12 - Speech Acts in Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Research: A Case Study of Historical Letter Closings

Summary

In Chapter 12, we engage in the study of the unit of speech act by contrastively examining the ways in which historical letters are conventionally closed in three different linguacultures: Chinese, German and British English. The ‘cross-cultural’ aspect of pragmatics does not only involve the study of language use in geographically different cultures – we may as well go back in history and compare language use in various historical periods within a particular linguaculture. Furthermore, we may also combine research on spatially distant linguacultures with that of diachronically distant ones. In this chapter we do exactly this, by conducting a contrastive analysis of typologically ‘closer’ and typologically more ‘distant’ linguacultures. By focusing on historical data, we highlight the overlap between cross-cultural pragmatics and the field of historical pragmatics. The chapter shows how our speech act coding scheme outlined in Chapter 8 can be put into use in data analysis.