Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2013

The article traces the development of three pragmatic markers with a hedging function, as it were, so to speak and if you like, back to their origins in the fourteenth century, the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, respectively. They all probably started out as full clauses, as adverbial clauses (as it were, if you like) or as complement clause (so to speak), but underwent different degrees of restructuring and shortening. While as it were has lost its whole complement section and has fossilised an older conjunction use, if you like just froze in a fairly usual elliptical form and so to speak may not have changed its form at all. In the case of if you like and so to speak the influence of parallel parenthetical forms seems to have been important. The changes in question are seen as instances of pragmaticalisation and partly also lexicalisation, although they share many features with grammaticalisation.

In this article, I strengthen the contested view that the distribution of Late Medieval Greek object clitic pronouns is not only regulated by a syntactic rule but also by a pragmatic principle, i.e. that fronted focalised information attracts object clitic pronouns into preverbal position. For this purpose, I appeal to the modern concept of “light verbs”, as the direct objects of these semantically weak, unspecific verbs can be assumed to constitute focalised information. By means of a case study of the fourteenth century Chronicle of Morea, I demonstrate that almost all the fronted direct objects of the light verbs ποιώ (‘to do’) and δίδω (‘to give’) are indeed associated with preverbal object clitic pronouns. As such, the so-called “focus-hypothesis” can be verified in an objective way.

The aim of this contribution is to investigate, by means of a diachronic multi-genre corpus-based approach (Academic, Narrative, and Present-day Spoken French), whether the historical functional shift from the propositional domain to the causal/pragmatic domain of linguistic expressions correlates with their semantic shift from primarily conceptual to primarily procedural content. Our analysis concentrates on two discourse markers derived from the French verb voir (‘to see’), namely vu que (‘since’), and on a/nous avons vu que (‘we have seen that’). Our initial hypothesis was that both markers result from an (ongoing) “proceduralisation” process which found its source in the polysemous conceptual meaning of the verb voir, viz. perceptive and cognitive meaning. Our results show that this hypothesis needs a more qualified perspective on linguistic change leading us to approach the “proceduralisation” process in terms of gradualness rather than polarity, and to broaden the field of grammaticalisation to non-linguistic criteria such as the “stylistic” parameter.

This paper explores to what extent and how defendants (re)initiated talk in the English courtroom during the period 1760–1860. Adopting both a qualitative and quantitative approach to the analysis of a sample of the Old Bailey Proceedings, I investigate defendants’ moves in terms of their illocutionary force, their addressees and whether there is evidence of change in frequency and format over the period under examination. The achievement of full defence by counsels in 1836 is expected to bring defendants’ behaviour closer to what it is like nowadays. In line with this hypothesis, the study shows a gradual decrease in defendants’ turn transitions, reporting moves and informing acts over the nineteenth century. However, the turn-allocation technique used to gain the turn as well as the increase of (re)initiating moves and questioning acts produced by defendants over the course of time disconfirms the hypothesis of a more active participation of counsels.

This study seeks to provide new insights into the development and use of pray in Early Modern English. The study is based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus, which combines the drama text samples of three different Early Modern English corpora, comprising a total of 242,561 words from a time span of 1500 to 1760. We investigate the quantitative distribution of the different forms in which pray appears during this period, and the influence of the variables of social status and gender. The aim of the current study is consequently to shed more light on the sociopragmatic nature of pray forms, and to reach a more profound understanding of their use in the Early Modern English period.

This paper investigates the performative nature of Late Middle English administrative documents. While certain documents indicate the instantaneous performance of a speech act by using the canonical construction “I (hereby) + speech act verb”, explicit performatives are frequently inscribed with third-person reference of different kinds. This suggests that performativity may be a gradable phenomenon and that certain pragmatic contexts generate performative constructions which serve to (re)activate the speech act at some other point in time. In a quantitative study based on the Middle English Grammar Corpus, this paper provides a survey of the distributional patterns of three conceptionally distinct types of explicit performative constructions in documents. While the canonical construction seems to be tied to oral communication, related forms with third-person reference give documents a more autonomous status. Detaching the written record from the oral ceremony, these constructions facilitate a later verbatim reactivation of the respective speech act.