Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2014

This paper deals with authorial stance in prefatory material of Early Modern English manuals on women’s diseases. Publications on this field from between 1612 and 1699 constitute our corpus of study. Original digitalised texts have been analysed manually to identify and detect structures concerning authorial identity and stance, according to the model developed by Marín-Arrese (2009). This model for the identification of effective and epistemic stance strategies enables us to describe both the relationship between the authors and their texts and, more specifically, the power relationship between the writers and their audience. One of the most important conclusions of this study concerns the strategic use of stance markers to enhance the quality of these books and make them appropriate for a wide variety of readers.

Propositional attitude predicates, such as English think, guess and seem, occur parenthetically in many languages. In this article we pay attention to a group of propositional attitude predicates which can be labelled epistemic/evidential, namely appear, look, seem and sound, and which, in addition to degree of certainty, also give an indication of the evidential source. In this study we describe the different parentheticals available with these verbs, paying special attention to like-parentheticals (e.g. Going to be a big one, looks like), a development characteristic of American English. Using data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies 2010-) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, Davies 2008-), we explore whether these developments can be conceptualised in terms of grammaticalisation and (inter)subjectification. In the structural domain, these parentheticals show fixation, decategorialisation and fusion. In the semantic-pragmatic domain, they show signs of generalisation of meaning and increased (inter)subjectivity.

This article deals with so-called sentence-final coordinating conjunctions in some dialectal varieties of English and Japanese. It emphasises that such final coordinating conjunctions derive from two syntactically different processes (“truncation” and “backshift”), and demonstrates that the final conjunctions stemming from each process differ accordingly in syntactic, prosodic, and discourse-pragmatic terms. In both English and Japanese, the backshift type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions (i) can be fronted to sentence/clause-initial position with no semantic/logical contradiction, (ii) have a sentence-final contour, (iii) do not tolerate being followed by a filler or interjectory particle, and (iv) express emphatic or emotive meanings. On the other hand, the truncation type of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions show the opposite characteristics. The cross-linguistic commonality observed in each of the two types of sentence-final coordinating conjunctions strongly suggests that their discourse-pragmatic meanings are cross-linguistically associated with syntactic/grammatical repertoires, such as truncation, backshift, and sentence-final position.

Givón’s (1995) quantity principle about the diagrammatic iconicity of coding forms has mostly been investigated for topic continuity and nominal elements. The present paper considers its applicability both to participant continuity and the continuity of time, focussing on their interaction in the organisation of narrative discourse. As an additional test of the hypothesis, the paper studies historical data, examining the structuring roles of signals of participant and temporal continuities in Old English narrative prose. The findings indicate that the choice of signals of the continuities of time and participants follows the iconic quantity principle of longer and informationally-heavier forms encoding greater degrees of discontinuity. The paper also underlines the importance of text type and genre-specific factors in investigations of discourse-structural signals. Specifically for the Old English narrative data, the study provides further support for the discourse marker role of þa ‘then’ as distinct from other temporal expressions.

The opening scene of Hamlet portrays two military-related speech events — changing of the guard and unknown persons approaching a sentry. This article utilizes insights from military history, Shakespearean playhouse practice, and military protocol pragmatics to analyze these speech events. Diachronic pragmatics investigation reveals military protocol for changing of the guard portrayed by Shakespeare has continued to be followed from the late 1500s to the present time.Identifying early seventeenth-century military protocol for guard duty at night and analyzing the function of the opening scene in Shakespearean theater, the article compares use of direct and indirect speech acts, including use of conventional and institutional ellipses, in the 1603 Quarto and 1623 First Folio. Pragmatic stylistic analysis shows the Folio version violates military protocol through use of more indirect speech acts, including expressives, unusual in these two military speech events, more effectively portraying underlying tension through the sentries’ sense of an inward, personally disturbing threat than the Quarto’s presentation of straightforward military protocol regarding unknown persons approaching sentries on duty.