Jucker Andreas H. (Editor). Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English

John Benjamins, 1995. — xv, 623 pages. — (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series). — ISBN: 90-272-5047-2 / 1-55619-328-9.Historical pragmatics is a very young field of scientific enquiry. It combines the methodologies of pragmatics, which is itself still quite young, and historical linguistics, which can look back on a long tradition. Pragmatics may be defined very crudely as the study of language in use, while historical linguistics is concerned with the investigation of earlier stages of particular languages and their diachronic development.The volume contains 22 original papers that encompass a wide range of approaches. All but two of them use English language data, and therefore this volume is subtitled "Pragmatic Developments in the History of English".The book starts with seven pragmaphilological papers. They all deal with historical English texts and their interpretation. And all of them endeavour to go beyond the traditional levels of analysis. In the words of Navarro-Errasti, they aim to review "historical texts in the light of pragmatic approaches", or they investigate the reliability of modern editions of old texts for pragmatic analyses. They pay close attention to the communicative context of these texts, which are not just seen as historical artefacts but as communicative acts with a sender who wrote for a particular audience with a particular purpose or intention. Who was the author, to whom was the text addressed, and what was the purpose of writing the text?The second and the third part of this book comprise papers in diachronic pragmatics, in which the authors trace the development of a pragmatic unit across different stages in the development of English (or Japanese in the case of Onodera's contribution). Two broad classes can be distinguished within diachronic pragmatics. On the one hand, there are papers that take a linguistic form as their starting point, e.g. particular lexical items or syntactic constructions, and study their pragmatic functions at different times. These approaches are called diachronic form-to-function mappings (Part II). And on the other hand, there are papers that take a particular pragmatic function as their starting point, e.g. discourse strategies or politeness, and study their linguistic realisation at different times. These approaches are therefore called diachronic function-to-form mappings (Part III).The Historical Perspective in Pragmatics
Pragmaphilology
The Openness of Medieval Texts
They Had Their Points: Punctuation and Interpretation in English Renaissance Literature
Punctuation: And - 'Pragmatics'
A Close Reading of William Caxton's Dialogues: "... to lerne Shortly frenssh and englyssh"
Wills and Will-Making in 16th and 17th Century England: Some Pragmatic Aspects
Justifying Grammars: A Socio-Pragmatic Foray into the Discourse Community of Early English Grammarians
Communicative Clues in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Diachronic form-to-function mapping
Pragmatic Maxims in Explanations of Language Change?
Pragmatic Constraints to Word Order, and Word-Order Change in English
The Semantic and Pragmatic Development of Substitutive Complex Prepositions in English
On Doing as You Please
Your Average Generalisations: A Case-Study in Historical Pragmatics
Demonstratives in Early Modern English Letters
The Ambiguous Adverbial/Conjunctions Þa and Þonne in Middle English: A Discourse-Pragmatic Study of then and when in Early English Saints' Lives
Middle English Þo and other Narrative Discourse Markers
Diachronic Analysis of Japanese Discourse Markers
Interjections in Early Modern English: From Imitation of Spoken to Conventions of Written Language
Diachronic function-to-form mapping
Topics in the History of Dialogue Forms
"Then I saw to antique heddes": Discourse Strategies in Early Modern English Travelogues
Linguistic Politeness Strategies in Shakespeare's Plays
Constraints on Politeness: The Pragmatics of Address Formulae in Early English Correspondence