Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2017

This introductory paper defines the present state of the art of historical (socio)pragmatics. We single out interactional and social foci as the most important, and we briefly characterise some more narrowly defined perspectives. These involve a politeness-related view that relies on relational practice with dynamic negotiations and the context-based approach to language use in time and space with its situational and cultural constraints. Next, the paper discusses the research questions addressed in this Special Issue. The papers cover diachronic changes in rhetorical and sociocultural modes of communication, whether and how irony and sarcasm can be detected in different historical periods, how metadiscourse reveals politeness strategies and intercultural transfer, what disruptive institutional activity types occur and what their cognitive underpinnings are, how ephemeral texts have been used in social and political conflict, how meaning-making practices work on the macro level of genres, and how literacy skills are reflected in correspondence with a connection to genre models. Overall, this introduction aims to set the scene for current historical (socio)pragmatics. We show its interdisciplinarity and methodologically eclectic research ground, and how it may develop in relation to, and feed into, the neighbouring fields of linguistics and the humanities in general.

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the pragmatics of Beowulf, specifically in relation to speech in what is known as the “Unferð Episode”, and more generally in terms of the poem’s placement in the ethnopragmatic history of English. Previous critics have almost unanimously read sarcasm into Beowulf’s treatment of the initially hostile Unferð (e.g., in his address to the latter as wine min, ‘my friend’), and in turn historical pragmaticists have discussed the poem in relation to Germanic insult-boasts, or flyting. By discussing the relevant contextual and co-textual frames, I show that previous interpretations along these lines have failed to recognize the import of Beowulf’s courtly speech.

This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners, and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 1550–1624, and its role in discourses to do with social regulation, negative evaluation and moralizing. The other is to undertake a detailed comparison of Della Casa’s Galateo and, in particular, Brown and Levinson (1987) . The major finding here is the close similarity between the two. Along the way, the paper also airs some theoretical distinctions relating to notions of politeness, notably the distinction between first- and second-order politeness, and touches on some of the features of the social context of Early Modern England.

This paper provides a qualitative historical (socio)pragmatic analysis of records of three eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trials using a socio-cognitive model of discursive community and identity construction. I aim to describe how the general social and legal context of witchcraft became situated and interpreted in the actual witchcraft trial records from the delegated officials’ perspective. I argue that in the analysed records, the officials did not simply apply a codified definition of “witchcraft”, but they discursively (re)constructed “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as the defendants’ identity. Thus, from the officials’ perspective, discursive community and identity construction established a relationship between the general context of witchcraft and the actual witchcraft trials. In order to reconstruct this process, I investigate the linguistic constructs by which the delegated officials actively created “witchcraft” and the defendants’ “witch” identity as mental constructs.

In this paper, I examine a form of argumentation employed by one of the most prominent parliamentarian news pamphlets of the English Civil War (1642–1649). The pamphlet in question is Mercurius Britanicus. It was founded to counter through its pages the news that was being published in Mercurius Aulicus, the foremost royalist publication. In its animadversion of Aulicus’s news, Britanicus first repeated the royalist text, and then responded to it. In my study, I shall focus on instances where the not wholly faithful reporting of Aulicus’s text leads to (socio)pragmatic meanings. I have taken into consideration both the wider social context in which the pamphlet writers were writing as well as the immediate situational context – the pamphlet as a genre. In my analysis of Britanicus’s animadversion, I examine titles of courtesy and the omission and substitution of words.

Genres work through conventions of communicative patterns. Variation in them is related to sociolinguistic parameters of writers and readers as well as situational and contextual factors, including culture. Conventions of writing change slowly and there are elements that remain constant throughout centuries but acquire new connotations. I shall first discuss genre theories and methods of studies at the interface between language and literature, and then provide a case study. The top genre of scholastic research was the commentary with a distinct genre structure. It was first introduced in Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became established in Early Modern English, as my examples will show. The transition period is particularly intriguing as the old thought style began to give way to new ideas, and observation proved inherited wisdom erroneous. Commentaries had an afterlife in spurious writings, providing an empirical example of genre dynamics and proving the usefulness of the notion of genre script as applied in this case study. 1

When addressing family members or friends, letter writers enter a common ground of some sort, where, as research has shown, the rules of everyday interaction apply ( Nurmi and Palander-Colin 2008 ). In different historical periods, familiar correspondence is thus very much about maintaining existing bonds and about phatic communion. The situation is likely to be very different in the case of institutional recipients, in particular if somebody addresses a given institution for the first time. The data selected for the study, the 1819 applications to the British Colonial Office for the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme (TNA 48/41–6), include many letters written by “first timers” (i.e., the encoders 1 who have not addressed the institution before). These letters may provide some insights into the specific participation framework of the first-time writers in their interaction with the institution.

In the paper, I propose that contact initiation may be related to the literacy levels of letter-writers, focusing on what I refer to as “technical literacy”. Based on some parameters thereof, I distinguish between two broad groups of informants, reflecting what may be described as standard and non-standard literacies, respectively. The two groups, I assume, do not operate within the same participation framework and, therefore, display pragmatic and linguistic differences in constructing the initial encounters. Moreover, the analysis of these initiations offers a new perspective on the routinisation of institutional correspondence.

It is argued that shame has become increasingly important as a mechanism of social control in Western societies while our awareness of shame has simultaneously decreased. This paper explores the functions of the lexemes shame, disgrace and ignominy in the eighteenth-century section of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and investigates how shame-inducing situations were discussed in letter-writing. Direct expressions of shame emerge particularly as formulaic apologies and reflect breached social conventions, honour, inadequacy and immorality. Shame discourse in the two case studies, however, proved to be context-dependent, evasive and euphemistic, and shame was expressed through a range of negative emotions. An element of discomfort in eighteenth-century shame discourse indicates that shame had taboo connotations, but the formulaic presence of shame and its connection to the cultural keyword of honour underlines its role as a mechanism of social control.

This paper has two purposes. First, it constitutes an exploration of context from the perspective of some prominent historical pragmaticians, and/or as demonstrated by publications which represent/exemplify a particular approach within historical pragmatics ( Jacobs and Jucker 1995 ; Archer and Culpeper 2003 , 2011 ; Nevala 2011 ; Traugott 2004 , 2011 ; 2012 ; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2014 ) as well as related disciplines such as historical sociolinguistics ( Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 ). Second, it explores my own (evolving) view in respect to context, often in response to the influential work of others, as evidenced in a selection of my work ( Archer 2005 , 2011 , 2012 , 2013 , 2014 ).