Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2015

This paper provides an outline of the changes in linguistics that gave rise to historical pragmatics in the 1990s and that have shaped its development over the twenty years of its existence. These changes have affected virtually all aspects of linguistic analyses: the nature of the data, the research questions, the methods and tools that are being used for the analysis, as well as the nature of the generalizations and findings that result from these investigations. We deal with the changes in terms of shifts in thought styles and discuss seven different turns: the pragmatic turn, the socio-cultural turn, the dispersive turn, the empirical turn, the digital turn, the discursive turn and the diachronic turn. We also deal with some long-standing, recent or emerging interfaces where historical pragmatics interacts with other disciplines and we discuss some future challenges, such as the multimodality and fluidity of communication and the problem of combining big data with pragmatic micro analyses.

In this paper, we reconstruct the emergence of the modal and discourse marker uses of adverbial and clausal expressions with no doubt. Their history contrasts in a number of surprising ways with typical grammaticalization hypotheses. Existential expressions with no doubt emerged directly with grammatical modal meaning and developed lexicalized idiomatic uses later on. We account for this in terms of Boye and Harder’s discourse approach to grammaticalization and lexicalization, according to which the former involves coded discourse secondariness whereas the latter expresses a primary point of the discourse. Like adverbial no doubt, I have/make no doubt acquired uses not only as a modal but also as a discourse marker. Invoking the principles of Kaltenböck, Heine and Kuteva’s Thetical Grammar, we explain this development in terms of the positional and scopal flexibility, and the discourse functionality of these expressions.

Discourse markers are a crucial component of natural language, which is why a description and account of their diachronic evolution must be part of our linguistic models. However, researchers have different views on whether this evolution should be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization and/or pragmaticalization. In this paper, we provide a structured overview of the accounts given for the diachronic evolution of DMs. It is shown that the different positions encountered in the literature can be brought back to diverging views on the conceptualization of grammar, the categorization of discourse markers, and the weight that is put on specific processes involved in the diachronic change. We provide case studies for each of the positions that we present and discuss.

The prefaces to English school grammars of the eighteenth century may be conceptualised as a frame of reference for the authorial voice behind them. To promote and boost the sales of their works, grammarians generally wrote sound, meaningful prefaces that combined propositional content with metadiscursive comments. Therefore, this kind of prefatory material falls within the scope of what Genette (1997: 1–2) calls the “paratextual apparatus” of a work, which aims to provide the reader with essential information for the correct reception, understanding and perusal of the book. This paper focuses on grammarians’ textual and interpersonal metacomments as thoughtful strategies to guide the reader carefully through the text, as well as to shape the contents and message of the book at various levels (Hyland 2000; Lorés-Sanz 2006: 92). To this end, a study corpus of fifteen English school grammars has been retrieved from the ECEG Database (2010) by restricting two search parameters: target audience and authors’ place of birth.

In Danckaert (2014), the Latin particle quidem was analysed as a marker of emphatic affirmative polarity. Building on this proposal, this paper elaborates on the pragmatic properties of this element. I argue that quidem is not a neutral but a so-called “presuppositional” polarity marker, which confirms a proposition which (i) is already part of the common ground but (ii) was not overtly spelled out in the (immediately) preceding context. In more formal terms, I propose that quidem gives rise to the conventional implicature that the speaker assumes that the content of his message might already be known to the addressee, or that it conveys information that the latter expects to hear or read. Quidem can be regarded as a “lexical marker of common ground”, in the sense of Fetzer and Fischer (2007).