Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2018

This paper is concerned with the relation between semantics and non-linguistic practice and with change in that relation. The particular case involves two classes of clausal constructions that have lay as their verb and are used in initiating bets. One class involves lay a wager and the other involves lay stake. Associated with the use of these constructions are a number of practices that have to do with what is done with the stakes of the bet. The crucial distinction among these practices in terms of the semantics of lay is whether or not stakes are physically laid down. If they are, then lay is interpretable as naming the physical action. Otherwise, some other interpretation must be sought for lay. I show that, over three centuries, there is a decline in the practice of laying stakes down when lay stake is used. With lay a wager there is no significant change. The result of the changing use of lay stake is that lay is increasingly interpreted as having a metaphoric or abstract meaning. Where the new meaning is metaphoric, this is due not to a deliberate expressive choice on the part of the speaker – as is usually assumed for metaphoric use – but to change in non-linguistic practice.

Foreign language learning manuals can be valuable sources for the history of pragmatics and historical pragmatics. They may contain explicit guidance on pragmatics not found in native-speaker grammars. For example, accounts of German forms of address in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English–German manuals provide evidence of changing views on the appropriateness of ihr and Sie earlier than does the “native” grammatical tradition. The bilingual model dialogues that are typical of such manuals may also implicitly model appropriate linguistic behaviour, demonstrated here by examining the communicative genre of bargaining in a series of three related English–Dutch language manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, the dialogues may provide metalinguistic comment on linguistic behaviour – for example, by criticizing the culture of excessive negative politeness. Such sources can enrich our knowledge of language use and attitudes to language use in the area of politeness, complementing the evidence to be gleaned from mainstream native grammars, civility manuals, merchants’ guides, and the like.

In this paper, I look at the Ancient Greek expressions áge, íthi and phére, which are all usually translated as ‘come (on)’. After discussing some existing accounts of these items, I look at their structural – syntactic properties and argue that they can be regarded as pragmaticalized imperatives. Then, I propose a new interpretation of their function – on this analysis, they can be regarded as conversational “boosters”, increasing the degree of strength of the illocutionary point of the utterance. Finally, I look at their diachronic development – in the corpus under consideration, áge is gradually replaced by íthi as the expression used with other imperatives, while phére develops as the preferred expression for use with non-imperative directive utterances.

The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective ( Jucker [ed.] 1995 ; Culpeper and Kádár [eds] 2010 ; Jucker and Taavitsainen [eds] 2010 ; etc.). The approach adopted in this study favours a first-order im/politeness view ( Watts et al. [eds] 1992 ; Eelen 2001 ; etc.), which is mainly concerned with the evaluation of behavioural elements by the participants in a communicative event. As im/politeness in Romanian is under-researched from a historical sociopragmatic perspective, this analysis tries to fill a gap exploring the seventeenth to early-eighteenth century cultural patterns and their characteristics in only two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia (separate states from the Middle Ages until their union in 1859).

My analysis is limited to the understanding and practices of “impoliteness” in official settings (court and diplomatic interactions), aiming to capture the production and evaluation, as well as some self-reflexive aspects ( Eelen 2001 ; Kádár 2013 ) and emotional effects of “impoliteness”. The corpus consists of Moldavian and Wallachian chronicles from the second half of the seventeenth-century and first half of the eighteenth-century, presenting local court life and also scenes at the Ottoman court.

This paper provides an overview of verbal markers of evidentiality in Early Modern German (1650 to 1800) in light of Boye’s propositional scope hypothesis. The markers under investigation include the semi-auxiliary scheinen (‘to shine, appear, seem’) and the perception verbs sehen (‘see’) and hören (‘hear’). I show that, although Boye’s hypothesis sheds new light on and calls into question previous diachronic accounts of scheinen, it appears not to account fully for why cases where perception verbs do not scope over propositions are also found with evidential readings in light of the larger discourse context. I will show that Boye’s hypothesis is still feasible when such contexts are taken into account. Data are drawn from the German Manchester Corpus (GerManC), a representative multi-register corpus of Early Modern German from 1650 to 1800.