Literary studies and literary pragmatics: The case of “The Purloined Letter”. SubStance 25.3: 69–89. Taavitsainen, Irma 1995 Narrative patterns of affect in four genres of the Canterbury Tales. The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism 30.2: 191–210. Taavitsainen, Irma 1997 Genre conventions: Personal affect in fiction and non-fiction in Early Modern English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles, 185–266. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma 1998 Emphatic language and romantic prose: Changing functions of interjections in a sociocultural perspective. European Journal of English Studies 2.2: 195–214. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Susan Fitzmaurice 2007 Historical Pragmatics: What it is and how to do it. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), 11–36. Tandon, Bharat 2003 Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation. London: Anthem Press. Toolan, Michael (ed.) 1992 Language, Text and Context: Essays in Stylistics. London: Routledge. Wright, Susan 1995 Subjectivity and experiential syntax. In: Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, 151–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

About the authors

Dawn Archer is Reader of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. She researches the discursive practices of the English Historical Courtroom. Her 2005 monograph explored questions and answers during the period 1640–1760. More recently, she has also begun to investigate the nineteenthcentury English courtroom, and facework within the context of the courtroom (historical and modern). Archer’s work on the historical courtroom draws upon her work in (historical) pragmatics and corpus linguistics. She is also involved in the development of content analysis tools and corpus annotation schemes for historical texts, and the promotion of the use of such tools/schemes across linguistics and other disciplines (see, e.g., her recent edited collection, What’s in a Word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction ). Leslie K. Arnovick is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her main research interests are historical pragmatics, the history and structure of the English language and Old and Middle English language and literature. Her book publications include Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven case studies in English illocutionary development (Benjamins, 2000), Written Reliquaries: The resonance of orality in medieval English Texts (Benjamins, 2006) and The English Language: A linguistic history (with Laurel J. Brinton, Oxford University Press, 2006). Marcel Bax is a senior researcher and lecturer in discourse linguistics in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research interests are in (historical) ritual interaction, the history of indirect and (im)polite language use, and the evolution of discourse genres. Publications include books on stance-taking in oral narrative (Oordelen in taal, WoltersNoordhoff, 1985) and cognitive pragmatics (Een spiegel van de geest, Martinus Nijhoff, 1995), (co-)edited volumes on (applied) linguistics (Reflections on Language and Language Learning, John Benjamins, 2001), ritual analysis (Ritual Language Behaviour [= special issue 4.2 of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics], John Benjamins, 2003), and cultural semiotics (Semiotic Evolution and the Dynamics of Culture, Peter Lang, 2004), along with papers on historical and diachronic pragmatics, semiolinguistics, and argumentation and discourse analysis. Laurel Brinton is Professor of English Language at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of research include tense/aspect, diachronic discourse analysis, pragmatic markers, grammaticalization, lexicalization, and linguistic stylistics.

706

About the authors

She is the author of The Development of English Aspectual Systems (CUP 1988, reissued 2009), Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions (Mouton, 1996), and The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development (CUP, 2008). With Elizabeth Closs Traugott, she has co-written Lexicalization in Language Change (CUP, 2005), and with Alexander Bergs she is co-editing the two-volume Handbook of Historical English Linguistics (Walter de Gruyter). She is also the author of two textbooks, The English Language: A Linguistic History (OUP, 2nd edn. 2010) co-authored with Leslie K. Arnovick, and The Structure of Modern English (Benjamins, 2nd edn. 2010) co-authored with Donna M. Brinton. She is assistant editor of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 2nd ed. online, and Bank of Canadian English (in progress). Beatrix Busse is Associate Professor of English (Historical) Linguistics at the English Department of the University of Berne. She was a visiting researcher in Birmingham (UK), Stratford (UK), and Lancaster (UK), and is a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy. Her scholarly interests include the history of English, (historical) pragmatics, Systemic-Functional Grammar, Shakespeare studies, stylistics, and corpus linguistics. One of her major publications is on Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare (Benjamins, 2006). One of her current research projects is on speech, writing and thought presentation in 19th-century English. Ulrich Busse is Professor of English Linguistics at the Martin Luther University at Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Over the past twenty years, he has published widely on Anglo-German language contact and its lexicographical description, including a book (Anglizismen im Duden ) and a three-volume dictionary on the influence of English on present-day German (Anglizismen-Wörterbuch – Der Einfluß des Englischen auf den deutschen Wortschatz nach 1945 by Broder Carstensen and Ulrich Busse). His general interest in lexis and its description is reflected in a number of publications on lexicology and (meta-) lexicography. In English historical linguistics, he has worked on Early Modern English, historical pragmatics and the language of Shakespeare in particular (Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns). More recently, he has investigated the role of prescription and description in the codification of English as exemplified in usage manuals from the 19th century to the present. Claudia Claridge is Professor of English Linguistics at the Universität DuisburgEssen, Germany. She is one of the compilers of the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts. She is author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000), based on the above corpus, and of Hyperbole in English: A corpusbased study of exaggeration (2010). Her main research interests lie in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, and corpus linguistics. Within

About the authors

707

these fields, she has published articles on topics such as similes/comparison, superlatives, questions, conditionals, and discourse deixis. She has also contributed articles to various handbooks, such as the Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2008) and History of English: An international handbook (t.a.). Jonathan Culpeper is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His work spans pragmatics, stylistics and the history of English, and has resulted in various books and articles, the latest being Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing (2010, CUP; co-authored with Merja Kytö). He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pragmatics. Kathleen L. Doty is Professor of English and Linguistics at Humboldt State University (Arcata, California, USA), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English linguistics, literature, and rhetoric. Her research has included pragmatic study of modern fiction and drama as well as the language of earlier periods, including the legal discourse of the seventeenth century and the Salem witchcraft trials in particular. A recent study examines conduct literature for women in colonial America. Doty has published articles in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Poetica, among others. She is currently pursuing an analysis of religious language and rhetoric in the early modern period. Susan Fitzmaurice is Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Her principal areas of research include historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, and English historical linguistics. She has recently co-edited the following volumes: with Donka Minkova (2008): Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change (Mouton); and with Irma Taavitsainen (2007) Methods in Historical Pragmatics (Mouton). She has also published a number of articles on eighteenthcentury English, including most recently: “The sociopragmatics of a lovers’ spat: the case of the eighteenth-century courtship letters of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley”, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, (10(2) 2009). She also has essays forthcoming in Raymond Hickey (ed.) Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change, and in Païvi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.) Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English. Gerd Fritz is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Gießen, Germany, formerly at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research interests include the pragmatics of text and dialogue, especially the structure and dynamics of scientific controversies, text comprehensibility and usability of hypertexts, and historical semantics. He is currently conducting a project on the use of digital

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About the authors

formats (mailinglists, blogs, wikis) in scientific communication and he is working on a book on dynamic text theory. Among his major publications are: Kohärenz. Grundfragen der linguistischen Kommunikationsanalyse (1982), Handbuch der Dialoganalyse (co-edited, 1994); Historical Dialogue Analysis (co-edited, 1999), Einführung in die historische Semantik (2005), Communication Principles for Controversies: A historical perspective (2008). Elke Gehweiler is a research associate in the project “effects of performance on linguistic systems: evidence from grammaticalization and the study of verbal aggression” (within the Sonderforschungsbereich 447 funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ) at the Freie Universität Berlin and lexicographer for the Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Neubearbeitung at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her research interests and topics of publication include semantic change, grammaticalization, idioms and formulaic language, semantic change in idioms, lexicology/lexicography and interjections and expletives. She is co-editor of the volume Grammaticalization: Current Views and Issues (2010) (with Katerina Stathi and Ekkehard König). Andreas H. Jucker is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, where he is also Vice Dean for Resources of the Faculty of Arts. His current research interests include historical pragmatics, speech act theory, politeness theory and the grammar and history of English. His recent book publications include Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems (Benjamins, 2003), Speech Acts in the History of English (Benjamins, 2008), both co-edited with Irma Taavitsainen, Early Modern English News Discourse (Benjamins, 2009), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse (Rodopi, 2009) co-edited with Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt, and Communicating Early English Manuscripts (CUP, 2010) coedited with Päivi Pahta. He is co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (with Irma Taavitsainen) and from 1995 to 2007 he was the series editor of the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (Benjamins). Thomas Kohnen is Professor of English Language and Medieval Studies at the University of Cologne. His major fields of study include historical pragmatics and historical text linguistics, corpus linguistics (both synchronic and diachronic), historical syntax, speech act theory, orality and literacy and the language of religion. He is co-editor of the book series “English Corpus Linguistics”. He is also in charge of the “Corpus of English Religious Prose” (COERP), which is being compiled at the English Department of the University of Cologne. His recent publications include studies on politeness, religious discourse and English Bible translations.

About the authors

709

Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language in the Department of English Uppsala University, Sweden. Her fields of interest include variation analysis, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and the history of English. Among her recent publications are Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (associate editor, CUP, 2009), Corpus Lingiustics: An International Handbook (co-editor, de Gruyter, 2008) and Nineteenth-century English: Stability and Change (co-editor, CUP, 2006). With Jonathan Culpeper, she co-authored Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing (CUP, 2010). She is the general editor of the Studies in English Language (CUP) series and a co-editor of the ICAME Journal and Studia Neophilologica. She has participated in the compilation of historical corpora, among them the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English, and, together with Jonathan Culpeper, the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. She is currently working on an electronic edition of Early Modern English witness depositions, together with Peter Grund and Terry Walker. María José López-Couso is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and a member of the Research Unit Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization. Her main research areas are morpho-syntactic and pragmatic change and grammaticalization processes in the history of English, with specific interests in the fields of clausal complementation, existential constructions, and negation. She has published extensively on these and other topics, and has co-edited several volumes in the areas of historical linguistics (English Historical Syntax and Morphology, Benjamins 2002) and grammaticalization studies (Rethinking Grammaticalization: New perspectives, Benjamins 2008, and Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization, Benjamins 2008). Gabriella Mazzon is Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Her main research interests are varieties of English and postcolonial Englishes, history of English syntax and historical sociopragmatics of English. Some of her main publications in historical linguistics include: A History of English Negation, Pearsons Longman 2004; (editor) Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings. [Proceedings of the 5th ICOME conference, Naples, 24–27 August 2005] Peter Lang 2007, Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama [Pragmatics and Beyond NS 185]. John Benjamins 2009. Brigitte Nerlich is Professor of Science, Language, and Society at the Institute for Science and Society (School of Sociology and Social Policy), at the University of Nottingham (UK). She studied French and philosophy in Germany. After three years as a Junior Research Fellow in general linguistics at the University of Oxford, she moved to Nottingham, where she worked in linguistics and psychology, before moving on to sociology. Her current research focuses on the cultural and

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About the authors

political contexts in which metaphors and other framing devices are used in public, policy and scientific debates about emerging technologies (from bio to nano), emerging diseases, as well as climate change. She has written books and articles on the history of linguistics, semantic change, metaphor, metonymy, polysemy and, more recently, the sociology of health and illness and the social study of science and technology. She is a Member of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences. Minna Nevala is a researcher at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, University of Helsinki. Her current project involves referential terms in Early and Late Modern English. She is the author of Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions (2004, Société Néophilologique de Helsinki). She is also one of the compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Päivi Pahta is Professor of English Philology at the School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies, University of Tampere. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and multilingualism, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, text and discourse analysis, and the history of scientific and medical writing. Her main publications include Medieval Embryology in the Vernacular (Société Néophilologique 1998), Writing in Nonstandard English (co-editor, John Benjamins 1999), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (co-editor, CUP 2004), the corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (cocompiler, John Benjamins 2005), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation (co-editor, John Benjamins 2008), Medical Writing in Early Modern English (co-editor, CUP 2010), Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English (co-editor, John Benjamins 2010) and Communicating Early English Manuscripts (co-editor, CUP, 2010). Mari Pakkala-Weckström is Senior Lecturer of English Translation at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Her 2005 Doctoral Dissertation dealt with Chaucer’s marriage dialogue. Her current research interests include various forms of discourse studies, both contemporary and historical. Minna Palander-Collin is currently Professor of English Philology at the Department of Modern Languages and Senior Researcher at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki. Her main research interests include historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics, and her latest project focuses on Language and Identity: Variation and Change in Patterns of Interaction in the History of English. She has published several articles on these topics and co-edited The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) (Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009) and Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English (Amsterdam / Phil-

About the authors

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adelphia: John Benjamins, 2010). She is also one of the compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Irma Taavitsainen is Professor of English Philology and Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, linguistic stylistics, and the evolution of medical writing. She is co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (with Andreas H. Jucker). Her co-edited volumes include Speech Acts in the History of English (with Andreas H. Jucker, Benjamins, 2008), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation (with Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Minna Korhonen, Benjamins, 2008), Methods in Historical Pragmatics (with Susan Fitzmaurice, Mouton, 2007), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (with Päivi Pahta, CUP, 2004) and Medical Writing in Early Modern English (with Päivi Pahta, CUP, 2010). She was also involved in compiling Middle English Medical Texts (Benjamins 2005, and Early Modern English Medical Texts (forthc. Benjamins 2010). Elizabeth Traugott is Professor of Linguistics and English, Emerita, at Stanford University. Her research has been primarily in historical morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicalization, and linguistics and literature. She is currently working on constructionalization, especially ways to bring the theories of grammaticalization and construction grammar to bear on accounts of micro-changes. Publications include A History of English Syntax (1972), Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980; with Mary L. Pratt), On Conditionals (1986; co-edited with Alice ter Meulen, Judith Snitzer Reilly, and Charles A. Ferguson), Grammaticalization (1993, 2nd much revised ed. 2003; with Paul Hopper), Regularity in Semantic Change (2002; with Richard B. Dasher), Lexicalization and Language Change (2005; with Laurel J. Brinton), and Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization (2010; co-edited with Graeme Trousdale).

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Index of subjects

713

Index of subjects

A A Midsummer Night’s Dream 255 A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 36, 41, 392, 534, 562, 564, 666, 688 accommodation theory 665 activity type 80–82, 84, 85, 399, 404 definition 80 address forms see terms of address address formulae 39, 79, 80, 365, 430 address terms see terms of address adjacency pairs 178, 290, 636 advertisement 44, 605, 607, 608 advice see speech acts, advice African-American culture 495 African-American sounding 14, 269, 394, 489, 490, 492, 495 alchemy 552, 553 alerters 406 Anglo-American pragmatics see pragmatics, Anglo-American Anglo-Norman 555 Anglo-Saxon 12, 14, 269, 384, 398, 439, 507, 531, 532, 535, 555, 626 antagonistic 489, 507 anthropology 697, 699 Antony and Cleopatra 260–262 apology see speech acts, apology ARCHER see A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers argumentation 41, 105, 147, 451, 452, 467, 528, 529, 571, 597, 602, 605 ars dictaminis 652, 655, 657 Arthurian romances 230, 238, 508, 685 As You Like It 254, 265, 512 astrology 471, 552, 553 astronomy 454, 468, 471, 552, 553, 562 audience design 353, 468, 560, 651, 665 audience involvement 237, 318, 333–335, 337, 339, 498, 689, 695 Augustana 35 autobiography 336, 337, 697

B bald-on-record 384, 638 banter 77, 394, 396, 397, 496 Beowulf 324, 380, 390, 394, 395, 406, 502, 507, 532 Bible 41, 44, 174, 322, 335, 337, 341, 465, 523–529, 532, 533, 535–537, 540, 541 Bible translations 174, 335, 337, 523–525, 532, 535, 536 biography 336, 533, 604 blasphemy 320, 321, 322, 324–327, 343, 697 blessing 14, 174–179, 183, 184, 324, 332, 338, 486 BNC see British National Corpus Bonner Frühneuhochdeutsches Korpus 35 book historical research 559, 560 Book of the Duchess 224, 225, 226, 239 bridging 101, 102 British National Corpus 400, 613, 614 British parliamentary debates 645 broadsheets 593, 598 Brown Corpus 34 C Canterbury Tales 220–222, 224, 225, 227–240, 266, 320, 324, 333, 337–339, 357, 359, 363, 391, 396, 695, 700 CCSARP see Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns CED see Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 CEEC see Corpus of Early English Correspondence CEECE see Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension CEECS see Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler CEECSU see Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement CEEM see Corpus of Early English Medical Writing

714

Index of subjects

Cely letters 660 Century of Prose Corpus 38 chancery 628, 633 change-of-state token 341 charms 486, 499, 569 chronicle 525, 598, 601, 604 Church 82, 177, 326, 328, 330. 523, 525, 526, 528, 529, 530, 531, 533, 535, 540, 630, 695 cleft construction 102, 103, 114, 115 CLMET see Corpus of Late Modern English Texts cluster analysis 666 CMPV see Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse coalescence 182, 185, 186 Cockney rhyming slang 322 code-switch 568, 629, 665 collocations 108, 109, 112, 257, 287, 288, 292, 305, 327, 331, 334, 392, 588 colloquial 35, 56, 104, 114, 266, 287, 294, 334, 337, 426 comedy 8, 39, 40, 233, 252, 255, 260, 334, 335, 360, 403, 641, 659, 691, 693 comedy drama see drama, comedy comment clause 13, 109, 289, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 300, 302, 305 commissive see speech acts, commissive communication principles 452, 455, 456, 457, 461, 468–472 communication, forms of 451, 456, 459, 473, 680 complaints see speech acts, complaints compliments see speech acts, compliments CONCE see Corpus of Nineteenth-century English Condolences see speech acts, condolences 401 Confessio 240 confession 530, 532, 538, 542, 637–640, 642 congratulations see speech acts congratulations conjurations 240, 499 consilia 569 CONTE see Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section contemplative treatises 535, 541

Continental European pragmatics, see pragmatics, Continental European controversies 21, 22, 132, 135, 136, 147, 150, 184, 265, 296, 451–473, 489, 490, 503, 508, 571, 573, 596, 597, 615, 616 computer-mediated 466 history of 451–473 medical 458, 472, 571, 572 philosophical 452, 454, 455, 467 religious 22, 453–455, 463, 571, 594 scientific 466, 457, 465–467 conversation 35, 39, 335, 342, 343, 397, 403, 429, 439, 537, 538, 627, 659, 685, 688, 690, 691, 696 analysis 341, 342, 624, 691 analytic framework 332, 341 formula 174–178 goal 166, 182 implicatures 51, 130, 146, 165, 199, 209, 270, 298, 304, 693 marker 19, 267 maxim 5, 6, 469, 691 meaning 693 principle 165, 182, 184, 381, 691 routines 167, 168, 174–178, 304, 365 strategies 637, 694 COPC see Century of Prose Corpus CoRD see Corpus Resource Database Coriolanus 270, 271 corpora 11, 21, 33–47, 50, 52–55, 150, 178, 179,184, 196, 250, 252, 352, 365, 393, 401, 404, 406, 472, 524, 534, 561, 562, 573, 623, 625, 627, 632–634, 644, 666, 667 corpus compilation 35, 37, 39–41, 43, 45, 50, 53, 54, 352, 542, 562, 564, 628, 631, 666 Corpus del Español 35 Corpus do Português 35 corpus linguistic analysis 24, 561, 688, 691 corpus linguistic methodology 15, 379, 385, 568, 641 corpus linguistic tools 568 corpus linguistics 34, 35, 46, 681, 683, 688 Corpus of Early English Correspondence 37–39, 589, 662, 666, 667 Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension 39

Index of subjects Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler 39 Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement 39 Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 38, 40, 54, 562 Corpus of Early English Recipes 562 Corpus of Early Ontario English, PreConfederation Section 41 Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 8, 38–40, 51, 252, 256, 406, 436, 627, 633, 641 Corpus of English Religious Prose 38, 40, 524, 534, 536, 542 Corpus of Irish English 41, 54 Corpus of Late Eighteenth-century Prose 667 Corpus of Late Modern English Prose 39 Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 45 Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse 37, 45 Corpus of Nineteenth-century English 38, 39, 666 Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence 667 Corpus of Scottish Correspondence 41, 42, 666, 667 corpus pragmatics 24 Corpus Presenter 53, 54 Corpus Resource Database 46 corpus stylistics 562 correspondence, see also letters 13, 18, 22, 35, 36, 38, 39, 48, 78, 266, 352, 353, 359, 363, 432, 566, 651–668 business 389, 430, 654, 657 family 431 military 654 personal 430, 653, 659 private 652, 654 public 652 Coruña Corpus 562 court records 8, 10, 13, 40, 42, 48, 86, 359, 403, 419, 428, 429, 441, 622, 623, 625, 627–631, 635, 637–640, 645 courtesy 257, 359, 389 marker 137, 170, 171, 301, 306 title of 268

715

courtroom 10, 12, 48, 77, 86, 386, 388, 398, 399, 419, 435, 436, 621–645 discourse 5, 22, 77, 419, 420, 430, 433, 435–437, 621–645, 695 definition 621 interaction 628 language 12 proceedings 10, 641 witness depositions 82, 399, 429, 627, 641, 659 Early Modern English 12, 40, 399 critical discourse analysis 69, 74–80, 87, 201, 645 cross-cultural analysis 20, 455, 484, 490, 643, 645 cross-cultural pragmatics see pragmatics, cross-cultural Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns 406 CSC see Corpus of Scottish Correspondence curses see speech acts, curses cursing see speech acts, cursing Cymbeline 260 D data, fictional 8, 86, 219, 220, 232, 401, 403, 627 dawn-song 237, 238 Decameron 224, 240 deference 86, 167, 257, 258, 262, 265, 270, 286, 289, 352, 354, 355, 358, 361, 364, 367, 424, 426, 440 deictic 20, 49, 99, 107, 132, 133, 136, 137, 184, 188, 237, 287, 316, 336, 687 discourse 133, 287 element 184, 237, 316 social 132, 137, 188, 316 text 287 verb 686 deixis 128, 129, 142, 153, 166, 184, 186, 254, 683 discourse 184 deontic 130, 133, 328, 329, 363, 392, 398, 399, 563 deposition 8, 40,42, 48, 82, 252, 253, 290, 359, 360, 371, 399, 429, 435, 621, 622, 626, 627, 629, 631, 635, 636, 641, 659

716

Index of subjects

Der digitale Grimm 45 desemanticisation 99, 185, 302, 303, 305 desubjectification 142, 143 DeutschDiachron-Digital 35 diachronic pragmatics 3, 4, 13, 16, 34, 36, 51, 76–78, 81, 194, 203, 219, 220, 232, 236, 248, 266, 268, 379, 458, 497, 507, 513, 572, 587, 621, 625, 637, 638, 686 dialogicity 105 dialogue 17, 33, 35, 49, 50, 106, 174–176, 219, 220, 227, 229, 235, 238, 239, 247, 263, 266, 290, 292, 319, 335, 340, 341, 352, 353, 357–360, 362, 363, 366–368, 381, 389, 419, 420, 427, 428, 437, 456, 459, 497, 533, 571, 596, 604, 613, 628, 631, 659, 684, 690, 694, 695 analysis 6, 7, 33, 55, 360, 452, 456, diaries 45, 50, 336 Dictionary of Old English 45 Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form 37, 45 diglossia 525 direct discourse 297, 630, 631, 635–637, 639, 640 direct speech 51, 168, 297, 319, 334, 337, 340, 341, 597, 612, 628, 629 direction of fit 270, 393, 398, 483, 489, 490, 634 directive see speech acts, directive discernment 353, 430–433, 439, 440 discourse analysis 6, 12, 76, 87, 422, 427, 484, 587, 624, 690 critical 69, 74–76, 79, 80, 87, 645 diachronic(ally oriented) 13, 76, 285, 296 historical 12, 76, 285, 564, 568, 587 literary 681 discourse marker 6, 13, 14, 18, 22, 52, 86, 98, 104, 105, 107–114, 129, 132, 134–137, 140, 153, 165, 167–169, 181, 185, 186, 188, 254, 266–268, 272, 285–307, 315, 317, 330, 332, 343, 570, 626, 629, 638, 683–685 definition 110, 150, 286 Early Modern English 254, 266–268, 290–292

French 136, 294, 295, 306 German 136 Hebrew 135 Italian 110, 165, 295 Japanese 111, 136, 152, 296 Late Modern English 292, 293 Latin 294 Mandarin Chinese 136 Mexican Spanish 110, 135 Middle English 135, 288–290, 297, 684 Old English 134, 135, 188, 287, 288, 293, 297 Old French 294 Old Italian 295 Old Japanese 136 Old Portuguese 136 Portuguese 136 Spanish 105, 135, 149, 150, 152, 306 Swedish 296 discourse particles see discourse marker discourse-oriented historical linguistics 14, 76 discursisation 21, 165–188, 430 disputation 453, 460–462, 465, 467, 472, 473, 513, 597, 604 scholastic 462 DOE see Dictionary of Old English DOEC see Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form drama 8, 18, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 104, 248, 250, 252, 256, 261, 263, 266, 290, 292, 293, 320, 335, 337, 338, 353, 357–361, 365, 368, 382, 386, 388, 389, 419, 420, 429, 430, 432–434, 436, 489, 501, 512, 537, 564, 630, 634, 641, 659, 667, 681, 683, 689, 691–695 comedy 8, 39, 40, 252, 641, 659, 691 E Early English Books Online 11, 43, 44 Early Modern English Dictionary Database see Lexicons of Early Modern English Early Modern English Medical Texts 562, 565, 570 ECCO see Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Index of subjects Edward the Third 250, 251 EEBO see Early English Books Online Eighteenth Century Collections Online 11, 43, 44 Eighteenth Century Fiction database 392 EMEMT see Early Modern English Medical Texts emotional loading 338 encyclopaedic treatises 569 English Witness Depositions 1560–1760: An Electronic Text Edition 42 epistemic adverb 135, 148 authority 342 expressions 689 marker 288 meaning 103, 130, 131, 143, 286, 289, 291, 293, 295, 299, 303, 565 modality 110, 130, 133, 146, 147, 148, 291, 612 parentheticals 133, 134, 137, 289, 293, 300, 301, 306 tense marker 392 epistolary etiquette 439 facework 439 formula 136 novel 696 structure 660 ethos 264, 487, 495, 571 exclamation 136, 237, 267, 317, 329, 333, 334, 336, 337, 542, 614, 700 exegesis 528, 529, 541 exhortation 41, 494, 528–530, 541, 604 existential presuppositions 397 expletive 22, 139, 167, 171, 172, 180, 269, 288, 292, 315–344, 398 explicit performatives 240, 268, 393, 439, 538 exposition 528, 530, 542 expressive 129, 298, 328, 329, 379, 382, 393, 398, 492, 512, 630, 631 expressive function 127, 167, 171, 296 speech act, expressive 17, 179, 270, 327, 328, 329, 379, 382, 393–402, 567, 568

717

F fabliaux 226, 229, 231, 234, 235, 238, 324, 333, 334, 337, 338, 340 face 131, 250, 262, 264, 266, 361, 394, 397, 401, 419, 436, 437, 441, 637, 653 attack 433, 437 damage 394, 397, 398, 436 dynamics 427 enhancing 393, 399 flattering 393, 400, 439 negative 383, 423, 424, 432 saving 231, 286, 384, 389, 496, 541, 637 threat 257, 262–265, 359, 362, 366, 383, 384, 393, 398, 400, 407, 419, 421, 426, 429, 434, 436, 439, 597, 637 loss 297, 426, 436 obligations 382 threat mitigators 168, 169, 297 positive 394, 423, 424 face-to-face conversation 403, 627, 659 dialogue 106 interaction 9, 39, 622, 626, 661, 662 oral examination 630 facework 79, 363, 379, 402, 429–433, 438, 439, 484, 513 Fachprosa 562 farce 324, 694 farewell see speech acts, farewell 401 felicity conditions 270, 406, 499 fiction 8, 22, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45, 49, 86, 194, 219, 267, 292, 320, 334–338, 392, 341, 403, 420, 428, 428, 641, 659, 667,679, 685, 688, 694, 695 flattery 262, 263, 363, 393, 399, 401, 439 flyting see speech acts, flyting 14, 269, 394, 395, 406, 493–495, 506, 507 focus markers 114 forms of address see terms of address form-to-function mapping 4, 13, 34, 51, 248, 271, 296, 297, 315, 323, 330–332, 385, 683 formulae, opening and closing 390, 659, 660 formulaic discourse 635 expression 176, 389, 400, 471

718

Index of subjects

language 344, 389, 486, 624, 634 patterns 390 routine 177 frame analysis 84, 85, 693, 694 Frantext 35 function-to-form mapping 4, 13, 34, 51, 248, 268, 296, 297, 315, 323, 326–330, 385, 683 fuzziness 269, 390, 534 G gender 40, 42, 44, 79, 235, 238, 261, 353, 360, 361, 405, 420, 507, 558, 559, 633, 653, 655, 662, 664 general pragmatics see pragmatics, general genre 8, 20, 21, 33, 35–44, 50, 52–54, 74, 77–79, 85–87, 103, 104, 111, 115, 165, 220, 226, 229, 231, 233, 235–238, 252, 254, 255, 260, 266, 267, 272, 288, 292, 315, 318, 320, 332–334, 336–342, 344, 355, 360, 362, 363, 366, 384, 388, 389, 395, 403, 426, 432, 456, 457, 484, 486, 490, 492, 495–497, 499, 507, 508, 513, 523–542, 549, 550, 553, 555–557, 561–564, 567–570, 573, 587, 588, 603–606, 614, 628, 629, 631, 634–636, 651, 652, 653, 654, 657–662, 666, 679,680, 686–691, 695, 698–700 analysis 550, 568 definition 226, 569 German modal particle 106, 136 gradience 141, 142, 152, 385 grammaticalisation 5, 21, 45, 97–116, 127, 130, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 153, 165, 166, 170–172, 174, 181, 183, 185–188, 199, 285, 298, 302–307, 363, 388, 392, 629, 634, 645 definition 97, 98, 165, 185, 307 greeting see speech acts, greeting Grice’s cooperative principle 247, 381, 626, 629, 634, 640 Gricean maxim 81, 84, 101, 105, 182, 469, 610, 691 Gricean pragmatics 693

H Hamlet 249, 257, 260, 262, 263, 267, 325, 385 handbooks 17, 35, 359, 569, 570 dialogic 35, 39, 641 Hanseatic trading alliance 660 HC see Helsinki Corpus of English Texts HCOS see The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots headlines 588, 593, 598, 606–610, 615 hedge 108, 109, 135, 165, 167, 172, 173, 265, 292, 316, 572, 658 hedged performative 387 Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence 252 Helsinki Corpus of English Texts 8, 34, 36–38, 41, 267, 334, 337, 338, 340, 341, 384, 524, 534, 562, 565, 666 Henry VI, Part 3 267 historical dialogue analysis 6, 7, 55, 452 historical linguistics, discourse-oriented 14, 76 historical pragmatics, Anglo-American 5, 6, 21, 87, 622 historical pragmatics, definition 5, 6, 69, 193, 549, 621, 681 historical pragmatics, Continental European 5, 6, 21, 587, 622 historical semantics 6, 11, 21, 193, 205, 458, 473 historical sociolinguists 7, 38, 79, 87, 352, 550 historical sociopragmatics 21, 69–88 definition 69, 86 historical stylistics 564, 568, 680, 681 Historical Thesaurus of English 6, 11 homilies 341, 524, 532, 539, 541 honorific 131, 137, 138, 152, 170, 355, 356, 365, 366, 389, 424, 426, 431 honorification 108, 137, 138 HTE see Historical Thesaurus of English humiliative 137, 138, 432, 661 humor 323, 334, 603, 652 I ICAME CD-ROM 47 ICAMET see Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts

Index of subjects iconic 439, 488–492, 494, 500, 503, 505, 512 ideology 421, 441, 658, 679 illiteracy 654, 657 illocution 19, 71, 176, 567, 568 illocutionary act 234, 636, 697 chunks 168 developments 327, 329 force 16, 167, 174, 176, 183, 184, 268, 286, 316, 380, 385, 386, 388–392, 404, 483, 635 force indicating devices 316, 386, 390–392, 404 meaning 174, 179, 380, 388 performance 178 smoothing 430 transparency 384 verbs 270 implicature 51, 69, 100, 101, 105, 130, 146, 165, 166, 184, 199, 209, 254, 270, 295, 298, 303, 396, 664, 691–693 impoliteness 22, 238, 262–266, 379, 394, 397, 402, 407, 419, 420, 423, 425, 433–437, 440, 441, 597, 637, 638 impoliteness strategies 433 impositives see speech acts, impositives indirect free style 687 indirect language 382, 615 indirect reported speech 611 indirect speech act 270, 299, 301, 380, 384, 386, 387, 406, 425, 610, 611, 628 indirectness 19, 355, 384, 386, 387, 421, 430, 572, 626, 634 inference 14, 81, 100, 102, 131, 140, 142, 180, 198, 200, 203, 206, 209, 298, 302, 358, 405, 644, 664, 682, 692 information structure 4, 102, 103, 107, 112–115, 171, 551 Innsbruck Computer Archive of MachineReadable English Texts 37, 39 Innsbruck Letter Corpus 38 institutional talk 342 insult see speech acts, insult interactional sociolinguistics 75, 353, 356, 665

719

interjection 8, 18, 22, 111, 136, 167, 168, 171, 172, 180, 183, 188, 231, 259, 266–268, 287, 288, 290, 292, 295, 296, 299, 304, 315–344, 683, 685, 700 Internet 10, 11, 15, 43, 45, 451, 455, 464, 506, 569, 591, 594 intersubjectification 21, 107, 108, 111, 127–154, 298, 299, 307 definition 298 intersubjectivity 107, 111, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 143, 147, 153, 180, 186, 286, 303, 307, 332, 405, 665, 668 definition 147 intertextuality 465, 553, 570, 571 invisible-hand theory 473 invited inferencing 14, 100, 101, 105, 131, 180, 206, 209, 298, 302, 331 Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change 99, 101, 105, 131, 331 irony 17, 19, 198, 334, 342, 380, 381, 396, 400, 435, 467, 470, 471 J Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4, 6, 23, 69, 247, 379 Journal of Pragmatics 315 journals, scholarly 451, 457, 458, 464, 558 journals, scientific 457, 472, 557, 567 K keyword analysis 52, 54, 55, 659, 666 King Henry VIII 255, 263 King Lear 250, 253, 254, 257, 260, 262, 263, 269, 271, 366 King Richard III 256, 259 L LAEME see Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English LALME see Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English 1350–1450 Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts 38, 40, 134, 534, 562, 594, 598, 603, 604 Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus 38, 40, 602 LAOS see Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1 Le Journal des Sçavans 557

720

Index of subjects

legal data 399, 465, 606, 626, 629, 634, 638 discourse 623 document 398, 624, 625, 629, 643 genre 631, 635 language 621, 623, 626, 634, 635, 644 register 185 Legend of Good Women 225–227, 230, 239 LEON see Leuven English Old to New letters 79, 85, 136, 293, 353, 389, 403, 419, 420, 425, 428, 431, 437, 464, 468, 557, 566, 590, 603, 604, 605, 611, 614, 651–668, 683, 688, 690 as data 9, 17, 18, 38, 39, 41, 45, 50, 77, 80 business 419 corpora 666, 667 definition 652 diplomatic 652 family 654, 664, 699 official 41 personal 8, 38, 419, 539, 652, 653, 658, 659, 661, 662, 665, 680, 689, 700 private 335, 389, 430, 431, 463, 464, 652, 653, 656, 699 public 389, 652, 653 religious 524, 526, 535 to the editor 605 letter-writing convention 655 letter-writing manuals 359, 438, 655, 657, 660, 663 Leuven English Old to New 36 lexical bundles 40, 55 lexicalisation 153, 166, 175, 176, 182, 206, 285, 302–307, 332 definition 305 Lexicons of Early Modern English 46, 259 liminality 500–502 lingua franca 549, 557, 565 Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 43 Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English 1350–1450 43, 368 Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1 43 Lion see Literature Online literacy 335, 391, 493, 507, 531, 539, 540, 558, 559, 592, 593, 613, 626, 643, 653, 654, 657, 665, 679, 688, 689, 697 literary 338, 392, 439, 690, 698

convention 559 criticism 271, 272, 352, 697 data 44, 45, 46, 78, 219, 236, 353, 356, 358, 360, 363–365, 402, 430, 506, 552 dialect 50, 219, 220 discourse 22, 219, 342, 427, 589, 679–700 form 679, 680 genres 226, 229, 254, 338, 426, 680, 686, 689 history 454 language 224, 252 meaning 682 pragmatics 231, 367, 680, 681, 691 definition 231 theory 258, 454, 699 Literature Online 43, 44 locutionary 133, 175, 329 logos 571 London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English 335, 540 M Macbeth 260, 262, 263, 266, 433, 434 macro-analysis 21 macro-approach 69, 668 macro-level 20, 40, 53, 74–77, 81, 259, 437, 460, 550, 560, 568, 633 macro-perspective 458, 459 macropragmatics 682, 686, 687 macro-social group 663 macro-societal issues 653 macro-societal level 567, 651, 668 macro-societal perspective 663 macro-sociolinguistic studies 666 macro-structure 456, 551 mass communication, definition 589 mass media 9, 455, 486 materia medica 553, 570 maxim flouting 640, 693 maxim of agreement 400 maxim of modesty 400 maxim of quantity 101, 691, 693 maxim of relation 691 MED see Middle English Dictionary medical writing 40, 549–574 MEG-C see Middle English Grammar Corpus

Index of subjects MEMT see Middle English Medical Texts metacommunicative 136, 165, 187, 567 metadiscursive practices 567 metaphor 22, 100, 193–209, 260, 467, 471, 692 metaphoric change 99, 100, 130, 298 metaphorisation 15, 69, 98 metatextual 105, 286, 295, 298, 556, 563 metonymic chains see serial metonymy metonymy 100, 193–209, 392 microanalysis 20, 21, 52, 73–77, 250, 272, 336, 626, 633, 639, 642, 668 micro-interactional level 668 micro-level 20, 40, 53, 81, 427, 437, 461, 568, 633, 639, 689 micro-perspective 458, 459 micropragmatic shifting 100, 429 micropragmatics 253, 362, 419, 429, 682, 683 micro-structure 456 Middle English Compendium 45 Middle English Dictionary 45, 331 Middle English Grammar Corpus 38, 43 Middle English Medical Texts 54, 553, 562, 563 mimetic 219, 485, 488, 490–496, 500, 503, 505, 511, 512, 687, 693 Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank 35 modal 18, 20, 52, 102, 103, 105–108, 110, 129, 130, 133, 136, 139, 144, 146–148, 165, 237, 306, 336, 363, 383, 390, 392, 404, 419, 539, 683, 689 modality 19, 107, 108, 110, 133, 147, 152, 272, 291, 563, 605, 612, 644 MonoConc Pro 53 Moscow Slave Chancery 628 moves 453, 455–457, 461, 462, 463, 466, 596, 640 opening 687 support 387, 388, 406 Much Ado About Nothing 255 multilingual discourse practices 568 multilingual resources 551 N name-calling 269, 395, 396, 435, 638 narration 41, 335, 336, 339, 340, 528–530, 541, 604, 605, 695

721

narrative 12, 50, 78, 82, 83, 108, 115, 224, 226, 229–233, 236, 237, 287, 288, 291, 293, 340, 381, 393, 398, 506, 507, 525, 529, 551, 565, 599–607, 611, 612, 632, 634–636, 640, 652, 679, 684–687, 693–697, 699 Natural Semantic Metalanguage 316 NEET see Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts negative face 262, 383, 423, 424, 432 negative politeness 78, 79, 182, 257, 264, 265, 286, 289, 290, 353, 365–367, 384, 385, 389, 419–424, 426, 430–432, 439, 637 negative politeness culture 78, 79, 264, 266, 384 neo-Gricean pragmatics 14, 69, 101, 105 Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts 667 news 564, 588, 593, 599, 602, 605–607, 609, 614, 652, 653 news discourse 9, 22, 77, 587–616 news report 605, 606 newsbook 612, 616 newsletter 589, 604, 661 newspaper discourse 610 newspapers 10, 40, 41, 455, 535, 569, 588, 590, 591, 593, 594, 600–605, 616, 652, 659 classification 593 definition 599 normative 229, 420, 425, 436, 438, 460, 505, 657, 664, 666 novels 104, 292, 339, 400, 685–688, 696 oath see speech acts, oath Old Bailey 43, 625, 630–632 Old Bailey Corpus 43, 631, 632, 644 onomasiology, function-to-form 17 onomatopoeia 315, 318 oral 35, 39, 167, 232, 266, 286, 292, 293, 297, 318, 340, 391, 395, 441, 463, 483, 486, 490, 493–495, 499, 503, 506–508, 512, 532, 538, 540, 541, 564, 597, 612, 614, 625–630, 633, 634, 643, 645, 652, 658, 684, 685, 688, 689 oral discourse 266, 286, 612, 629

722

Index of subjects

orality 38, 267, 439, 539, 540, 597, 612, 623, 625, 626, 628, 629, 633, 636, 658–660, 662 Origin of Species 571 OTA see Oxford Text Archive Othello 257, 260, 262, 363, 426 Oxford English Dictionary Online 11, 45, 205 Oxford Text Archive 45 P pamphlets 9, 40, 451, 455, 456, 459, 463–465, 468, 469, 472, 534, 535, 562, 571, 588, 593–605, 610, 615, 616, 632 Parliament of Fowls 221, 222, 227, 228, 233, 239 parody 337, 339, 401 Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence 39, 53 Paston Letters 80, 359, 657, 663, 668 pathos 571 PCEEC see Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English 53 Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English 37 Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 37 performative 19, 52, 134, 179, 188, 200, 201, 234, 204, 262, 268, 380–384, 393, 396, 439, 505, 537–539, 604, 608, 626, 634, 696, 697 performative verbs 128, 133, 382, 384, 387, 390, 389, 392, 624 perlocutionary effect 16, 17, 86, 232–234, 328, 390, 392, 396, 404, 434, 636, 638, 643 personal affect 237, 332, 333, 336, 338, 339, 685, 700 persuasion 463, 571, 589, 594, 596, 687 persuasive strategies 237, 550, 551, 571, 605, 652 phatic 136, 287, 317, 335, 337, 364 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 557, 565, 570, 571, 653

plays 8, 12, 20, 36, 41, 78, 79, 81, 104, 109, 174, 175, 220, 247–272, 319, 325, 338, 352, 357, 363, 385, 419, 425–429, 604, 691, 692, 694 pledge 393 pluralis majestatis 252, 355 poetry 41, 44, 197, 223, 225, 226, 232, 239, 255, 256, 381, 390, 508, 511, 602, 606, 681, 687, 696, 700 politeness 9, 17, 19, 22, 75, 78, 79, 84, 137, 138, 140, 171, 176–178, 182–184, 201, 231, 232, 236, 238, 240, 247, 250, 251, 252, 257, 258, 262–269, 272, 286, 289, 290, 291, 295, 301, 303, 353, 355, 357, 365–368, 379, 380, 382, 383, 385, 386, 388, 389, 394, 400–402, 406, 407, 419–441, 459, 464, 469–473, 496, 502, 513, 539–541, 572, 592, 597, 615, 626, 636–639, 691 marker 131, 167, 170, 171, 388, 389, 406, 432 norms 263, 284, 384, 636–638 principle 71, 469–471, 473 strategies 263, 358, 432, 637 theory 248, 263, 264, 266, 353, 358, 361, 422, 423, 429, 634, 637, 643, 651, 660, 690, 691 politic behaviour 182, 353, 421, 422, 433, 436, 438–440 positive politeness 78, 79, 257, 264, 265, 266, 286, 353, 366, 384, 386, 389, 401, 419–421, 423, 424, 426, 430, 431, 660 positive politeness culture 78, 79, 264, 266, 384, 386, 430 power 76, 80, 223, 235, 238, 259, 262, 265, 272, 353, 355, 356, 368, 387, 399, 419, 420, 422, 423, 425, 426–428, 431, 435, 436, 440, 455, 536, 550, 567, 612, 623, 624, 626, 630, 638, 641, 644, 645, 653–655, 659, 660, 661 asymmetries 436, 639 dynamic 622, 623, 638, 644 relations 75, 235, 258, 261, 435, 549, 629, 637, 639, 641 semantics 252 solidarity 251, 253, 258, 358, 367, 425, 427, 684

Index of subjects PPCME2 see Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English pragmaphilology 4, 12, 76, 77, 78, 219, 248, 367 definition 219 pragmatic competence 49, 203 pragmatic marker 13, 40, 52, 108–111, 134, 135, 137, 149, 167, 181, 187, 317, see also discourse marker definition 109 pragmatic particle 136, 336 pragmatic space 269, 379, 380, 385, 394, 395, 402, 407, 505, 506 pragmaticalisation 21, 22, 110, 165–188, 285, 303 definition 165, 166 pragmatics Anglo-American 5, 6, 21, 70, 71, 87, 101, 622 Continental European 5, 21, 70, 86, 101 cross-cultural 72–74 praise see speech acts, praise prayer see speech acts, prayer preparatory condition 387, 399, 406, 635 pre-requests 386 presupposition 6. 166, 319, 342, 397, 615, 637, 639, 640, 642, 664 Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913 43, 631, 632, 644 prognostications 552, 555, 567, 569 Project Gutenberg 45 promise see speech acts, promise proposition 14, 109, 113, 115, 128, 129, 130, 134, 138, 150, 172, 180, 298, 300, 382, 392, 457, 610, 611 propositional content 127, 129, 328, 329, 388, 489, 525 propositional meaning 165, 167–169, 170, 179, 286, 380 prose fiction 8, 39, 627, 641, 659, 685, 687, 688, 693 prototype 379, 380, 395, 402, 456, 460, 461, 463, 492, 495, 570, 588, 595, 604, 640 theory 73

723

Q questions see speech acts, questions quotative 136, 137, 149, 162, 165, 563, 629 R recipes 553, 561, 562, 568, 569, 570 register 37, 48, 104, 185, 220, 247, 253, 293, 325, 326, 334, 351, 353, 354, 366, 428, 528, 536, 550, 555, 556, 558, 562, 564–566, 568–570, 573, 588, 589, 607, 615, 654, 659, 662, 684, 688, 689, 699 relevance theory 85, 254, 353, 356, 367, 570, 664, 691 religious 322, 325–327, 330, 331, 333 biography 533, 534, 535 controversies 22, 453–455, 463, 594 discourse 5, 523–542, 568, 569, 679 treatises 320, 524, 534, 541 remedybook 553, 568, 569, 570 reported speech 137, 290, 297, 610, 611, 628, 629, 694 requests see speech acts, requests rhetoric 198, 259, 456, 467, 503, 550, 564, 657, 690, 699 rhetoric of science 550, 570–572 rhetorical question see speech acts, question, rhetorical ritual 77, 171, 188, 209, 248, 327–330, 366, 381, 382, 394–396, 432, 434, 438, 439, 483–513, 693 definition 484 ritual insults see speech acts, insults, ritual rogatives 382, 406 romance 36, 97, 226, 229–231, 235, 238, 260, 324, 334, 335, 337–340, 380, 508, 685, 687, 700 Romaunt of the Rose 224, 226 Romeo and Juliet 171, 237, 238, 260, 269 Rostock Newspaper Corpus 606, 609, 613, 614 S saints’ legend 533, 694 saints’ lives 231, 333, 334, 358, 524, 532, 694, 700 Salem witchcraft records 628, 630, 631, 635, 636

724

Index of subjects

Salem witchcraft trails 630, 633, 637–641, 645 Salem Witchcraft Papers 644 Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language 45, 46 SARA 53 scalar expressions 111, 112 scale of politeness 257, 430, 431, 440 scientific discourse 5, 22, 451, 465, 549–573, 679 scientific news 566, 653 scientific treatise 10, 553, 555, 556, 559, 561, 567, 569, 605 scientific writing 45, 549–573, 653 scribe 48, 49, 625, 628–633, 657 semantic bleaching 99, 100, 107, 144, 170, 179, 183, 185, 298, 327, 330, 363 semanticisation 99, 100, 101, 105, 153, 165, 185, 302, 303, 305 semasiology, form-to-function 16 serial metaphor 207 serial metonymy 201, 203–207 sermon 41, 44, 52, 231, 237, 324, 333, 334, 340, 358, 403, 464, 472, 523, 524, 526–535, 539–542, 598, 602, 604, 700 Shakespeare Database 251 sincerity condition 234, 328, 399 slander see speech acts, slander slander depositions 290, 629 sneeze blessing see speech acts, sneeze blessing Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices 80 sociohistorical background 35, 323, 324, 440, 561 sociohistorical context 20, 78, 85, 272, 328, 549, 551, 563, 565, 567, 573, 635, 636, 640, 642–645 sociopragmatic annotation 386, 641, 644 Sociopragmatic Corpus 40, 53, 406, 633 sociopragmatics 39, 356, 367, 419, 569, 587, 665 definition 70–72, 76 historical 21, 69–88 solidarity 251, 253, 258, 261, 286, 356, 358, 364, 367, 394, 397, 401, 420, 424, 425, 427, 432, 441, 498, 626, 684 sounding see speech acts, sounding

SPC see Sociopragmatic Corpus speaker attitude 14, 19, 107, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 145, 146, 152, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172, 179, 267, 298, 304, 381, 396, 405, 428, 550, 689 speaker meaning 379, 380, 682, 683, 692 speech acts 14, 16–20, 52, 78, 82–84, 105, 177, 232–235, 268, 319, 327, 379–407, 419, 428, 456, 466, 483, 489, 506, 507, 538, 570, 611, 626, 634, 636, 641, 697, 698 advice 381, 384, 389, 401, 559, 569, 612, 684, 697 apology 14, 18, 44, 52, 239, 266, 381, 382, 384, 400, 456, 604 commissive 19, 105, 233, 234, 270, 379, 381, 382, 389, 392, 393, 430 complaints 105, 134, 358, 384, 436, 451, 466, 469, 664 compliments 14, 17, 44, 52, 239, 379, 380, 382, 384, 393, 394, 399–404, 424, 664 condolences 401 congratulations 382, 401 curses 80–84, 324, 328, 329, 343, 382, 393, 394, 398, 399, 486, 697, 698 cursing 179, 269, 323, 324, 327–329, 331, 338, 394, 398–399 directive 19, 20, 52, 105, 143, 170, 239, 249, 250, 263, 266, 268–271, 275, 294, 379, 381–389, 393, 403, 405, 430, 433, 499, 538–541, 567, 697 farewell 401 flyting 14, 269, 394, 395, 406, 493–495, 506, 507 greeting 19, 20, 134, 136, 165, 166, 168, 176, 178, 188, 248, 332, 338, 344, 381, 382, 400, 401, 439, 652 impositives 384, 386, 388 insult 17, 18, 20, 229, 232–234, 238, 239, 269, 320, 329, 352, 361, 364, 366, 380–382, 393–397, 399, 407, 420, 428, 429, 433–435, 466, 468, 484, 489, 490, 496, 504, 506, 507, 597, 638, 698 agonistic 14, 395, 396 ritual 380, 395, 396, 484, 489, 490, 504

Index of subjects oath 83, 171, 172, 179, 181, 183, 231, 237, 320–324, 327, 328, 330, 331, 337, 338, 395, 398, 635, 697 praise 17, 399, 439, 530, 531, 538, 662 prayer 171, 329, 331, 403, 523, 526–528, 530, 531, 533, 534, 536, 537, 539, 542, 655 promise 234, 382, 391, 393, 403, 404, 428 questions 19, 40, 142, 170, 237, 265, 271, 342, 381–383, 385, 405, 406, 466, 510, 597, 606, 626–629, 636, 641, 642, 659, 689, 695, 698 rhetorical 142, 143, 333, 597, 639 requests 83, 137, 269, 270, 291, 342, 358, 368, 382–389, 396, 399–401, 404, 406, 423, 425, 430, 439, 503, 530, 537, 641, 661 slander 10, 290, 395, 629 sneeze blessing 168, 176–179, 183, 184 sounding 394, 396–398, 490, 496 swearing 7, 167, 171, 234, 237, 269, 315, 320–329, 336–344, 392, 395, 398, 399, 638, 697 thanking 18, 168, 188, 291, 380, 382, 400, 401, 530, 531, 538, 540 threat 84, 233, 234, 238, 239, 394 vow 328, 391–394, 486 worshipping 530, 538 speech community 14, 358, 680 speech event 48, 50, 73, 129, 131, 142, 298, 424, 484, 489, 490, 632, 694 speech presentation 39, 86, 607, 610–612 spoken interaction 8, 9, 10, 39, 40, 42, 47–50, 77, 508, 513, 621, 627, 630, 664, 685 stance 106–109, 115, 127, 131, 134, 248, 266, 272, 293, 353, 360, 368, 406, 565, 570, 641, 642, 659, 665, 689, 695, 697, 700 marker 266 standardisation 121, 385, 441, 485, 536, 569, 587, 611, 626 State Trials 50 statutes 604, 622 style 219, 220, 226, 237, 247, 263, 264, 292, 337, 339, 352, 357, 358, 428, 439, 464, 526, 541, 551, 556, 562, 563, 566,

725

567, 571, 589, 592, 596–599, 604, 606, 609, 612, 613, 623, 624, 656, 658, 660, 662, 663, 665, 666, 679, 680, 684, 687–689 subjectification 21, 69, 100, 107–112, 127–154, 169, 172, 179, 185, 186, 298, 299, 303, 304, 307, 327, 329, 331, 332 definition 129, 131, 140, 141, 145, 298 subjectivity 107, 108, 127–154, 180, 186, 303, 307, 597, 610, 662, 665, 683, 697 definition 129, 147 surgical treatises 553, 561, 569 Survey of English Usage 34 Svenska Akademiens ordbok 45 swearing see speech acts, swearing syntacticisation 103, 115, 303 T taboo 108, 104, 168, 172, 179, 320–331, 343, 435, 437, 495, 501, 502 taboo expletive 288, 318, 320, 326, 329, 330, 331, 336, 342 TCP see Text Creation Partnership terms of address 5, 8, 13, 22, 78, 79, 235–237, 251–261, 263, 266, 351–369, 389, 419, 420, 426, 428, 429, 431, 432, 441, 536, 537, 538, 542, 597, 629, 638, 683, 660 Text Creation Partnership 44 text types 33, 82, 333, 336, 344, 457, 464, 472, 587, 588, 597, 603, 604, 626, 627, 636, 688 thanking see speech acts, thanking The Edinburgh Medical Journal 565 The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots 41 The Merry Wives of Windsor 267 The Tempest 255, 269, 272 The Winter’s Tale 260 Textes de Français Ancien 35 Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien 35 threat see speech acts, threat Timon of Athens 255, 264 Titus Andronicus 260 tragedy 260, 512 translation 174, 286, 306, 335, 337, 365, 523–525, 532, 535, 536, 550, 553, 554, 555, 556, 657

726

Index of subjects

travelogues 336, 534 trials 40, 43, 81, 83, 84, 252, 388, 396, 399, 441, 534, 598, 606, 621–645 data 386 proceedings 8, 35, 38–41, 48, 78, 86, 537, 627, 630, 631, 632, 659 records 48, 50, 267, 353, 359, 366, 622, 626, 627, 630, 635, 637, 638 transcripts 49, 628 Troilus and Criseyde 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, 233, 234, 237–239 turn-taking 35, 39, 81, 105, 110, 111, 166, 171, 238, 286, 288, 292, 295, 303, 305, 333, 335, 337, 339–341, 456, 510, 511, 626, 628, 685 Twelfth Night 268 U unidirectionality 104, 113, 130, 142, 143, 152, 298, 302, 423, 537 Unifob AKSIS Centre 45 uniformitarian doctrine 625 uniformitarian hypothesis 634 uniformitarian principle 268, 405 V VARBRUL analysis 662 Variant Detector 2 55 Vedic 500 verbal abuse 326, 327, 495, 496, 506 verbal aggression 232, 233, 320, 381, 394, 434, 436, 437, 493, 507 verbal duelling 14, 366, 381, 382, 394, 420, 433, 484, 485, 495, 498, 503 vernacularisation 536, 550, 554–556, 564, 566, 569

vocative 40, 86, 129, 251, 256–263, 265, 268, 323, 329, 330, 331, 333, 335, 340, 361, 364, 365, 388 vow see speech acts, vow W wills 533, 559, 622, 626, 658 Anglo-Saxon 626 witchcraft narratives 82, 83, 398, 635, 640 trials 83, 84, 399, 628, 630, 631, 633–635, 637–641, 644, 645 witches’ curses 80–84, 398, 399 WordSmith Tools 53, 392 worshipping see speech acts, worshipping written language 7–10, 42, 49, 50, 335, 352, 429, 531, 621, 624, 626, 658, 662, 685 X Xaira 53 Y YCOE see York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose Yiddish movement 116 York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry 37 York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose 37 Z ZEN see Zurich English Newspaper Corpus Zurich English Newspaper Corpus 38, 40, 601, 602, 605, 606, 611–614

Index of names

727

Index of names

A Aaron, Jessi Elana 150, 151 Abbott, Edwin A. 247, 251, 253, 256, 352 Abels, Richard 555 Abelson, Ronald P. 81 Achilles 493, 494 Adamson, Sylvia 112, 137, 142, 148, 247, 259, 680, 682, 687, 690 Addison, Joseph 663, 667 Ahuja, Anjana 208 Aijmer, Karin 110, 137, 165, 289, 301, 304, 335, 386, 388 Akatsuka, Noriko 139 Akimoto, Minoji 137, 170, 188, 291, 292, 300, 303 Alfred, King 555 Alioto, Anthony M. 552 Allan, Keith 321, 323, 343 Allen, Cynthia L. 270, 301 Allwood, Jens 81 Alonso-Almeida, Francisco 382, 562, 569, 570 Ameka, Felix 287, 315–318, 334, 335, 337, 341–343 Andersen, Henning 255 Andersson, Bo 558, 567 Andersson, Lars 320, 321 Aphra Behn 339, 685 Archer, Dawn 20, 22, 40, 55, 77, 78, 85, 88, 268, 379, 382, 383, 385, 386, 388–399, 403, 404, 406, 419, 420, 430, 435–437, 440, 625, 633, 634, 640–645, 695, 698 Aristotle 451–453, 460, 467, 571 Arnauld, Antoine 454 Arndt, Horst 421, 423, 440 Arnold, Gottfried 453 Arnovick, Leslie K. 14, 22, 76, 78, 165, 166, 168, 174, 179, 183, 184, 188, 232, 234, 304, 307, 323, 324, 327–329, 343, 380, 382, 390, 392, 394–398, 404, 406, 430, 486, 491, 496, 506, 507, 698

Arthur, King 508 Asher, Nicholas 193 Askehave, I. 551 Asteropaios 493, 494 Athanasiadou, Angeliki 144, 154 Atkinson, Dwight J. 565, 570, 571 Attridge, Derek 700 Augustine 528 Aurelius 390, 391 Austen, Jane 339, 685, 693 Austin, Frances 653–655 Austin, John L. 188, 200, 386, 398, 499, 681, 696, 698, 700 Ayres-Bennett, Wendy 357, 360, 362 B Bach, Kent 398, 405 Bach, Ulrich 381, 452, 455, 456, 592, 593, 595, 596, 599, 603, 604 Bäcklund, Ingegerd 558, 567 Bacon, Francis 462 Bailey, Richard W. 42 Baker, Frank 656 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 85, 681, 690 Ball, Catherine N. 393 Bandle, Oskar 356, 361 Barber, Charles 248, 256, 257, 357, 362, 366 Baron, Alistair 55 Barratt, Alexandra 532 Barrotta, Pierluigi 454 Barton, David 651, 656 Bauer, Johannes 197 Bax, Marcel 22, 47, 77, 84, 85, 380, 382, 395, 420, 438, 439, 441, 485, 494, 498, 502, 503, 506–508, 511, 513, 571, 634, 693–695, 698 Baym, Nancy K. 398 Bazerman, Charles 571, 653, 655, 657 Bazzanella, Carla 286, 295 Becker, Monika 77 Bednarek, Monika A. 81

728

Index of names

Beeching, Kate 108, 136, 193, 201 Beetz, Manfred 382, 401, 459, 496, 513 Behringer, Wolfgang 590, 591 Bell, Allan 607, 662 Bell, Catherine 484–488, 497–499 Bennett, H. S. 533 Bennison, Neil 691 Benson, C. David 240 Benson, Larry D. 222, 225, 226, 228, 239 Bentivoglio, Paola 356, 363, 428, 441 Benveniste, Émile 128, 129, 131 Bergs, Alexander 359, 429, 663 Berkoff, Steven 691, 692 Berlin, Normand 385 Bernard of Gordon 555 Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella 232, 269, 379, 380, 402, 404, 405 Betsch, Michael 354, 355, 357, 369 Biagioli, Mario 454 Biber, Douglas 38, 49, 50, 78, 79, 106, 315, 321, 344, 537, 551, 562, 564, 565, 570, 606, 607, 615, 658, 659, 683, 685, 688, 689, 698 Biese, Alfred 196 Birner, Betty 113 Black, Jeremy 592–595, 598–602, 605, 606 Black, Max 200, 201 Blake, Norman F. 221, 222, 227, 228, 231, 247–249, 262, 263, 267, 290, 385, 428, 526 Blank, Andreas 193, 205 Blank, Walter 526 Blench, J. W. 539 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 383, 384, 386–388, 390, 406, 422, 423, 441 Bock, Martin 352 Bogoch, Bryna 398, 538, 626, 643 Bokenham, Osbern 694 Bourdieu, Pierre 258, 681, 690 Bousfield, Derek 396, 397, 407, 420, 422, 433, 434, 436, 440, 441, 597, 638 Boyer, Paul 631 Boyle, Robert 552 Brainerd, Barron 255 Bramhall, John 463–465 Braun, Friederike 355, 357, 363–365, 367, 369, 427

Bréal, Michel 194 Breban, Tine 112, 145–147 Bredin, Hugh 202 Bremer, Kai 454, 455 Breuer, Horst 258 Breustedt, Barb 406 Brinton, Laurel J. 4–6, 11–14, 22, 46, 52, 76, 98, 109, 110, 137, 140, 153, 166, 167, 171, 174, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 206, 266, 285, 286, 288–291, 293, 294, 297, 299–303, 305–307, 317, 330, 564, 587 Brisard, Frank 107, 154 Brown, Penelope 75, 79, 131, 257, 262–264, 358, 383, 386, 387, 419–424, 426, 430, 434, 438, 440, 513, 637, 690 Brown, Roger 8, 13, 78, 137, 249, 251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 262–264, 268–270, 353, 358, 360, 364, 365, 387, 406, 420, 422, 425–427, 430, 438, 441, 683, 684 Brownlees, Nicholas 77, 359, 364, 366, 589, 599, 612 Bruster, Douglas 260 Bruti, Silvia 254, 357, 368, 420, 428 Bryson, Anna 655, 657, 663 Bucher, Hans-Jürgen 455 Bühler, Karl 127, 153 Burger, Harald 319, 320, 332, 333, 589 Burke, Peter 486, 487, 489, 496, 498, 501, 502, 506, 512, 513, 663 Burkhardt, Armin 194, 317 Burling, Robbins 207 Burness, Edwina 248 Burnley, David 221, 222, 231, 236, 240, 357, 358, 360, 362, 366, 368, 428 Burridge, Kate 321, 323, 343 Busse, Beatrix 12, 22, 247, 249–251, 258, 259, 261, 262, 272, 357, 358 Busse, Ulrich 12, 22, 78, 247, 249–252, 254, 256, 257, 267, 270, 271, 291, 356–358, 360, 361, 365, 366, 368, 379, 382, 383, 385, 388, 402, 406, 426, 432, 683 Butt, Miriam 100 Bybee, Joan 97, 99–101, 133, 139, 149, 153 Byrne, Geraldine 256, 352, 357

Index of names C Cabrera-Abreu, Mercedes 382, 570 Caffi, Claudia 390 Caius, John 556, 557, 559 Calvo, Clara 253, 258, 353, 356, 358, 361, 368, 420, 427, 428, 683 Cameron, M. L. 553 Canakis, Costas 154 Caplan, Arthur L. 463 Carey, Kathleen 139, 146 Carnap, Rudolph 70 Carpenter, Malinda 207 Carrillo Linares 550 Carroll, Ruth 569, 570 Cassirer, Ernst 209 Cavendish, Margaret 683, 695 Caxton, William 44 Cecconi, Elisabetta 598 Chaemsaithong, Krisda 637, 638, 644 Chambers, Jack K. 357 Chang, Han-liang 451 Chapman, Don 320, 358, 366, 380, 382, 420, 435 Charrow, Robert P. 624 Charrow, Veda R. 624 Chartier, Roger 652 Chaucer, Geoffrey 12, 22, 219–240, 266, 324, 325, 333, 337, 339, 364, 390, 391, 395, 432, 682, 683, 695, 700 Chen, Guohua 301 Chen, Rong 400, 423 Clanchy, M. T. 559 Claridge, Claudia 22, 35, 36, 46, 174, 289, 304, 307, 382, 383, 534, 562, 597, 603 Clark, Victoria 562, 564 Clarke, David D. 193, 194, 200–203, 205, 209 Clarke, Samuel 464 Claudi, Ulrike 98–100, 194 Clay, C. G. A. 593 Cloeren, Hermann J. 197 Clover, Carol J. 394, 395, 406, 491, 506, 507, 511 Clyne, Michael 356, 368 Coghill, Nevill 239 Collier, Jeremy 326 Collins, Daniel E. 47, 49, 86, 628–630, 633, 634, 643

729

Collins, Randall 451, 453 Collinson, Patrick 533 Company Company, Concepción 110, 135, 136, 139, 140, 149, 150 Conboy, Martin 607 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 195, 199 Conley, John M. 624, 645 Conrad, Susan 666, 688 Cooper, Helen 224, 227–229, 239 Copernicus, Nicolaus 571 Cornillie, Bert 142–144, 154 Cotterill, Janet 622 Coulmas, Florian 168 Coupland, Nikolas 74 Crawshaw, Robert 74 Cremaschi, Sergio 452, 454 Cressy, David 592, 654 Crisciani, Chiara 552, 553 Croft, William 98 Crombie, Alistair Cameron 552, 566, 573 Crossgrove, William 553, 555 Crystal, David 524, 528, 536, 538 Culpeper, Jonathan 4, 6–8, 11, 14, 20, 21, 39, 40, 48, 49, 69, 74, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 193, 201, 266, 290, 292, 353, 379, 382, 383, 385, 386, 388, 389, 398, 399, 402–406, 419, 420, 423, 430, 433–436, 440, 537, 597, 627, 638, 643, 644, 666 Curzan, Anne 33, 550 D Daly, Nicola 320 Danchev, Andrei 102 Danet, Brenda 398, 538, 624, 626, 643 Dante Alighieri 362 Darmesteter, Arsène 194, 205 Darwin, Charles 571 Dascal, Marcelo 452, 454–456, 458, 460, 461, 596 Dasher, Richard B. 5, 14, 101, 107, 108, 131–134, 136–138, 140, 142, 148, 153, 180, 188, 193, 289, 291, 296, 298–301, 303, 304, 331 Davidse, Kristin 112, 137, 149 Davis, Norman 655, 657 Davy, Derek 524, 528, 536, 538 Dawkins, Richard 202 de Courtin, Antoine 656

730

Index of names

de Man, Paul 696 de Roder, Jan H. 511 De Smet, Hendrik 141, 145, 149, 154 De Ventura, Paolo 357, 362 de Vries, Jan 510 Deanesly, Margaret 533 Defour, Tine 288, 296, 297 Degand, Liesbeth 111 Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella 379, 382, 389, 390, 402, 403, 430, 441, 553, 694 Demaitre, Luke E. 555 Denison, David 47, 667 Derrida, Jaques 696 Descartes, René 454 Detges, Ulrich 105, 106, 135, 139, 306 Deutscher, Guy 199 Deutschmann, Mats 18 Diamond, Julie 421–424 Dickey, Eleanor 364 Dieckmann, Walther 452, 455, 469 Dierks, Constantin 658 Diessel, Holger 114 Diewald, Gabriele 102, 106, 110, 111, 115, 136, 286, 305 Dillard, James Price 423 Dittmar, Norbert 75 Donald, Merlin 485, 491–494, 512, 513 Dorgeloh, Heidrun 565 Dossena, Marina 651, 653, 666, 667 Doty, Kathleen L. 8, 13, 22, 630, 631, 634, 635, 640, 642, 644, 645 Dove, Mary 532 Ducrot, Oswald 105 Dufter, Andreas 114 Duke of Brunswick 463 Dundes, Alan 485, 490, 495, 496, 504 Durkheim 454, 487, 498, 499 Dury, Richard 656, 667 E Eagleson, Robert D. 253, 368 Eberhard, Johann 454 Eckardt, Regine 103, 113 Eckert, Penelope 394 Eckhart, Caroline 226 Eco, Umberto 197 Eder, Donna 491 Edmondson, Willis J. 386

Edwards, A. S. G. 532 Edwards, Viv 490, 498, 503 Eelen, Gino 421, 422 Ehlich, Konrad 317, 318, 329 Ehrismann, Otfried 359 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus 493 Elliott, Ralph W. V. 324 Elspass, Stephan 654, 665, 666 Enfield, Nicholas J. 101, 512 Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr. 463 Enkvist, Nils Erik 287 Equiano, Olaudah 697 Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam 652, 684, 690 Erbe, T. 529 Erler, Mary C. 533 Erman, Britt 110, 165, 304 Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. 352 Esnault, Gaston 207 Estlein, Roi 135 Evans, G. Blakemore 249 Evans, Nicholas 101 Evans, William W. 368 Evert, Stefan 393 F Fairclough, Norman 74, 75, 80 Fairman, Tony 654, 666 Fanego, Teresa 135, 441 Faya-Cerqueiro, Fátima María 137, 430 Feilke, Helmuth 203 Feinäugle, Norbert B. 454 Fernández-Conde, Rosa Eva 355, 357, 360, 363, 368 Ferraresi, Gisella 115, 136 Fielding, Henry 392 Fielding, Sarah 663 Finegan, Edward 38, 78, 79, 129, 133, 562, 564, 565, 658, 659, 688 Finell, Anne 296, 297 Finkenstaedt, Thomas 352 Finocchiaro, Maurice A. 454, 463, 466 Firth, Raymond 488 Fischer, Andreas 171, 172, 290, 317, 323, 325, 330 Fischer, Olga 97, 140, 149, 153, 289, 301, 305, 307 Fish, Stanley E. 270

Index of names Fisher, Sheila 391 Fishman, Joshua A. 525 Fiske, Susan T. 73 Fitzmaurice, Susan 4, 6, 7–9, 22, 46, 50–53, 77, 84, 85, 132, 153, 219, 250, 272, 299, 405, 420, 428, 432, 439, 441, 549, 561, 621, 622, 625, 642, 651, 653, 656, 657, 660, 661, 663, 664, 667, 683, 688, 691, 695, 699, 700 Flanagin, Andrew J. 398 Fleischman, Suzanne 165, 188, 294, 306, 561 Florio, John 262 Fludernik, Monika 288, 289, 297, 657, 684–687, 693, 699 Foley, William A. 501 Fontana, Ernest 696, 700 Fontenrose, Joseph 489, 499 Ford, Marguerite 252, 258 Foucault, Michel 624, 644 Francis, W. Nelson 34 Francke, August Hermann 468 Frank, Roslyn M. 208 Frank-Job, Barbara 165, 304 Fraser, Bruce 109, 110, 167, 286, 387, 406, 421 Frazer, James G. 489 Freedman, Penelope 251, 357 French, Roger 552, 553, 557 Fretheim, Thorstein 113 Freudenthal, Gideon 454 Friedrich, Paul 352 Fries, Norbert 315, 343 Fries, Udo 287, 600, 601, 605, 613 Fritz, Gerd 6, 9, 16, 22, 33, 35, 55, 193, 381, 452, 454–456, 458, 463, 465–467, 469, 471, 571, 587, 596–598, 600–602, 604, 605, 615, 616 Frotscher, Antje G. 507 Frye, Northrop 512 Fujii, Noriko 115 G Gainsford, Thomas 612 Galasin’ki, Dariusz 365 Galileo Galilei 454, 463, 466 Gardiner, Alan 194 Garner, Thurmon 491, 496

731

Gee, James Paul 72, 88 Geeraerts, Dirk 101, 193 Geertz, Clifford 487, 498, 504 Gehweiler, Elke 22, 139, 171, 172, 180, 188, 266, 287, 288, 291, 292, 317, 321–323, 331 Geis, Michael L. 100, 131 Genette, Gérard 686 Genetti, Carol 139 Gerber, Gustav 196, 197 Getz, Faye 553, 559 Geuder, Melchior Friedrich 468 Geuder, Wilhelm 100 Gibbins, John 199, 621 Gierl, Martin 454, 459, 462, 463, 473 Gieseler, Jens 589 Gilman, Albert 8, 13, 78, 137, 249, 251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 262–264, 268–270, 353, 358, 360, 364, 365, 387, 406, 420, 422, 425–427, 430, 438, 441, 683, 684 Givón, Talmy 97, 185, 187, 383, 385 Gloning, Thomas 368, 452, 454, 455, 457, 463, 465, 466, 601, 602, 614 Glüer, Juliane 452, 455 Goddard, Cliff 315, 316 Goffman, Erving 74, 81, 386, 436, 438, 439, 484, 486, 487, 490, 491, 494, 496, 498, 502, 513, 694 Golato, Andrea 400 Goldenbaum, Ursula 459, 469 Goldgar, Anne 459 Gonzáles-Alvarez, Dolores 565 González-Cruz, Ana I. 138 Goodman, Dena 653, 656 Goossens, Louis 133 Gorham, Geoffrey 454 Görlach, Manfred 259, 524, 525, 535, 569, 652, 656 Gotti, Maurizio 77, 566, 570, 653 Gower, John 224, 240 Grabes, Herbert 595 Graff, Harvey J. 558 Graham, Sage Lambert 398 Gray, Bethany 570 Green, Eugene 540 Green, Ian 533 Green, Monica 555, 559, 560 Green, Thomas A. 644

732

Index of names

Gren, Friedrich 464 Grice, H. Paul 101, 381, 469, 494, 513, 610, 613, 626, 637, 640, 681, 691, 693 Griffiths, Dennis 591 Grimes, Ronald L. 484, 486, 488, 497, 498, 502 Grimm, Jacob 588 Grimm, Wilhelm 588 Grmek, Mirko D. 552 Grootendorst, Rob 456, 469 Gross, Alan G. 456, 570, 571 Große Kracht, Klaus 454 Grote, John 199 Grund, Peter 42, 48, 552, 569, 628, 630, 634, 643 Grzega, Joachim 19, 20, 382 Gudykunst, William B. 72 Gundel, Jeanette K. 113 Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise 555, 558, 567, 568, 572 Gunther of Burgundy, King 508 Günthner, Susanne 286, 304 Güttgemanns, Erhardt 526 H Habel, Thomas 457 Habermas, Jürgen 681, 697 Haiman, John 100, 115 Hall, Nigel 651, 656 Hall, Stuart 72 Halla-aho, Hilla 654 Halliday, M. A. K. 74, 127, 129, 141, 201, 253, 258, 259, 565 Halliwell, J. O. 561 Hamblin, Charles L. 451, 453, 469 Hammond, Antony 260 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard 110, 111, 113, 153, 285, 286, 295, 299 Hanson, Kristin 134 Hardie, Andrew 602, 616 Harmon, Joseph E. 570, 571 Harnish, Robert 398, 405 Harré, Rom 427 Harris, Joseph 491, 506–508 Harris, Randy Allen 571 Harrison, Julia 74 Hart, David 420, 423 Harvey, Gabriel 175

Harvey, William 454, 557 Hasan, Ruqaiya 74, 129, 141 Haspelmath, Martin 97, 99 Haß-Zumkehr, Ulrike 590, 591, 601, 604, 605, 610–612 Hasund, Ingrid Kristine 380 Haugh, Michael 422, 438 Haverkort, Marco 511 Heffernan, Thomas J. 532, 533, 539 Heine, Bernd 98–101, 115, 185, 193, 194 Held, Gudrun 4, 5, 421, 424, 439 Hellsten, Iina 198 Henderson, Judith Rice 653 Henry IV, King 397 Hentschel, Elke 315 Heritage, John 341 Herman, Vimala 219 Herring, Susan C. 142, 398 Herzog, Marvin 15, 34 Hettema, Theo L. 455 Hickey, Raymond 47 Higashiizumi, Yuko 104 Hill, John M. 390 Hill, Virginia 364 Hill, Wane F. 269, 395 Hillis Miller, J. 696, 700 Hilpert, Martin 193, 203, 205 Hilton, Walter 532 Hiltunen, Risto 287, 318, 332, 340, 551, 570, 630, 631, 634, 635, 639, 640, 642, 644, 645 Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 98 Hobbes, Thomas 454, 463–465, 467 Hock, Hans-Henrich 322 Hoey, Michael 570 Hoffmann, Sebastian 45, 393 Hoffmeister, Maren 486, 488 Holder, R. W. 320 Holmes, Janet 73, 399–401, 440 Homer 502 Honegger, Thomas 220–222, 226, 235–238, 247, 248, 358, 363, 366, 368, 381, 428, 496, 687, 700 Honkapohja, Alpo 11, 42, 46 Hope, Jonathan 78, 247, 253, 255, 359, 428–430 Hopper, Paul J. 113, 114, 140, 153, 171, 172, 181, 185, 287, 304, 307

Index of names Horie, Kaoru 104, 109, 111, 153 Horn, Laurence R. 5, 6, 101, 691 Horner, Patrick J. 532, 539 Horobin, Simon 368 House, Juliane 384, 386–390, 406, 422 Houtlosser, Peter 456 Huang, Lillian M. 136 Huang, Yan 5 Huber, Magnus 43, 625, 630–634, 644 Hudson, Anne 532 Hughes, Geoffrey 320, 321, 323–326, 395, 398 Huizinga, Johan 486, 496 Hume, David 195 Humphrey, A. R. 397 Hundt, Marianne 24 Hünnemeyer, Friederike 98–100 Hunt, Arnold 533 Hunt, Tony 356, 359, 362, 363, 555 Hüsken, Ute 484, 496 Hussey, S. S. 226 Hutchby, Ian 342 Hymes, Dell 352, 366 I Ide, Sachiko 353, 424, 438, 440 Iser, Wolfgang 697 J Jacobs, Andreas 7, 11–13, 34, 39, 47, 48, 50, 69, 76, 77, 219, 231 Jacobsson, Mattias 291, 382 Jäger, Gerhard 115 Jakobson, Roman 127 James I. 536 Janney, Richard W. 421, 423, 440 Jardine, Nicholas 468, 471 Jary, Mark 423, 440 Jasin, Joanna 559 Jaworski, Adam 365 Jay, Timothy B. 329 Jean Paul, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter 196–198 Jerome 528 Jespersen, Otto 343 Jiang, Wenying 440 Johansson, Stig 34 Johnson, Anne Carvey 352

733

Johnson, Mark 206 Johnson, Samuel 45, 46, 663 Jones, Peter Murray 551, 556, 559 Jones, William J. 364 Jonson, Ben 691, 692 Jost, Jean 391 Jucker, Andreas H. 4–7, 11–14, 16, 17, 24, 33–35, 39, 44, 47–52, 55, 69, 70, 76–79, 101, 108, 135, 166, 168, 169, 171, 188, 193, 201, 219, 220, 222, 231–233, 235, 236, 239, 240, 266, 267, 269, 285, 286, 290–293, 296, 297, 320, 330, 332, 353–355, 358, 360, 362, 364, 366, 379–383, 385, 393–404, 406, 420, 422, 428, 433–435, 439, 441, 456, 491, 506, 507, 542, 549, 564, 587, 589, 593, 607, 611, 612, 621, 622, 625, 633, 642, 681, 695, 698 Julian of Norwich 532 Jung, Matthias 455 Justice, Steven 536 K Kádár, Dániel 78, 201, 424 Kadri, Sadakat 623, 643, 645 Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena 637, 638 Kaislaniemi, Samuli 11, 42, 46 Kant, Imanuel 454 Kantorowicz, Ernst. H. 251 Kasper, Gabriele 384, 386, 388, 390, 406, 422, 423, 440 Keen, Maurice 558 Keiser, George 560 Keller, Rudi 101, 148, 473 Kempe, Margery 340 Kennedy, Arthur G. 352, 357 Kepler, Johannes 467, 468, 471 Kerbrat-Oreccioni, Catherine 393 Kerkhof, Jelle 357 Kermode, Frank 247 Kertzer, David I. 486–488, 497, 498 Khorasani, Manouchehr Moshtagh 452, 455, 466 Kibre, Pearl 560 Kielkiewicz-Janowiak, Agnieszka 256, 420, 427 Kim, Taejin 287 Kim, Young Y. 72

734

Index of names

King, John N. 533 Kiparsky, Paul 97 Kirk, Harry 644 Kirwan, Richard 454, 464 Kittel, Ruth 391 Klausnitzer, Ralf 454 Kluckhohn, Clyde 72 Kluge, Friedrich 318 Knobloch, Clemens 199 Koch, Peter 7, 9, 10, 49, 193, 201, 203–205, 240 Kochman, Thomas 491 Kohnen, Thomas 19, 22, 41, 52, 269, 365, 379, 382–386, 402–404, 406, 420, 432, 433, 438, 525, 526, 528, 535, 537–540 Koivisto-Alanko, Päivi 291 Kökeritz, Helge 247 König, Ekkehard 100, 137, 138, 141, 298 Kopytko, Roman 78, 79, 257, 263, 264, 353, 365, 384–386, 394, 406, 420, 422 Koskenniemi, Inna 365 Koster, Jan 486, 497, 499, 500, 502 Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt 110, 165, 304 Kövesces, Zoltán 206, 207 Kranich, Svenja 139 Kroeber, Alfred L. 72 Kroon, Caroline 285, 294 Krug, Manfred 133, 305, 307, 683 Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara 77, 315, 420, 435, 438, 628, 629, 633, 636, 638, 642, 644 Kucˇera, Henry 34 Kuhn, Thomas S. 453, 571 Kurtz, Patricia Deery 560 Kurzon, Dennis 645 Kuteva, Tania 99, 106, 115, 193 Kwarcin´ski, Wojciech 635, 642 Kytö, Merja 7, 8, 11, 21, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48–50, 79, 86, 102, 115, 290, 292, 353, 435, 524, 537, 561, 562, 625, 627, 628, 632, 643, 688 L Labov, William 7, 15, 34, 380, 396, 484, 489, 490, 491, 496, 504, 625, 640 Laitinen, Lea 109 Laitinen, Mikko 662 Lakatos, Imre 453

Lakoff, George 167 Lambert, Johann Heinrich 195, 196 Lambert, Mark 227 Lambrecht, Knud 114 Lamont, William 454 Lancashire, Ian 46 Langacker, Ronald W. 107, 108, 127, 143–148, 153, 154 Langbein, John H. 623 Lange, Deborah 137, 645 Lange, Joachim 461 Langer, Suzanne K. 209 Lascarides, Alex 193 Lass, Roger 42, 79, 355 Lave, Jean 398 Lavoisier, Antoine 453, 464 Lawson, E. Thomas 485–487 Layder, Derek 81, 661, 668 Layer, Christopher 441 Leach, Edmund 487, 498, 501 Leach, Jerry W. 485, 490, 495, 496, 504 Lebsanft, Franz 6, 22, 33, 35, 55, 77, 381, 456 Lee, David 47 Leech, Geoffrey 19, 20, 71–73, 75, 88, 104, 229, 386, 394, 397, 400, 406 Legh, Peter 667 Lehmann, Christian 97, 104, 110, 111, 114, 185, 302, 304, 307 Lehmann, Hans Martin 613 Lehmann, Hartmut 454 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 453–455, 462–464, 467, 468 Leith, Dick 356, 365 Lenker, Ursula 134, 287, 300, 303 Leong, Elaine 551, 570 Lessing, Gotthold 454, 462, 463 Levi, Judith N. 623, 624 Levinson, Stephen C. 74, 75, 79–81, 101, 131, 257, 262–264, 358, 383, 386, 387, 399, 404, 419–424, 426, 430, 434, 438, 440, 512, 513, 637, 690 Levorato, Alessandra 597, 615 Lewis, C. S. 525 Lewis, Diana M. 292 Lima, José Pinto de 136, 138, 139 Lincoln, Bruce 488, 498, 503 Lindström, Jan 296, 301, 303, 307

Index of names Linell, Per 81 Linnaeus, Carl 557 Lisle, Lady Alice 396, 628, 636 Ljung, Magnus 343 Lloyd, Geoffrey 451 Locher, Miriam A. 407, 422, 440, 441 Locke, John 195, 196, 462, 463 Loewenstein, David 533 Lönnroth, Lars 507 López-Couso, María José 21, 107, 286, 289, 303 López-Meirama, Belén 133 Lötscher, Andreas 7, 323, 326, 327 Lowe, Valerie 691 Lowth, Robert 664 Loxley, James 697–699 Luckmann, Thomas 456 Lüdeling, Anke 34 Lutz, Angelika 357 Lutzky, Ursula 52, 290, 330 Lyons, John 127, 129, 133, 141, 153, 392 M MacCauley, Robert N. 485–487 McConchie, Roderick 550, 556 McConnell-Ginet, Sally 394 McDermott, Ann 46 McDonald, Russ 247 McEnery, Tony 33, 34, 52, 320, 616 McGrew, William C. 487, 488, 490, 494, 502, 503, 506 Machan, Tim William 219 McIntosh, Angus 357 Mack, Maynard 385 McKie, Douglas 454 MacLean, Douglas 455 McQuillan, Martin 700 McVaugh, Michael R. 554 Maggioni, Maria Luisa 220, 238 Magnusson, Lynne 247, 250, 263, 428, 684, 689, 690 Mäkinen, Martti 553, 562, 570 Malebranche, Nicolas 454 Malory, Thomas 135, 168, 170, 339, 684, 685 Malthus, Thomas Robert 454 Mamiani, Maurizio 453 Manes, Joan 393, 400, 424

735

Marcoe, Ingvilt 541 Marti, Hanspeter 461 Martin, Janice 114 Martino, Gabriella di 420 Marttila, Ville 11, 42, 46, 559 Maschler, Yael 135 Mason, Patricia 357, 359, 368 Matsumoto, Yo 136 Matsumoto, Yoshiko 353, 424, 438 Matthews, Stephen 109, 111, 114, 115 Mattock, John N. 495, 508 Mausch, Hanna 357 Mauser, Wolfram 454 Mauthner, Fritz 198 Maynard, Senko K. 133 Maynes, Mary Jo 654 Mazzon, Gabriella 8, 18, 22, 78, 222, 235, 251, 253, 254, 257, 353, 357, 358, 360–366, 368, 419, 426–429 Mehl, Dieter 260 Meier, A. J. 421, 440 Meillet, Antoine 113 Mellinkoff, David 623, 624 Mendelsohn, Everett 455, 457 Méndez-Naya, Belén 137, 290 Meurman-Solin, Anneli 666, 667 Mey, Jacob L. 70 Meyer, Charles F. 34 Miecznikowski, Johanna 295 Milfull, Inge B. 381 Milic´, Louis 38 Mill, James 195 Mill, John Stuart 195 Mills, Sara 396, 397, 440 Milroy, James 34, 39 Milroy, Lesley 663, 664 Miranda García, Antonio 562 Mitchell, Bruce 532 Mitchell, Eleanor Retting 352 Mitchell, W. Frase 539 Moessner, Lilo 524, 565, 566, 570 Moik, Christopher 380 Molesworth, Jesse 697 Molnár, Anna 136 Montagu, Ashley 320, 321, 323, 398, 399 Montagu, Elizabeth 659, 660, 664 Mooney, Annabelle 84

736

Index of names

Moore, Colette 103, 184, 290, 629, 633, 634 Moran, Jo Ann Hoeppner 533 Moreno Olalla, David 562 Moreno, Maria Cristobalina 357, 360, 361, 366, 441 Morgan, Marcyliena 394 Morris, Charles W. 70 Morris-Reich, Amos 454 Mortelmans, Tanja 144, 154 Morton, Anne D. 537 Moskowich-Spiegel, Isabel 562 Mouton, Nicolaas Tobias O. 208 Muckenhaupt, Manfred 381 Mueller, Janet 533 Mühleisen, Susanne 524, 535 Mühlhäusler, Peter 427 Mühlmann 500 Muir, Edward 485, 486, 497, 498, 506, 512, 513 Mulac, Anthony 137, 289, 300, 303, 305 Mulholland, Joan 248, 256, 357 Mullini, Roberta 360, 363, 368 Munkelt, Marga 250, 251 Murphy, James J. 657 Musgrave, Alan 453 Musolff, Andreas 208, 455, 471 Mutz, Katrin 286, 304 Myers, Greg 406, 551 Myhill, John 133 N Nagell, Katherine 207 Näslund, Harry 567 Nerlich, Brigitte 15, 22, 99, 193, 194, 198–201, 203, 205, 208, 209 Neuhaus, H. Joachim 251 Nevala, Minna 22, 38, 39, 74, 78, 79, 86, 108, 131, 235, 252, 262, 353, 358, 359, 364, 366, 367, 420, 428, 431, 432, 440, 441, 651, 652, 655–657, 659, 660, 663, 665, 683 Nevalainen, Terttu 7, 13, 38, 74, 75, 79, 112, 139, 353, 357, 359, 389, 405, 428, 430–432, 441, 524, 589, 651–653, 662, 667, 683 Nevanlinna, Saara 289 Newton, Isaac 552

Nietzsche, Friedrich 194, 196–198 Nissenbaum, Stephen 631 Nissinen, Martti 653 Nordlinger, Rachel 133 Nordlund, Taru 666 Norri, Juhani 550 Norrick, Neal R. 207, 317 Nübling, Damaris 315–318, 323, 331, 343 Nurmi, Arja 38, 568, 651, 659, 662, 663, 665 Nutton, Vivian 556 Nuyts, Jan 147, 148 O Oates, Titus 628, 636 O’Barr, William M. 623, 624, 645 O’Driscoll, Jim 75 O’Sullivan, Patrick B. 398 Ochs, Elinor 128 Oesterreicher, Wulf 7, 9, 49 Oldenburg, Henry 566 Oliveira, Sandi Michele de 360 Olsen, Magnus 508 Ong, Walter J. 486, 493, 503, 507 Onodera, Noriko O. 111, 136, 138, 149, 153, 296 Orford, Richard 667 Ortega-Barrera, Ivalla 562 Ortony, Anthony 195 Osselton, N. E. 659 Öttchen, Cynthia J. 269, 395 Ovid 690 Özkök, Bora 485, 490, 495, 496, 504 P Padmos, Tineke 382, 503, 507, 511 Pagliuca, William 97, 101, 133, 139, 153 Pahta, Päivi 22, 41, 80, 499, 550, 551, 553–555, 558, 561–563, 566–569, 659, 665 Pakis, Valentine A. 507, 508, 510, Pakkala-Weckström, Mari 12, 22, 220, 222, 230, 234, 235, 238, 358, 382, 390–392, 403, 420, 428 Palander-Collin, Minna 8, 22, 38, 79, 86, 165, 289, 300, 303, 562, 651, 659, 662, 663, 665, 699

Index of names Panther, Klaus-Uwe 193 Papin, Denis 454, 463 Parks, Ward 485, 491, 493–495, 502, 506–508 Partingdon, James Riddick 454 Partridge, Eric 320 Paston, Margaret 80, 657, 663 Paul of Tarsus 528 Paul, Hermann 194 Paulik Sampson, Gloria 357 Paulsen, Friedrich 462 Pearsall, Derek 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 235, 239, 240 Peikola, Matti 630, 631, 634 Peirce, Charles 70, 488 Pelyvás, Péter 144 Pennell, Sara 551, 570 Penny, Ralph John 356 Pereira, Michela 552 Perelman, Les 652, 655–657 Peréz-Guerra, Javier 565 Perkins, Revere 97, 101, 133, 139, 153 Person, Raymond F. 247, 291, 317, 332, 341–343 Peters, Kate 533 Petersen, Zina 695 Petré, Peter 36 Philips, Susan U. 624, 645 Piao, Scott Songlin 616 Pierrepont, Mary see Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary Pilkington, Adrian 700 Plato 451, 460, 571 Pomerantz, Anita M. 182 Porter, Joseph A. 270 Porter, Roy 593 Powell, Mavo Jo 134 Pratt, Mary-Louise 700 Prentice, Sheryl 602 Priestley, Joseph 454 Prince, Ellen F. 112, 115 Probst, Siegmund 454 Proust, Marcel 696 Pryor, Francis 491, 500 Pulham, Carol 391 Pulsiano, Phillip 532

737

Q Quintana-Toledo, Elena 562 Quirk, Randolph 34, 248, 252, 253, 289, 368 R Rabb, Theodore K. 483 Radcliffe, Ann 339, 685 Radden, Günter 206, 207 Radtke, Edgar 4 Raglan, Lord 512 Rand Schmidt, Kari Anne 554 Rasoloson, Janie Noelle 318, 330 Ratia, Maura 572 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 7, 13, 38, 74, 75, 79, 353, 357, 359, 389, 405, 428, 430–432, 441, 651, 653, 662, 663, 667, 683 Raymond, Joad 459, 464, 589, 591, 598–600 Rayson, Paul 55 Reddy, Michael 204, 570, 571 Regner, Anna Carolina 454 Reh, Mechthild 99 Reichl, Karl 486, 499, 500, 512 Reinink, Gerrit J. 508 Reisig, Christian Karl 194, 195 Reisigl, Martin 87, 322, 323, 329, 330 Replogle, Carol A. H. 248, 256, 365, 366 Rhee, Seongha 108 Ricardo, David 454 Richardson, Malcolm 657 Rickford, John R. 114 Riskin, Jessica 195 Rissanen, Matti 8, 33, 34, 39, 46, 112, 291, 562, 628, 637, 638 Risselada, Rodie 294 Ritz, Marie-Eve 115 Roberts, Ian 98, 100 Robertson, Jean 657 Robinson Scott, Sarah 392 Robinson, Fred C. 532 Rodríguez Somolinos, Amalia 294 Rodríguez-Espiñeira, María José 133 Romaine, Suzanne 34, 47, 137, 268, 405, 625, 645 Room, Room 205 Rorty, Richard 199

738

Index of names

Rosch, Eleanor 73 Rosen, Lawrence 645 Rosenbach, Anette 115, 149 Rosenthal, Bernard, General 631, 645 Rossari, Corinne 111, 153 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 696, 697 Rothenbuhler, Eric W. 484, 486 Rothwell, William 205, 206 Roulet, Eddy 105 Roussou, Anna 98, 100 Rudanko, Juhani 222, 233, 247, 264, 265, 270, 271, 382, 420, 435, 437, 695, 700 Rudwick, Martin J. S. 454 Rummel, Erika 462 Russell, Bertrand 127 Russell, G. H. 532 Rütten, Tanja 541 Rydén, Mats 38 Ryder, Mary Ellen 693 Ryle, Gilbert 504 S Sadler, Misumi 108, 193 Sadock, Jerrold M. 316 Sairio, Anni 659, 663, 664 Salager-Meyer, Françoise 455, 472, 572 Salmon, Vivian 8, 248, 250, 266, 352, 356, 363, 364 Samuels, M. L. 34 Sánchez Roura, Teresa 655, 660 Sanders, José 147 Sarangi, Srikant 81 Sarrazin, Gregor 261 Saße, Günter 454 Savage, Richard 632 Sbisà, Marina 390 Schachter, Paul 315 Schaffer, Simon 571 Scheibman, Joanne 127, 150 Schieffelin, Bambi 128 Schiffrin, Deborah 147, 167, 286 Schleissner, Margaret 553 Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 381–383, 405 Schmidt, Alexander 261 Schmied, Josef 534, 562 Schneider Ute 457 Schneider, Edgar W. 50 Schneider, Gerold 406

Schneider, Klaus P. 400 Schneider, Kristina 593, 597, 602, 607, 609, 612–614 Schneider, Peter 600, 601, 605, 606, Schön, Donald 201 Schourup, Lawrence 285, 286, 298 Schreier, Daniel 24 Schröder, Thomas 589, 591 Schroeder, Alan 455 Schwenter, Scott 105, 113, 134, 139, 142, 151, 291 Schwitalla, Johannes 452, 455, 463, 593, 595, 596, 598, 602–604 Scott, Mike 55 Searle, John R. 19, 234, 270, 328, 379, 380, 385, 386, 390–392, 398, 399, 405, 483, 489, 513, 634, 635, 681, 698 Sebeok, Thomas A. 486 Seebold, Elmar 318 Segal, Robert A. 512 Sell, Roger 9, 231, 240, 421, 424, 432, 440, 680, 700 Selosse, Philippe 570 Semino, Elena 48, 82, 83, 382, 398, 399, 404 Senderowicz, Yaron 454 Seoane, Elena 4, 551 Seppänen, Eeva-Leena 356 Shakespeare, William 12, 22, 174, 175, 237, 247–273, 290, 291, 325, 332, 341, 342, 357, 363–366, 385, 391, 394, 397, 426–428, 433, 437, 512, 682–684, 690, 691, 695 Shank, Roger C. 81 Shapin, Stephen 454, 459, 571 Sharman, Julian 320, 323 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 663 Shibatani, Masayoshi 115 Shiina, Michi 40 Shindo, Mika 112 Shinzato, Rumiko 111, 142, 143, 149 Shirley, Frances Ann 325 Shoemaker, Robert 625, 630–632, 634, 642, 644 Short, Michael H. 48, 229 Sienkewicz, Thomas 490, 498, 503 Sifianou, Maria 368, 387 Sikorska, Liliana 340

Index of names Simmel, Georg 454 Simmler, Franz 525, 526 Simon, Horst 356, 362, 363, 368 Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie 111, 607, 609, 610 Siraisi, Nancy G. 553, 554 Sitta, Horst 50 Skinner, Quentin 681, 698 Slack, Paul 559 Slembrouck, Stef 645 Smart, Benjamin Humphrey 196 Smith, Jeremy J. 368 Smith, William R. 485 Smitherman, Geneva 394, 397, 398, 491 Snoek Henkemans, Francisca 456 Socrates 571 Solan, Lawrence 624 Sommerville, John C. 594, 616 Sorva, Elina 104 Spencer, H. Leith 539 Spencer-Oatey, Helen 423, 440 Spener, Philipp Jakob 463, 464 Sperber, Dan 85 Spevack, Marvin 174, 249, 250, 254 Spitz, Alice 353 Spoerhase, Carlos 454 Spooren, Wilbert 147 Staal, Frits 483, 484, 486, 498, 499, 501, 504, 506, 511, 512 Steger, Hugo 526 Stein, Dieter 139, 148, 149, 153, 247, 251, 253, 254, 357, 359, 360, 363, 368, 427, 441 Stein, Gabriele 357, 366 Stenström, Anna-Brita 380 Sterne, Laurence 326 Stetter, Cornelius 379 Stewart, Dugald 203 Stidston, Russell Osborne 352 Stoll, Rita 256 Stötzel, Georg 455, 471 Stowers, Stanley K. 657 Strang, Barbara M. H. 357 Straßner, Erich 587 Streekstra, Nanne 513 Stroebe, Klara 20 Strohm, Paul 224 Stubbs, Michael 109

739

Studer, Patrick 587, 588, 591, 592, 600–602, 605, 607, 609, 611, 612 Stygall, Gail 624, 644, 645 Suerbaum, Ulrich 259 Sully, James 199, 200 Suzuki, Ryoko 111, 136, 149 Svartvik, Jan 34, 250 Svorou, Soteria 99 Swaen, A. E. H. 321 Swales, John 551, 568 Sweetser, Eve 99, 101, 133, 193, 195 Swenson, Karen 491 Swift, Jonathan 326, 392 Swirsky, Peter 700 T Taavitsainen, Irma 4–8, 13, 14, 17, 22, 41, 44, 46, 50–53, 78, 219, 220, 231–233, 235, 237, 239, 250, 269, 272, 288, 290, 292, 317–320, 323, 332–335, 337, 339–341, 343, 344, 353–355, 362, 364, 366, 379–383, 385, 393–403, 405, 406, 420, 435, 441, 491, 499, 506, 507, 549–556, 558, 561–563, 565–567, 569, 570, 621, 622, 625, 642, 651, 680, 685, 686, 688, 695, 698, 700 Tabor, Whitney 291, 292, 302, 307 Tambiah, Stanley J. 486 Tandon, Bharat 693 Tannen, Deborah 81, 451 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa 651 Tavormina, M. Teresa 559 Taylor, Gary 249, 267 Taylor, Shelley E. 73 Terkourafi, Marina 368 Thelwall, Mike 320 Thomas, Jenny 71, 72, 75, 81, 86, 421–423, 440 Thomas, Keith 552 Thomas, Thomas 261 Thomasius, Jakob 453, 461, 462 Thompson, Sandra 137, 289, 300, 303, 305 Thornburg, Linda L. 193 Thorndike, Lynn 560 Thunqvist, Daniel P. 81 Thynne, Maria 431 Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 137, 420, 428, 430, 651, 658, 659, 663, 664

740

Index of names

Tiersma, Peter M. 624 Tiisala, Seija 660 Tillyard, E. M. W. 259 Todd, Zazie 202 Toivari-Viitala, Jaana 653 Tolmie, Jane 507 Tomasello, Michael 207 Toolan, Michael 679 Torres Cacoullos, Rena 139, 150, 151 Toulmin, Stephen 473 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 3–5, 14, 21, 23, 69, 97–102, 107, 108, 113, 127, 129–134, 136–143, 145–148, 152–154, 169, 179–182, 185, 186, 188, 193–195, 200, 206, 209, 285, 289, 291, 292, 296, 298–305, 307, 329, 331 Treharne, Elaine 532 Trolle Larsen, Mogens 654, 655 Trotula 555, 560 Troupp, Lotte 247, 248 Trudgill, Peter 320, 321, 357 Tsui, Amy B. M. 386 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, Baron de l’Auln 195, 201 Turner, Victor W. 484, 487, 492, 495, 496, 500, 512 Tyrkkö, Jukka 551 U Ungerer, Friedrich 594, 606 Ursus (Nicholas Reimers) 471 V Vaihinger, Hans 196 Valkonen, Petteri 16, 240, 379, 382, 383, 392, 393, 404 Valle, Ellen 566, 570, 653 van Bergen, Linda 667 van Creveld, Martin 498 van de Grift, Michel 294 van der Kooij 455 van der Wal, Marijke 666 van Dijk, Teun A. 405 van Eemeren, Frans H. 456, 469 van Gelderen, Elly 98 van Gennep, Arnold 485, 499, 500 van Oostrom, Frits 499, 500 Vandenbussche, Wim 654, 665

Vandewinkel, Sigi 112, 137 Vanstiphout, Herman L. J. 508 Vergaro, Carla 389 Verhagen, Arie 133, 147 Vermeer, Willem 654 Verschueren, Jef 5, 23, 70 Verstraete, Jean-Christophe 141, 145, 154 Vezzosi, Letizia 149 Vicente, Begona 193 Vico, Giambattista 195, 196 Vihla, Minna 551 Visconti, Jacqueline 113, 137 Vogel, Marianne 343 Voigts, Linda Ehrsam 550, 553, 555, 559, 560 von Fintel, Kai 99 von Polenz, Peter 455, 471, 508 Vopel, Hellmut 454 Vrooman, Steven S. 398 W Wales, Kathleen M. 252, 427 Wales, Katie 353, 358 Walker, Anne Graffam 623, 624, 645 Walker, Terry 39, 42, 48, 50, 78, 252, 256, 353, 354, 357, 359–361, 366, 429, 430, 432, 625, 627, 628, 632, 643 Wallace, David 223, 224, 226, 229 Wallace, William 381 Wallace, William A. 454 Wallat, Cynthia 81 Wallis, John 454 Walpole, Horace 339, 685 Walsham, Alexandra 533 Waltereit, Richard 105, 110, 135, 188, 193, 286, 295, 304, 306 Walton, Douglas 456, 461, 466 Wang, Chueh-chen 136 Waquet, Françoise 451 Ward, Gregory 5, 6, 113 Warren, Beatrice 195, 202 Wårvik, Brita 287, 288, 297 Waterhouse, Ruth 539 Watts, Richard J. 182, 353, 359, 402, 407, 420–422, 424, 436, 438–441 Weber, Johannes 589, 594, 598–602 Weber, Max 513

Index of names Webster, Charles 557 Wegener, Philip 194, 198, 199, 201, 209 Weigand, Edda 22, 381 Weinhold, Jan 498 Weinreich, Uriel 15, 34 Weisheipl, James A. 552 Wells, Stanley 249, 267 Wengeler, Martin 455, 471 Wenger, Etienne 398 Werkhofer, Konrad T. 422 Werlich, Egon 528 Westin, Ingrid 606 Wetzel, Patricia J. 423 Weydt, Harald 315, 381, 405 Wheathill, Anne 531 Wheelock, Wade T. 486 Wheitley, Agnes 441 White, Beatrice 321 Wichmann, Anne 420, 433, 434, 436, 440, 638 Wide, Camilla 296, 301, 303, 307 Wierzbicka, Anna 270, 289, 306, 315–318, 321, 322, 343, 387, 392, 399 Wilkins, David P. 101, 315, 316 Williams, Joseph M. 257, 357, 358, 364, 365 Wilson, Andrew 33, 34 Wilson, Deirdre 85 Windeatt, Barry 227, 239 Wischer, Ilse 110, 166 Wischer, Olga 289, 303, 305 Wisniewski, Roswitha 508

741

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 197, 198, 200, 458, 461 Wodak, Ruth 76, 87 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 559 Wolfson, Nessa 393, 400, 424 Wood, Johanna L. 80, 85, 653, 655, 657 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 85, 665 Wortley, Edward 85, 664 Wright, Roger 88 Wright, Susan 72, 139, 148, 153, 663, 682 Wright, T. 561 Wrightson, Keith 663 Wundt, Wilhelm 317 Wycherley, William 691, 692 Wycliffe 532, 535, 536 Wynne, Martin 48, 53–55 X Xiao, Richard 35, 46, 47 Y Yaguello, Marina 188 Yang, Yonglin 361 Yap, Foong Ha 109, 111, 114, 115 Young, Christopher 368 Z Zambrano, Nahirana 472, 572 Zethsen, K. K. 551 Zinken, Jörg 198 Zipfel 589 Ziv, Yael 266 Zwicky, Arnold M. 100, 131

742

Index of names

Index of languages

A Arabic 357, 554 B Bulgarian 106 Old 106 C Castilian 556 Catalan 11, 113, 555, 556, 673 Chinese 133, 134 Mandarin 111, 112, 136 Late Archaic 133 Pre-Archaic 133 Czech 13, 354, 355, 357, 369 D Danish 384 Dutch 22, 133, 141, 144, 147, 343, 355, 363, 382, 555, 599, 694 Early 382, 438 Early Modern 694 Middle 380, 503, 508 Old 500 E English 557, 569 American 36, 44, 150, 293, 384, 400, 562, 572, 688 Australian 115, 384 Canadian 41 Early Middle 341, 532, 695 Early Modern 9, 12–14, 37, 39, 40, 55, 79, 82, 137, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 188, 290, 297, 334–337, 359, 362, 366, 384–387, 389, 398, 399, 401, 403, 406, 432, 563, 628, 629, 638, 641, 642 Elizabethan 365 Irish 41 Late Middle 133, 137, 328, 333–335, 337, 341, 563

Late Modern 40, 148, 292, 430 Middle 12, 13, 18, 19, 37, 40, 43, 112, 135, 139, 168, 171, 173, 177, 188, 219, 288, 294, 297, 320, 327, 328, 331, 339, 357, 359, 362, 366, 368, 385, 390–392, 556, 559, 560, 562, 569, 686 New Zealand 400 Old 19, 20, 36, 37, 52, 100, 109, 130, 134, 135, 139, 177, 287, 289, 294, 297, 300–302, 317, 318, 320, 327–329, 332, 341, 358, 365, 366, 380, 390–392, 404, 432, 433, 435, 502, 507, 553, 560, 569 Renaissance 44, 368 Scottish 41, 112 Standard 115, 645, 662 F Finnish 109, 355, 356, 380, 555 French 22, 99, 100, 103, 105, 108, 109, 112–115, 128, 136, 137, 165, 205, 224–226, 285, 294, 295, 299, 306, 318, 337, 354, 357, 359, 362, 366, 368, 472, 555–557, 572, 573, 615, 686 Canadian 384 Early Modern 381 Medieval 22, 360, 381 Middle 105, 294, 356, 360, 363 Late Medieval 92 Old 103, 105, 113, 294, 295, 381, 561 Renaissance 357 G Gaelic 556 German 13, 22, 102, 108, 137, 138, 144, 147, 148, 317–319, 321, 329, 332, 343, 354–356, 359, 362, 381, 384, 471, 472, 499, 510, 532, 555, 557, 558, 657 Early New High 136 Low 660 Middle High 22, 364, 507

Index of languages Old 401 Old High 20, 364, 503 Swiss 22, 326, 327 Greek 9, 99, 128, 368, 387, 493–495, 512, 554, 560 Ancient 364 Classical 99 Cypriot 368 Early 495 H Hebrew 135, 384, 555, 556 Hopi 133 I Icelandic 507 Old 380, 382, 503, 507, 508 Indo-Arian 501 Irish 555 Old 507 Italian 110, 113, 137, 165, 225, 295, 321, 322, 329, 354, 355, 357, 368, 555, 657 Old 113, 295 J Japanese 104, 105, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 131, 133, 134, 136–140, 149, 152, 153, 296, 353, 356, 508 Classical 104 Early Modern 143 Late Middle 138 Middle 143 Old 115, 136, 138 K Korean 104, 108, 137, 153, 659 L Latin 42, 50, 97, 128, 174, 224, 285, 288, 294, 295, 328, 335, 341, 354, 365, 368, 471, 500, 535, 537, 550, 553–560, 566, 568, 569, 629, 635, 654, 660 N Newari 139 Norse Old 20 Norwegian 356

743

P Polish 317, 318, 355, 365, 387 Old 635 Portuguese 136, 138, 139, 355, 360 Brazilian 113 Medieval 138 Old 136 R Romanian 363 Russian 49, 317, 318, 355, 384 Medieval 654 Old 628 S Sanskrit 508 Spanish 35, 105, 133, 135, 137, 139, 144, 149, 151, 152, 306, 354–357, 363, 366, 441, 572, 573 American 354 Argentinean 384 Latin American 354 Mexican 110, 135, 149–151 Old 139, 151, 355, 360, 381 Peninsular 142 Renaissance 361 Sumerian 508 Swedish 45, 165, 296, 301, 323, 343, 355, 356, 564, 567, 572, 573, 660 T Tagalog 115 Tamil 142 Turkic 499 Turkish 115, 485, 495, 496 U Urdu 100 Y Yiddish 115, 116