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- Volume 22, Issue 2, 2021
Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2021
Volume 22, Issue 2, 2021
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The rise of a concessive “category reassessment” construction
Author(s): Elizabeth Closs Traugottpp.: 164–179 (16)More LessAbstractIn the Late Modern English period, several expressions arose with concessive ‘despite what might be expected’ meaning, among them anyway, nonetheless and all the same (Lenker 2010). The topic of this paper is the rise of the specialized concessive construction “but (be) X all the same”. In the full rhetorical formula of which it is a part, X is initially represented as not having properties Y but nevertheless as having sufficient other relevant properties to be classified as X, as in “…fear. It is not the eye-rolling, quaking fear seen in police states, but it is fear all the same” (1963 coha). Here the writer concedes that there is fear despite Y (see Horn [1991] on “redundant information”) and invites the addressee to reinterpret the initial X retrospectively (see Haselow [2013] on functions of “final particles”). Using data mainly from clmet3.0 and coha, I discuss the conventionalization of this construction in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar and argue alongside, for example, Goldberg (2004); Cappelle (2017) and Finkbeiner (2019) that pragmatics should be given a larger role in construction grammar than has often been the case in the past.
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Responding to thanks
Author(s): Laurel J. Brintonpp.: 180–201 (22)More LessAbstractA variety of forms serve as responses to thanks in Present-day English, albeit infrequently. Such responses minimize the debt incurred by the thanker and serve purposes of negative politeness. The history of responses to thanks has received only brief attention (Jacobsson 2002; Jucker 2020; Taavitsainen and Jucker 2020). Most of the contemporary responses to thanks (e.g., no problem and you bet) are of quite recent origin. Those that “express pleasure” (the pleasure was mine) appear in the late-nineteenth century, while those that express “verbal acknowledgment” (all right, okay) appear in the twentieth century. The increase of minimizing responses is consonant with a trend toward negative politeness, while the loss of the deferential forms found in Early Modern English (your humble servant) reflects the rise of camaraderie politeness. Responses to thanks have also undergone “attenuation” (Jucker 2019), evidenced by the appearance of short forms (welcome), the rise of verbal acknowledgment types, and the increasing use of such responses as conversational closers.
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Politeness reciprocity in Shakespeare’s dialogue
Author(s): Jonathan Culpeper, Samuel J. Oliver and Vittorio Tantuccipp.: 202–224 (23)More LessAbstractRecently, it has been proposed that (im)politeness in interaction today is governed in large part by a Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity (Culpeper and Tantucci 2021). This paper investigates whether politeness reciprocity works similarly in early modern English – specifically, in the plays of Shakespeare. Focussing on thanking behaviours, the questions of whether politeness reciprocity can be detected, and, if so, how social status might influence the nature of reciprocity, are addressed. The first part of the paper establishes that Early Modern English politeness behaviours were being discussed in terms associated with reciprocity (e.g., metaphors relating to balance and financial/commercial transactions). Then, all the instances of the two main thanking formula patterns (the verbal first person pronoun + thanks + second person pronoun and the nominal thanks) were extracted from thirty-eight plays attributed wholly or substantially to Shakespeare, and coded for a number of variables, including the weightiness of the gift for which thanks has been given, the amount of effort expended in performing thanks, and the social statuses of the Thanker and Thankee. The results show that reciprocity does govern thanking behaviours, and that social status licences imbalances in those behaviours. The paper also touches on conventionalisation.
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The sociopragmatic nature of interjections in Early Modern English drama comedy
Author(s): Ursula Lutzkypp.: 225–244 (20)More LessAbstractInterjections have been studied for all periods in the history of English, ranging from the study of Old English exclamations such as hwaet (Brinton 2017) to the pragmatic functions of forms such as oops in Present Day English (Lutzky and Kehoe 2017). The Early Modern English (EModE) period represents a turning point as it witnessed an increase in dialogic and speech-related text types, including drama comedy and trial proceedings. Nevertheless, despite recent advances in the compilation and especially the sociopragmatic annotation of corpora, EModE pragmatic markers have not been studied extensively over the last decade. This article addresses this gap by offering an investigation into the sociopragmatic nature of interjections in EModE drama comedy. It is based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus which includes a total of 242,561 words from the period 1500 to 1760. Taking a data-driven, form-to-function mapping approach, this study explores the use of interjections in the Drama Corpus with a focus on their distribution according to sociopragmatic variables. The aim of this study is to contribute to reaching a more comprehensive understanding of pragmatic marker use in EModE.
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Medical book reviews 1665–1800
Author(s): Irma Taavitsainenpp.: 245–262 (18)More LessAbstractThis article traces medical book reviews up to 1800 in the first scientific periodical, The Philosophical Transactions (pt 1665–), and the first general magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine (gm 1665–1922), within the frame of genre theory, focusing on polite and impolite speech acts. pt readers formed a close network of Royal Society members, while gm attracted a large and more heterogeneous readership. The method employed is qualitative discourse analysis in its sociohistorical context.
Two different lines of development emerge. The first issue of pt contains a book review that set a model genre script by surveying the contents and providing a concise positive evaluation at the end. gm published few book reviews at first but their number increased towards 1800. pt keeps to the positive end of evaluation with discreet criticism, while gm speech acts range from praising compliments to aggressive insults. The former trend goes back to book advertisements and the latter to scientific disputes; but in general, polite society conventions prevail in both publications.
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Lexical choices in Early Modern English devotional prose
Author(s): Jeremy J. Smithpp.: 263–281 (19)More LessAbstractReligious controversy in English has always been marked by ideologically charged lexicons. Developments in the analysis of machine-readable corpora have enabled more robust conclusions to be drawn about the nature of these vocabularies, relating particular usages to particular confessional orientations. In this paper, part of a long-term research project on the history of English religious vocabulary, an attempt is made to identify “keywords” characteristic of presbyterian, puritan and high Anglican communities of practice within the Church of England. In addition, the paper addresses some methodological and theoretical issues involved in such research, relating to the practice of historical pragmatics.
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Looking for concepts in Early Modern English
Author(s): Susan Fitzmauricepp.: 282–300 (19)More LessAbstractThe idea that conceptual meaning in discourse could be identified in constellations of lexical co-occurrences in a particular “universe” of discourse was key in guiding the computational historical semantic–pragmatic work conducted in the Linguistic dna project. The project mapped prominent lexical co-occurrences across the two hundred years of publications in Early English Books Online (eebo-tcp; Text Creation Partnership edition), yielding concept models – constellations of non-adjacent lemmas that consistently co-occur across spans of up to 100 tokens. The goal was to map meaning onto concept models as “discursive concepts”, using encyclopaedic knowledge, pragmatic analysis and context.
The first question concerns the effectiveness of making early hypotheses about the discursive meaning of concept models based on the inferred connections between the lemmas in a quad constellation. The second question is whether the meaning of frequent, apparently stable concept models changes upon their closer scrutiny in the discourses they lead us into. A reader familiar with the particular universe of discourse in which these quads occur, and with the social, historical, literary and philosophical traditions, and the context that they occupy, might be effectively primed by their encyclopaedic knowledge to hypothesise this discursive meaning. This paper demonstrates the efficacy of hypothesis building using encyclopaedic knowledge and pragmatic analysis to interpret optimally relevant concept models.
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Review of Peikola, Mäkilähde, Salmi, Varila & Skaffari (2017): Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts
Author(s): Jeremy Smithpp.: 301–303 (3)More LessThis article reviews Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts
Volumes & issues
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Volume 25 (2024)
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Volume 24 (2023)
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Volume 23 (2022)
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Volume 22 (2021)
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Volume 21 (2020)
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Volume 20 (2019)
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Volume 19 (2018)
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Volume 18 (2017)
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Volume 17 (2016)
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Volume 16 (2015)
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Volume 15 (2014)
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Volume 14 (2013)
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Volume 13 (2012)
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Volume 12 (2011)
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Volume 11 (2010)
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Volume 10 (2009)
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Volume 9 (2008)
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Volume 8 (2007)
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Volume 7 (2006)
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Volume 6 (2005)
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Volume 5 (2004)
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Volume 4 (2003)
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Volume 3 (2002)
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Volume 2 (2001)
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Volume 1 (2000)
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