Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2013

This study contributes to the research on the development of pragmatic particles from the perspective of the Bantu language Makhuwa. Makhuwa shows synchronic variation in the use of va and vo, which function as locative demonstratives, va (proximal) and vo (medial), but also as pragmatic particles in the left as well as the right periphery, where they draw the attention of the addressee, intensify the illocutionary force and indicate the relationship between speaker and addressee. The supposed development from demonstrative to pragmatic particle confirms the relevance of both peripheries for the change to pragmatic particle.Discussing the (inter)subjective properties of these pragmatic particles, the paper argues for a relatively broad definition of (inter)subjectivity as grounding the message in the speech situation (oriented towards the speaker, addressee or discourse).

The received view has it that the language of petitions aims at elevating the addressee and demeaning the author. Recent studies into historical (im)politeness interpret it as epistolary facework, i.e. “politic” rather than “polite” behaviour (Bax 2010). Drawing on evidence of the genre dynamics present in nineteenth-century petitions, this paper proposes that for a number of petitioners the conventionalised expression of deference could not have been their main motivation. Through close study of the structural models and their distribution in two collections of petitions related to British settlement in the Cape Colony (1819–1825), the study proposes an account for changes in users’ preferences in this respect. The discussion employs Luckmann’s (e.g. 2009) theory of “communicative genres” and “projects”, which allows one to reach beyond the textual evidence to the dimension of verbal interaction. The paper also focuses on the materiality of historical genres (cf. Barton and Hall 2000).

This paper seeks to explain the radical decrease in the use of the passive voice in Present-day English scientific discourse. A number of different linguistic factors having been discounted in previous research, it is hypothesised here that passives are being omitted for two reasons. Firstly, they became conventionalised in scientific discourse and subsequently lost the pragmatic function which originally justified their high frequency in scientific texts. Secondly, over the course of the twentieth century two sociocultural circumstances converge that exert pressure on conventionalised passives to disappear, namely (i) the increasing competitiveness in the scientific community, and (ii) the democratisation of discourse. This hypothesis is tested in the present paper by analysing the function of passives in scientific discourse before the drop in frequency began, that is, in Late Modern English (1700–1900). With data from ARCHER and other sources I will try to show that passives in Late Modern scientific English exemplify the conventionalisation and loss of contextual function of pragmatic strategies, a scenario that, given the right sociohistorical conditions, leads to linguistic change.

In contrast to Early Modern English, little is known about address pronouns in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper investigates early Scottish pronoun usage in more detail by presenting a case study on singular pronominal address in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English witness depositions from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The source texts drawn from the Criminal Trials in Scotland 1488–1624, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots 1450–1700 and A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 are examined with a quantitative and qualitative approach based on historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. Thou is found to be relatively frequent in the Scottish and Northern English data in comparison with the rapid decline in thou recently found in South-Eastern English depositions. However, there are significant differences in the distributions of pronouns, which are explained by an overrepresentation of upper social ranks in the Scottish sub-corpus.