2 - Historical Pragmatics

Summary

Historical pragmatics encompasses the subfields of historical pragmatics (proper), with static focus on pragmatic forms and functions in earlier language stages, and diachronic pragmatics, with dynamic focus on changes over time. Within each subfield, one can focus on the level of expressions (words, phrases, clauses), utterances (speech acts), and discourse (register, genre, style). But the “bad data” problem means that for the past we lack naturally occurring oral conversation, where pragmatic meaning, such as speaker attitude and speaker–hearer interaction, is most obvious. However, from the medieval period, we have records which, while they come down to us in written form, represent authentic (“speech-based”) dialogue (court transcripts, depositions, parliamentary proceedings), constructed or “speech-purposed” dialogue (dramatic and fictional dialogue) or intended for oral delivery (sermons, prayers). “Speech-like” texts are more or less colloquial in nature (personal letters, diaries). Many of these documents are now accessible in multi-genre and specialized, single-genre electronic corpora. Finally, this chapter contemplates the possibility of pragmatic corpus annotation.