Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2020

This paper1 addresses the visual-pragmatic functions of the so-called common mark of abbreviation, or macron, in a section of BL Royal MS 18 D II (ff. 147v–162r) – one of the best known “deluxe” manuscripts containing Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Contextualised within the framework of visual pragmatics, or Pragmatics on the Page (Carroll et al. 2013), the manuscript in question is considered here as a visual text (Kendall et al. 2013) – one for which the readers construe the meaning through internalising the physical organisation of discourse. The paper attempts to unpack the ways in which the common mark of abbreviation, employed by the scribes as a visual-pragmatic marker, organises the discourse of the manuscript page on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional and metalinguistic (following Erman 2001). The pragmatic roles of the macron are then confronted with the visual forms and possible functions of its notorious graphic doppelgänger (i.e., the otiose stroke).

Law language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared to oe wills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison of oe law-codes and oe wills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile of oe law-codes and statutes of later periods.

Hortative constructions are good sources of discourse markers (dms) because they have an engaging effect on the addressee. Such an engaging illocutionary effect enables hortative-based dms to acquire diverse functions, such as attracting and maintaining the addressee’s attention and foiling the interlocutor’s initiating an utterance. The dm eti poca (‘well, let’s see’; literally ‘where, let’s see’) is not a genuine hortative requesting the addressee to direct visual attention to something or somewhere together with the speaker, but is a strategic signal for management of interaction, information and the speaker’s self. The detailed functions that emerged through time include marking the speaker’s intent to hold the floor by way of filling unwanted pauses, to solicit common ground, to signal responsiveness, to encourage self to better concentrate on a task, and to affirm the self’s stance on the issues at hand.

In Italian, the adjective giusto (‘right’) has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI 2008: 671). In this paper, I argue that the adjective has recently undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse (Ocampo 2006: 317). In particular, I maintain that giusto may also serve the function of invariant tag (Andersen 2001), a linguistic item appended to a statement for the purpose of seeking mutual agreement, verification or corroboration of a claim (Millar and Brown 1979). Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries and language corpora of different varieties, the results will show that, although the use of giusto? as invariant tag is currently undocumented, records of such a use are in fact found since 1990. I explore whether there are positive correlations between the use of right? in English and the use of giusto? in real use Italian and AV dialogues.

This paper proposes a method that is designed to facilitate diachronic speech act analysis. The proposed method draws on the corpus linguistic concept of local grammar – an approach which seeks to account for, not the whole of a language, but one meaning or function only. Local grammar descriptions capture both formal and semantic regularities of speech act realisations, and local grammars offer a more reliable way to quantify speech act realisations across time. It is particularly in this respect that it is argued that a local grammar approach can be useful for diachronic speech act studies, which is demonstrated subsequently by tracing one particular speech act, namely “apology”, in a sample of the Corpus of Historical American English (coha).

Published academic writing often seems to be an unchanging form of discourse with its frozen informality remaining stable over time. Recent work has shown, however, that these texts are highly interactive and dialogic as writers anticipate and take into account readers’ likely objections, background knowledge, rhetorical expectations and processing needs. In this paper, we explore one aspect of these interactions and how it has changed over the past fifty years. Focusing on what has been called interactive metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; Hyland and Tse 2004), or the ways authors organise their material for particular readers, we analyze a corpus of 2.2 million words compiled from articles in the top journals in four disciplines to discover whether, and to what extent, interactive metadiscourse has changed in different disciplines since 1965. The results show a considerable increase in an orientation to the reader over this period, reflecting changes in both research and publication practices.