Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2024

Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores:

1. the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and
2. complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, standard written English of the ENL type.

There are two major findings. Colloquialisation works less well in the study of ESL varieties than ENL ones. In addition, recent real-time analyses of change in spoken English suggest that the supposedly homogeneous baseline style of informal conversational English is more internally variable than is assumed in current work on colloquialisation.

Democratization is often invoked as an explanatory factor for diachronic linguistic developments. We believe that at the root of democratization often lies the pragmatic negotiation of power relations, whereby a more democratic use of language can reduce the distance between addresser and addressee. This article examines the evolution of power relations in the New York Times editorials from 1860 to 1979 as represented in COHA. After a quantitative analysis of the evolution of three pragmatic variables that index democratization, the study offers a qualitative analysis with the aim of anchoring them to the situational context of newspaper editorials, especially regarding the power relations negotiated in this register over time. This paper also examines the impact of socio-historical events on the evolution of power relations and shows that they are intimately linked.

In this article, we investigate changes in British parliamentary discourse by using the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005). Our first goal is to determine whether parliamentary speeches have become colloquialised by studying frequency changes of select features associated with informal spoken language. Second, by analysing data from the House of Commons and the House of Lords separately, we show that the texts from the two Houses should be considered distinct sub-registers, each with their own conventions and development paths. Finally, we analyse a pattern that seems particularly relevant to parliamentary debates: one where speakers imply disagreement by referring to their peers in the third person, thus circumventing a parliamentary regulation whereby speakers are prohibited from addressing one another directly. Our findings support the idea of an ongoing colloquialisation/democratisation trend affecting parliamentary discourse while also suggesting that this process is not entirely transparent in the written record because of editorial interference.

Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights activists and campaigners for other progressive causes. To fill this gap, the present paper focuses on political speaking occurring outside of the party-political setting. The data comprises 120 American activist speeches from the years 1808–2016. The analysis focuses on the construction of ingroups and outgroups, and whether the use of personal pronouns is affected by the type of audience. The frequency trends bring forth new information about the referential complexity of pronouns within individual speeches.

As alternative media, suffrage periodicals played an important role in women’s fight for universal suffrage, which marked a milestone on the road to democracy. Opening up a space for women in public discourse, these papers shaped and were shaped by processes of democratisation. This study explores how they balanced informative, propagandistic and commercial functions, and how women positioned themselves and others as social actors in the context of the movement, challenging gender ideologies. In line with Rühlemann and Aijmer’s (2015) notion of corpus pragmatics, the study combines the assets of corpus-linguistic methods, e.g., by drawing on keywords as pointers to relevant areas of interest, with a pronounced qualitative perspective, complementing the search results by features demanding manual analysis and discussing the findings in their socio-historical context.

In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those hustings. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen 2008), approached through collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political tool.