Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2006

In this paper I provide a diachronic analysis of the lexeme mal, and I argue that the synchronic polysemy found in contemporary European Portuguese corresponds to different stages of the semantic change of the lexeme. Principles of diachronic pragmatics and semantic change are employed to detail the development of the different meanings. Two paths are analyzed: one, leading from the negative evaluation value as a manner adverb to the more recently semanticized meaning of temporality, specifically temporal proximity of one event to another, and a second one, leading from the manner adverbial meaning to a negation adverb, which is restricted to particular constructions.

The English construction “be supposed to X” is used in a variety of functions in Present-day English, including evidential, epistemic, and deontic functions. This research offers description and explanations for the development of the evidential, epistemic, and deontic functions from an earlier passive construction, through distinct processes of reanalysis (Hopper and Traugott 1993). I argue that the motivations for these semantic and syntactic shifts are motivated by pragmatic inferences based on: discourse function, discourse expectations about human subjects, frequency effects related to semantic properties of the construction in discourse, and reader-writer expectations about genre type. The results indicate that the evidential function is not part of the general category of epistemicity for this construction, following de Haan (1999, 2001b); that this construction does not exhibit the predicted pathway of semantic development from deontic to epistemic functions (Traugott 1989) due to constraints imposed by the source construction; and that genre plays an important role not only in the relative frequency of the construction (Biber et al. 1999), but also in the emergence of the deontic function diachronically. Finally, I situate the construction in relation to cross-linguistic patterns (Bybee et al. 1994), noting how it parallels broader patterns in the development of the deontic function.

The joint sonnet of the two lovers-to-be at the Capulet feast towards the end of the first act is rightly regarded as the dramatic and poetic climax of the first part of the play. Yet it constitutes, from an interactional point of view, merely a first move and the declarations of love proper occur only later in the orchard scene of the second act. This article explores the complex negotiations that precede the actual confessions of love and investigates how Shakespeare modified his rather simplistic source text, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562), in order to exploit the full interactional and dramatic potential of the situation.

In this paper I use a corpus of the writings of the Society for the Reformation of Manners to look at the discursive construction of attitudes to bad language in English. Using this corpus of texts as an example of a moral panic about language I use keywords to explore moral panic rhetoric, the formation of spirals of signification and the impact of both on attitudes to bad language in English in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

This paper discusses the methodology of conceptual history, a branch of the study of the history of political thought which focuses on the changing meanings of political concepts over the course of time. It is suggested here that methodological disputes among historians of political thought frequently arise out of differing theories of language and meaning and that historians should be more open-minded to the idea of combining various research strategies in their work. Conceptual history, for instance, can be viewed as the combination of historical versions of semantics and pragmatics. While the study of the macro-level semantic changes in the language of politics can reveal interesting long-term trends and innovative uses of language, a contextual analysis of speech acts is also needed when the rhetorical aspects of conceptual change are traced. This interaction of semantic and pragmatic analysis in conceptual history is illustrated by examples originating from eighteenth-century political preaching.