Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2009

It is shown how a model based on a critical discourse analysis approach, in conjunction with frame analysis, offers a systematic way to analyse fifteenth-century letters. It is argued that in this framework all contexts are “local contexts”. Letters present particular difficulties because they are formulaic in certain parts and expressive in others. It is shown that this characteristic may be exploited to facilitate the identification of expressive text. It is further shown that variation in the formulae has a practical application. The formulaic parts of letters that scribes wrote for Margaret Paston may be compared with letters they wrote for themselves. This provides evidence that Margaret herself was responsible for the wording of her letters.

This paper involves the historical construction of pragmatic meanings in a courtship correspondence of the eighteenth century. I draw on relevance theory in a pilot analysis preliminary to the pragmatic coding of implicature and inference in a rich body of epistolary prose in the letters subcorpus of the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET). Extensive qualitative pragmatic study from relevance theoretic and Gricean perspectives have been conducted using the corpus (Fitzmaurice 2002, 2000). Uncovering the meanings of the letters within entire exchanges consists of negotiating multiple specific literary, cultural, historical and linguistic contexts. The goal is to construct a larger (con)textual setting in which later readers can ascertain the extent to which original participants were able to calculate their correspondents’ intentions and how they in turn responded.

This article studies the use of nominal terms and pronouns as a means to refer to a third party, as well as to the writer him/herself and the addressee in written interaction. The purpose is to discuss the concepts of person reference and social deixis by looking at how the interactants’ social identities and interpersonal relationships are encoded in the use of referential terms in Late Modern English letters and journals. The results show that the term friend may be used when the writer has something to gain from it: an actual favour, a reciprocal act of solidarity, or an access to the addressee’s/referent’s in-group. In general, shifting between in-group/out-group membership appears to be a common function for the use of friend. The use of addressee- and self-oriented reference is in turn determined by the social and contextual aspects of appearance, attitude, and authority.

The pronoun I indexes the speaker or writer in place and time but also situates him or her in the moral order as the person responsible for what is uttered (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990). Consequently, this paper asks (1) what gentlemen of the Early and Late Modern England could say about themselves in the first person and (2) whether there were any register or diachronic differences in typical self-reference. This study relies on integrationist social theory and employs a set of quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of recurrent word clusters extracted from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. The results point to increasing self-reference and the prominence of mental verb clusters that often serve interpersonal functions.

In this paper, we argue that there is another approach to the study of historical pragmatics beyond those explicitly mentioned in Jacobs and Jucker (1995). We label this approach “sociophilology”. Moreover, we demonstrate how this approach can be effectively pursued by combining two corpus linguistics techniques: corpus annotation and “keyness” analysis. Specifically, we draw from the Sociopragmatic Corpus (1640–1760), an annotated subsection of comedy plays and drama proceedings taken from the Corpus of Dialogues 1560–1760, as a means of identifying the statistically-based style markers, or key items, associated with a number of social role dyads (including examiner to examinee and master/mistress to servant). We will show how such an approach might be used to uncover differential distributions of personal pronouns, interjections, imperative verbs, politeness formulae, etc., and how, by combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis, one can scrutinise such material for pragmatic import.