Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2010

This study provides close, pragmatically-orientated readings of epistolary manifestations of sincerity, sarcasm and seriousness as expressed in the letters of Maria Thynne to her mother-in-law and to her husband, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. By examining how each mode of expression arose from, and interacted with, its familial and textual environments, these readings discuss the social functions and linguistic implications of Maria’s stylistic repertoire. The study concludes with the suggestion that the letters provide preliminary evidence for the claim that, along with that of sincerity, the Early Modern period may also have been of some significance for the development of sarcasm in English.

This paper studies the public communication act of petitions made in the Middle Ages by subjects to their governors in situations of high personal need. Analysing an edited corpus of correspondence in Anglo-Norman and Italian chancelleries of the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, I attempt to identify verbal means that are related to what is today defined as “face” and “facework”, and to discuss this evidence in the tension modern pragmatics establishes between common “politic” and marked “polite” behaviour. Parting from the three-fold conception where all speech events have to be considered in their whole as social, discursive and textual practices, I briefly retrace the social and legal conditions of petitions and describe their particular discursive character on the threshold of two transitions: from orality to literacy and from Latin to vernacular. The data analysis is concerned with the textual cues bound to structural, syntactic and semantic constraints. Pointing out the most striking features of these three aspects and listing the most frequent forms that are cross-culturally congruent, I identify medieval facework as a ritual, but consciously iconic shaping of a power ideal at the intersection of political, juristic and religious implications. As formality is a shared value based on social position and role, no sign of reflexive politeness behaviour can be verified in this early period. Variations are simply attributed to the habits of the different chancelleries and their scribes. Though identified as unmarked politic behaviour, the common procedures in the medieval petition letters can nevertheless be seen as general face-saving strategies in response to the threatening character of requests. Thus the historical data shed light on the conception of linguistic politeness in the first-order and the second-order senses of the term and are useful to advance new hypotheses in the pragmatic discussion since Brown and Levinson’s classical study.

It is the aim of this paper to identify and analyse directive speech acts in a corpus of Early Modern English and Present-day English written texts from legal, religious and scientific discourse. It starts with a justification of the application of speech act models to the analysis of written texts. Then several descriptive models are compared (Section"2) and the corpus is introduced (Section"3). In Section"4, the research method of the paper is characterised as a combination of form to function and function to form approaches. The results of the analysis are presented in Section"5: in the Early Modern English period all three text categories show similar frequencies of directives, but differ in their realisation strategies. In Present-day English, scientific discourse is much less directive than the other text categories. Diachronic changes are also evident on the plane of realisation strategies; these linguistic changes correlate with functional changes in legal discourse and changes in the discourse community in scientific discourse. The last section summarises the main issues of the paper and offers some modifications for the development of a more powerful descriptive model for directive speech acts.

This article examines the types of syntactic mitigators employed in directive head acts in familiar letters written during the Spanish Colonial period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). In addition to analysis of the head-act-internal verbal modifiers used in Early Modern Spanish epistolaries, a primary focus of this paper is the question of where the language used in these letters falls on the oral–literate continuum. The directive speech acts noted in the corpus are categorized according to Koike’s (1992) hierarchy of illocutionary force and analyzed using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of face mitigation. The results reveal that the directives issued differ greatly in both nature and structure from those seen in studies of modern (spoken) Spanish as well as those noted in literary corpora of early varieties of the language. A general caution is therefore issued regarding the treatment of letters as manifestations of language that approximates orality.

This paper concentrates on Early Modern English statutes printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study considers the development of complexity and the rise of modern writing conventions by following the diachronic pragmatic view. The analysis also draws on genre studies and underlines the sociohistorical impact on linguistic changes. Complexity is assessed by a systematic method that observes the textual structure and syntax. The material consists of legislative documents in Early English Books Online; six of the documents were transcribed and compiled into a small-scale corpus. The results indicate that complexity was a common feature in the Early Modern English period: coordination and subordination are frequently used, and the sixteenth-century documents have an increasing tendency to favour subordination. During the sixteenth century, legislative sentences and text type structure become more regular and correspond to present-day practices.