Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001

Despite any appearances to the contrary, literary writing and reading are forms of communicative activity for which a human parity needs to obtain between the different participants. By the same token, literature can also bring about changes in the human world. Literary pragmatics is therefore continuous with the pragmatics of communication in general, and must be strongly historical in its orientation, even if this can never involve a rigid historical determinism. Although human identity is very much a matter of social formation, human beings do have a certain autonomy of imagination, intellect, temperament and choice. It is this relative autonomy which makes possible communication between different positionalities in the first place, and which also helps to explain the processes of personal and social change. When people really communicate, they meet each other half-way. Initiators of communication textualise a model of the communicative situation itself, for instance, and also make rhetorical concessions, which, as the mental distance between the context of sending and the context of receiving varies, can themselves vary in communicative effect. In responding to a communicative gesture, similarly, receivers are humanly obliged to make a hermeneutic effort, which, especially, but not only in the case of literary communication, may have to negotiate variations in text typology and politeness. The net effect of literature, like that of other uses of language, depends on who is processing it, and when and where and how. In principle, the effect can sometimes be deleterious. As always, human beings’ only moral defence lies in their own personal powers of judgement. Equally, some literary writings, like other actions, embody a kind of ethical beauty, not only as significant historical interventions in their own times and places, but also in terms of a continuing, yet quite distinct inspiration they can offer to human beings whose situationality is different. All genuine communication actually tends to override situational difference in the hope of closer communion. A historical pragmatics can itself facilitate rapprochement, by offering a theoretical basis for mediation between different viewpoints, and not least in the form of a mediating literary criticism. Here, though, there can be no suggestion of hegemony. Sociohistorical differences will never completely disappear. Nor will human behaviour ever become completely explicable. If it did, it would no longer be human in the sense understood by a non-determinist pragmatics.

In this article, I am concerned with the historical dimension of frame analysis, aiming at an appraisal of the general significance of this method if applied to historical linguistic data, in particular instances of oral or written discourse transmitted from the past. In order to demonstrate how frame analysis can be employed as a means of reconstructing the multiple meaning structures of earlier cases of linguistic communication, I shall examine the opening scene of a seventeenth-century Dutch theatrical play, i.e. Constantijn Huygens’s ribald farce Trijntje Cornelis. The analysis is preceded by a brief outline setting forth some fundamental issues and dilemmas of historical pragmatics. Arguing that there are (at least) two notably distinct ways of approaching the data, I will distinguish between two types of historical pragmatic enquiry, i.e. exostructural and endostructural analysis. As to the question of how these different perspectives can be integrated, I will claim that by and large frame analysis as conceived by Goffman is an effective device. Considering that this sociological theory has its limitations too, the final section will review the extent to which, and in which ways, the application of the notions and techniques of frame analysis enhances our understanding of verbal communication in historical contexts. My analysis of Huygens’s play is thus exemplified within a wider “frame” of scientific interest.

The first printed newspapers in the modern sense of the word appeared in the seventeenth century. They were weekly publications which contained regular reports by correspondents from all over Europe, mainly on political matters. Although the new medium as such was innovative in its general organization, the individual news items were produced by following text patterns which already had a history of their own. The article reports recent research on the emerging constellation of text types in the first two German newspapers, the Aviso and the Relation of the year 1609. It is focussed on delineating a prototype-based typology of the relevant text types and on tracing back these forms of presentation of news items to earlier genres and media like chronicles, handwritten newsletters, printed pamphlets and biannual news collections. The general interest of this line of research as a contribution to historical pragmatics lies in the attempt to see historical text types in an evolutionary perspective, taking into account the context of text production and, as far as possible, the reactions of the reading public.

This article focuses on Middle English medical recipes and aims to show that the concepts of “genre”, “text type” and “text tradition” provide useful tools for historical discourse analysis, as they operate in different ways and illustrate various sides of medieval texts. Medical recipes are a well-defined procedural genre included in a variety of contexts: they form the major contents of remedybooks, but they are also found within the learned tradition of medical writing. The reception and use of these texts can be studied through their genre contexts and other extralinguistic features. The assessment of their text-type features shows that a higher degree of standardisation is found in remedybooks; academic texts and surgical treatises show more variation. The observed differences cannot be attributed to genre, and the readership was presumably much the same. The underlying traditions seem to have been important: remedybooks were handbooks for consultation to find cures for diseases. The more standardised the format, the more easily the advice was accessible. In contrast, recipes in the learned tradition were included in longer treatises as integral parts for demonstration of the healing principles.

The article presents a socio-semantic study of evaluative expressions in medical scientific articles from six periods from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evaluations relating to the presentations of the medical case, the scientist’s own work and the work of other scientists were studied. The results of the analyses point to a gradual change in the directness of the evaluations; where the author earlier evaluated through his own voice, the modern author chooses to evaluate indirectly through facts and others’ voices. The evaluations were also found to gradually be less strong and more embedded in hedgings of various kinds. The changes in evaluative strength and style reveal the varied positions of the scientists and their scientific community as to the medical knowledge, the stage of the medical community and the role of the medical scientists in society.

This paper investigates the evolution of the linguistic means used by scientists to convey academic conflict in French and English medical discourse. The 185-year span studied (1810–1995) was divided into nine 20-year periods. The rhetorical strategies expressing academic conflicts were recorded in 180 papers and classified as direct or indirect. The results were analyzed using χ2 tests. Between 1810 and 1929, no cross-linguistic difference was found in the frequency of either direct or indirect academic conflict. Between 1930 and 1995 direct academic conflict was more frequent in medical French than in medical English (p = .013), and indirect academic conflict more common in medical English than in medical French (p = .0001). Qualitatively speaking, nineteenth-century medical French and medical English academic conflicts were personal, polemical and provocative. Regarding twentieth-century academic conflict, medical French conflicts tend to remain personal and categorical whereas medical English academic dispute is characterized by its politeness and/or the shifting of conflict responsibility onto some inanimate entity. Our study indicates that the intellectual climate in a given scientific discursive community influences the rhetoric of conflict.