Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2002

Shakespeare’s works consist mainly of plays, yet little attention has been paid to his informal language although he was one of the first dramatists to exploit this variety in dialogue. This article, based on the author’s work for a dictionary of Shakespeare’s informal English, explores first what is meant by informal English and what data might provide the basis for this dictionary. It then reviews the understanding of different varieties of English in Shakespeare’s works. Finally, a passage from Romeo and Juliet provides the starting point for an analysis and review of some of the different types of informal English found in Shakespeare’s writings. Examples from many plays are quoted in the analysis, though a short paper like this cannot be comprehensive. It is hoped that the paper will spark greater interest in informal English from a historical viewpoint.

This paper presents a case study of the fifty earliest English wills in the Court of Probate, London, with a view to contributing towards highlighting the historical development of this legal genre. By analysing these documents from a pragmatic perspective and setting them in a diachronic framework, I show how the realisation of the act of bequeathing is highly dependent on the socio-cultural context of production and use. Late medieval wills are utterly different from Anglo-Saxon ones in that they are the product of a relatively literate culture in which drafters followed the format of Latin testaments; in this sense late medieval wills are similar to modern ones because they conform to the model of autonomous, formal text. However, they do not fulfil all the felicity conditions necessary to achieve their full constitutive potential as the authority validating these documents remains rooted in religious practices rather than in legal enforcement. This paper offers evidence in favour of the view that a proper pragmatic analysis of medieval documents can only be achieved by taking the historical context into account.

The focus of this article is on interaction in Middle English and Early Modern English herbals. In the Middle Ages, herbals were mainly instructive aids for producing medicines of the plants described in the text. Later, in the Early Modern English period, the herbal genre split into two, retaining the genre called herbals and giving birth to systematic botanical texts. The interaction established in texts can be studied through the use of pronouns (involvement markers) and the use of imperatives. This study shows that the strategies employed in the Middle English period are very different from the strategies in the Early Modern English period: the use of second-person pronouns and imperatives prevails in the Middle English period, whereas the use of first-person pronouns was preferred in the Early Modern English period. In addition to this, another division, irrespective of the time of writing, is observed in the material: the first group includes handbooks and practical herbals, and the other group learned and empirical herbals. Factors which explain these differences in interaction strategies are the purposes for writing and the education of the intended audience.

This paper treats the rhetorical strategy of securing the addressee’s goodwill, also known as captatio benevolentiae. Following the postulation in Brown and Levinson (1987), I examine its possible pragmatic properties and effect, and its politeness value in the face wants of the addressees, taking into consideration the social distance and relative power of the correspondents. Captatio benevolentiae passages have been selected from the Cely Letters on the basis of their rhetorical properties, their intended use and also their position in the letter; captatio benevolentiae occurs not only at the beginning of the letter, as was traditionally dictated in the original ars dictaminis manuals, but also throughout the body of the text.

This paper is based on a corpus of textbook dialogues which were used to teach the basics of English and French in early modern times. I aim to show the relevance of this genre for historical pragmatics. For this purpose, I refer to extra-linguistic aspects such as function, content and target group of these written dialogues which claim to represent spoken language, and I explain why these aspects are likely to indicate a high degree of pragmatic authenticity. My paper also aims to analyse the verbal interaction represented in the model dialogues. I will focus on sales talk, a discourse type which is a typical element of the phrasebooks and a relevant feature of communication at a time when commercial activities had an increasing social impact. The analysis of the main components reveals that the dialogues are highly standardised but not totally fixed; they offer their users a (restricted) inventory of linguistic devices to negotiate successfully. However, a discourse analytical approach is not sufficient to explain the interaction between buyer and seller. I therefore propose that the pragmatic concept of “face work” is the determining force in the process of bargaining. Furthermore, the analysis of the textbook dialogues illustrates the value of combining very different approaches and levels of analysis.

This study focuses on the records of confessions by individuals accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, both those presented in direct discourse and in reported discourse. We analyze the material from two viewpoints: the pragmatic features of the discourse and narrative structure and function. The data consists of 29 individual records, with eight cases selected for closer scrutiny. The records span the period from March through September 1692. In the pragmatic analysis we study the question and answer patterns from the point of view of the examiners and the accused. The analysis of narrative patterns is based on Labov’s work in oral narratives. It provides a multilayered approach to understanding both the structure of the confessions and the spread of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem. The categories of orientation and complicating action reveal that each confession presents a vivid representation of the devil, the accused, and the sociohistorical context.