Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2005

This article discusses the semantic and pragmatic history of a grammatical construction consisting of a form of Be/Have + like followed by an infinitival verb form, which became obsolete in Standard English in the nineteenth century, but still survives in some regional varieties of British and American English, e.g. she liketa had a heart attack. It provides an example of a grammatical category that Kuteva (1998) has called “action narrowly averted” (ANA or avertive) with the meaning ‘on the verge of V-ing, but did not V’. Using a corpus of texts covering the last six centuries, we document the historical circumstances under which the avertive meaning emerged via invited inferences of counterfactuality drawn in the specific discourse context of predictive conditional constructions.

The adverb enfin (lit.: ‘at last’) is pragmatically highly polyfunctional in contemporary French, and previous studies disagree on its proper semantic representation. The present paper traces enfin’s diachronic development from the earliest French texts, where only the temporal, etymological sense of the adverb is found, to the present day, where non-temporal and discourse-oriented senses abound, arguing that the adverb should be seen as polysemous and that it can profitably be described within the framework presented in Geeraerts (1997). It is concluded that present-day enfin has three distinct “core” senses, and several peripheral uses derived from these core senses, and that, overall, its evolution provides support for the general tendencies of semantic change identified in Traugott and Dasher (2002).

Though the Early Middle English Ancrene Wisse is of a genre that almost requires a certain amount of misogynistic tropes and figures, the text itself reveals an authorial voice that is reluctant to condemn the women for whom the author writes. Using speech act theory and sentence analysis, this paper examines the ways in which certain structures and usages in Ancrene Wisse undercut its generic antifeminism, almost ironically to empower its readers with a sense of their own spiritual agency and responsibility.

What has emerged from much recent feminist analysis of medieval devotional literature is a model of reading based on a theorized resistance by the female reader to the misogyny of the medieval text. Yet this model of reading limits opportunities for positive communication between text and reader. This article offers an analysis of readers characterized in Hali Meiðhad through the use of parenthetical honorifics and direct address to argue that features encoded to entice reader participation or cue certain reader responses are more complex than has been noted and move beyond any unproblematic notion of avoidable misogyny. The description of narrative shifts in this discussion relies on Deictic Shift Theory to illustrate how the author of Hali Meiðhad explicitly shifts his readers from identification with one reader-character to another over the course of the epistle, enabling his readers to position themselves self-consciously in relation to various Christian identities.

The paper examines the abandonment of an established style of writing called gabun ‘elegant writing’ and the emergence of a new style termed genbun itchi ‘unity of spoken and written language’ in nineteenth century Japan, focusing on a language ideological debate that occurred in 1889 in a journal called Bun. The stylistic reform of written Japanese was one of the most contested reforms during Japan’s modernisation and it is the aim of the present study to provide a close-up inspection of social struggles and redistribution of power that accompanied the Japanese modernisation and the appearance of a modern Japanese voice. The emergence of genbun itchi writing presupposed that notions of cultural capital needed to be altered and newly distributed which coincided with a redefinition of who could be seen as an expert and authority on language. Therefore the present paper focused on language ideological notions and power issues behind the debate between proponents and opponents of genbun itchi writing.

The paper explores the functions and distribution of questions in the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, a 1.1 million-word corpus of pamphlets written between 1640 and 1740. Pamphlets are a highly interactive medium with a mostly persuasive function. Thus it is not surprising that pamphlet authors exhibit a critical and inquisitive attitude, which shows itself also in the explicit posing of questions. The questions can be sorted according to function into six major groupings: (i) introducing new information, (ii) provoking reader involvement, (iii) marking authorial emphasis, (iv) getting or focusing attention, (v) supporting the argumentation (backed by a number of conducive features), and (vi) exerting control. Of these, argumentation is clearly the dominant function, while reader involvement enhances the persuasive effect. Statistical analysis reveals questions to be more common in pamphlets, in particular highly contentious religious and political tracts, than in most other monologic texts.