Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2010

This paper is a study of the singular pronoun of address in Piers Plowman. Previous studies have held that Langland’s use of second-person pronouns conformed to the Old English system where the distinction between the thou and ye type pronouns was strictly based on number. This view has accorded with the assumption that singular ye in the late fourteenth century was restricted to “courtly” genres (Burnley 2003: 29). The appearance of singular ye in the manuscripts has mainly been explained by scribal interference; at best, Samuels (1988: 214) states that authorial usage is impossible to define. The present study is based on a detailed analysis of scribal variants in all three versions of Piers Plowman. It suggests that the use of ye comes no less naturally to Langland than to Chaucer, and that it forms an integral part of the language of Piers Plowman. The extent of scribal alteration with regard to this feature was modest, and there seems to be no reason to interpret the shared usage as anything but authorial. Finally, it is suggested that the choice between thou and ye in this period was not merely a question of authorial creativity but an obligatory choice for the speaker, with real social and pragmatic implications.

The traditionally held view that grammaticalisation should be a semantically-motivated process (as discussed, for example, in Hopper and Traugott 2003: 75, summarising Bybee 1985; Bybee and Dahl 1989; Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991; Heine et al. 1993; and Heine and Kuteva 2002) has not been without its critics. One particular area of study, so far for the most part unchallenged, is Fi­scher’s (1994, 1997, 2007) treatment of the grammaticalising periphrastic modal of obligation, have to, in English. She provides a syntactically-led grammaticalisation account in which it is believed that the present-day, developing modal form had links with an earlier, Middle English expression in which the transitive object of the infinitive was located in pre-infinitival position, shared by both the infinitive and have. The syntactically-determined explanation for the grammaticalisation of this modal expression also takes account of the fact that many of the visible grammaticalisation effects are demonstrated to have taken place following the general shift in word order during the Middle English period, from an SOV to an SVO order. In the present study, the alternative viewpoint (first proposed by Brinton 1991) in which the syntactic word order shift is seen to be most frequently associated with transitive objects that referred to entities incapable of acting as possessors is expanded to suggest a context-induced path of grammaticalisation (Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991; Heine 2002). In addition, the shift of the object to post-infinitival position is seen to be unavoidably linked to the prior development of obligation senses in the older construction, so necessitating a semantically-motivated explanation of the grammaticalisation route for have to.

This paper aims to identify the role of pragmatics in grammaticalisation and to highlight the particular steps in the process of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures on the basis of a historical pragmatic study concerning the grammaticalisation of the Catalan anar ‘to go’ + infinitive construction. It also provides some comparative considerations with similar constructions in other Romance languages. The corpus contains occurrences taken from medieval Catalan chronicles. In order to reconstruct the history of anar + infinitive, the paper also considers morphological facts and other Catalan medieval periphrases. The paper concludes that implicatures play a double role in semantic change. On the one hand, they can become part of the semantic meaning attached to a certain construction as a new semantic component. On the other hand, they can promote the salience of a certain semantic component within the semantic structure of a lexical item.

This paper provides an examination and analysis of two roughly synonymous aspectual markers in Korean, pelita and malta, that developed from the transitive verbs ‘throw away’ and ‘stop’, respectively. Based on electronic corpora, it is shown that these markers are distributed divergently: malta is strongly preferred to pelita in passive, non-volitional and resistant contexts. The divergent distributions of pelita and malta can be more clearly understood in terms of transitivity. I propose that the transitivity difference of their lexical sources is reflected in constraints on their grammaticalisation and contemporary uses. The low vs. high transitivity of the lexical verbs malta and pelita has persisted in grammaticalisation and brought about differences between their grammaticalised forms. This paper suggests that the gradient notion of transitivity can be used as an explanatory principle that generalises differences between synonymous grammatical words that developed from different lexical verbs.

The traditional diachronic treatment of the Korean honorific marker LsupL is that LsupL was originally used as a referent honorific marker from the subject’s point of view. It then underwent changes to become a speaker-addressee-oriented (S-A) marker. Diverging from this traditional approach, I claim, based on a large-scale corpus-based study, that LsupL was used as a speaker-oriented marker as early as the fifteenth century. To account for Lsup-’s function change, I posit three stages for the evolution of the modern usage of LsupL. In Stage I (fifteenth century), LsupL was used to establish an honorific relation between a speaker and a referent. In a later transition stage (Stage II, sixteenth century), LsupL began to be used with the contextual restriction that the referent be the same as the addressee. Due to its high frequency, this use of speaker-addressee honorification was coded as a new standard (Stage III). This paper shows that the pragmatic function change of the Korean honorific marker is adequately accounted for by Traugott’s (2003, 2007) (inter)subjectification theory.