Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2009

In this article, we examine a period when Sweden took a leap from a locally-oriented power structure to a more centralised state. This meant a profound social change. We concentrate on the connection between changes in rhetoric and changes in society that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our point of departure is that, in rhetoric, there occurred a shift in balance from the rhetoric of friendship to the rhetoric of patronage. In the context of Sweden and Finland, we discuss whether this was linked to changes in administration and in the social order as a whole. Were there any real changes behind this rhetorical transition? Our source material provides a glimpse into whether and how social changes were reflected within the correspondence of two noblemen living at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.

The Glencairn Uprising (1653–1654) was a military rebellion by Scottish Highlanders under the leadership of William, Earl of Glencairn, against the English government of Oliver Cromwell. This paper investigates the presentation of actors and groups on both sides of the Uprising — but most especially Glencairn himself — in the contemporary London press. The theoretical framework of the analysis is Critical Discourse Analysis (modelled especially on the approach of van Dijk 1991); however, a corpus-based methodology, and a partially-quantitative analysis, are employed. The documents in question — a corpus of newsbooks published in late 1653 and the first half of 1654 — are analysed by a process of assigning concordance lines extracted using a wide set of search terms to particular categories of discourse-semantic meaning. The newsbooks are shown to make use of greatly contrasting discourses in their representations of Glencairn and others, resulting in “discourses of empowerment and disempowerment” (the latter being associated secondarily with a “discourse of disunity”). By employing these discourses, the newsbook journalists discredit Glencairn and his associates, whilst crediting the English and their associates.

This paper invites the reader to revisit the accused individuals’ response strategies in the Salem witchcraft trials from the perspective of pragmatic politeness. However, politeness, as used in this paper, refers to politeness to self, for the sake of one’s face — a concept that is different from, yet not incompatible with, that of Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper argues that it is more realistic to examine the trials from this perspective because the accused’s responses were in part driven by “what they thought others thought of them”, which is part of their “face”. As many as nineteen sub-strategies of self-politeness were found to be in operation. Such self-politeness strategies were critical in these trials because they helped the accused to achieve two goals: first, they could defend themselves, and, second, at the same time that the responses might have led them to being acquitted or to a partial and more lenient punishment (although it could not be guaranteed that the responses would work to a satisfactory end), the accused were able to enhance or restore, to a certain degree, their tarnished public image.

The use of “oh” in conversation has been widely studied. These studies demonstrate various uses of “oh” in different sequences. For example, John Heritage (1984) has identified six different sequences in which “oh” is used as a “change-of-state token”. Ian Hutchby (2001) has demonstrated how “oh” can be used ironically in disputations. This study compares the observations concerning “oh” in spoken modern English with “oh”/“O” in The First Folio and Early Quartos of William Shakespeare. This comparison demonstrates that all of the identified contemporary uses of “oh” were also used in the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare. Furthermore, the Shakespeare corpus includes some previously unidentified uses of “oh” (for example, “oh” prefacing a refusal to a request) that augment our understanding of “oh”.

This article, in an attempt to add to the growing literature on Old Russian reported speech, considers the pragmatics of jako recitativum, i.e. direct discourse introduced by the particle jako ‘that, how’, a multifunctional conjunction with a variety of subordinating uses. Through a detailed pragmatic and quantitative analysis of corpus data, I show that in the Old Russian Primary Chronicle, jako recitativum contrasts two conflicting points of orientation, the narrator’s and the speaker’s. By using the construction with jako, the narrator expresses a negative and/or distancing attitude towards the content of the speaker’s utterance. The contrast between reported speech with jako and reported speech without jako is shown to be more significant than the contrast between direct and indirect discourse.

This paper examines the linguistic resources adopted by pamphlet writers to express their stance and engage their readers during the so-called Irish paper war that preceded the 1800 Union between Great Britain and Ireland. The data (about 100,000 words) consists of 23 pamphlets divided, according to their position in the debate, into two sub-corpora of approximately the same number of words. My purpose in this paper is to investigate the communicative and rhetorical functionality of the linguistic features writers use to express their stance towards the union, with a view to determining how writers establish themselves as morally and intellectually authoritative in their texts. The analysis brings out the crucial role lexico-grammatical patterns play, but also demonstrates the need for a broader interactive perspective, in order to fully account for the dynamics of persuasive discourse.