Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2024

Politeness (Brown and Gilman 1989; Rudanko 1993; Kopytko 1995) and impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, 2001; Bousfield 2007) have a prominent place in the reading of Shakespearean drama and serve as a means of characterisation. In this study, I utilise (im)politeness and face theory to characterise the royal discourse in 1, 2, 3 Henry vi. The study aims to analyse the linguistic behaviour of King Henry vi to see how well his royal discourse reflects his kingship and how his linguistic inadequacy contributes to his political failures. I investigate Henry’s use of (im)politeness and facework to handle political negotiations and I evaluate his level of awareness of the “political face”, which is the king’s desire to preserve a positive public image and to save face in social interactions. I look at the examples of Henry’s inadequate linguistic behaviour and try to establish why this behaviour was inefficient in a given scene and context.

Building on Goldberg’s (2006: 52) observation regarding the existence of “a family of related constructions in English” centred around the verb go, this article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title (“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”) and its relation to other members of the network of go-constructions. The analysis, conducted using three large corpora, shows that the Go VPing construction emerges from two source constructions (one with an –ing participle following the verb go and the other with an infinitive) which exhibit overlap in terms of certain aspects of their form and meaning. From its earliest attestations in the eighteenth century, the Go VPing construction has grown increasingly more interpersonal, and has become conventionalized as a marker of admonitive mood (Bybee et al. 1994: 321) which serves to dissuade or limit the performance of an activity that is apprehended as undesirable and counter-normative.

European Portuguese is known for the complexity of its second-person pronouns system. Despite this fact, there are not many works that deal with its evolution, since most analyses focus on case studies. In this article, I aim to pinpoint the diachrony of the second-person pronominal system of European Portuguese through the analysis of a corpus consisting of letters that cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The data will be compared to the available information regarding the previous centuries as well as the present. The results show that the European variety has journeyed through three very specific periods in its history, triggering both loss of inflection and person disagreements. Moreover, it has always maintained the spectrum of distance or power as the unmarked form of politeness – in contrast to the fashions attested in other languages and elsewhere in Europe.

General extenders (ges) are elements such as and so forth occurring at the right periphery. On the referential level, they implicate a set, but they also serve a range of discourse-pragmatic functions, such as hedging and interpersonal relations. Some sociolinguistic studies have seen the development of ges as synchronic grammaticalization involving phonetic reduction, decategorialization, semantic bleaching and pragmatic enrichment, but other studies have found no evidence of ongoing grammaticalization. Historical studies of ges are few. This paper sets out to fill this gap by studying the rise of disjunctive, adjunctive and bare ges formed with what – (or/and) what you will, or what, or/and what else, (or) whatever, (or/and) what not and (or/and) what have you. Despite their apparent similarity, these are shown to have quite different sources and histories. Their development conforms to some of the recognized parameters of grammaticalization but is more fruitfully understood from a constructionist approach.

The number of diachronic studies on English speech acts has recently increased remarkably, highlighting the importance of these phenomena for the understanding of the contextualised dimension of linguistic interactions. Recent studies on the realisation of directives in Old English have shown how, in the Anglo-Saxon world, negative politeness did not play a significant role. This study also focusses on the realisation of directives from a diachronic perspective but concentrating on Old Saxon and Old High German, filling an empirical gap in the literature. Focussing on four manifestations, the preliminary data shows the Old Saxon and Old High German may have also been worlds “beyond politeness”.