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- Volume 7, Issue, 2006
Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2006
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2006
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(Re)initiating strategies: Judges and defendants in Early Modern English courtrooms
Author(s): Dawn Archerpp.: 181–211 (31)More LessThis paper draws on the trial section of the Sociopragmatic Corpus to explore the interaction of judges and defendants in the English courtroom (1640–1760). I show that defendants tended to be more actively involved in their defence than defendants are today, because of: (i) the absence of legal counsel (although this was changing during our period), and (ii) a perceived need that defendants should demonstrate their own innocence, via their response(s) to evidence given against them. I also reveal that the judges’ role differed from the role adopted by judges today. Rather than presiding over the court, they were actively involved in the trial’s production. Moreover, several of the treason trials within the corpus suggest that their interaction with defendants did not follow a question–answer format. Consequently, I propose that we might need to study more than questions and answers to fully appreciate the dynamics of the historical courtroom.
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Impoliteness in Early Modern English courtroom discourse
Author(s): Barbara Kryk-Kastovskypp.: 213–243 (31)More LessThe paper investigates whether the notion of impoliteness worked out for synchronic pragmatics is also applicable in diachronic pragmatics. An analysis of two Early Modern English court trial records demonstrates that the answer is positive provided some new dimensions are added. My model of impoliteness cuts across the following axes: structural, semantic, and pragmatic. Structural impoliteness ranges from words and phrases to portions of texts, thus the syntactic dimension cuts across the complexity dimension. The semantic/pragmatic dimension includes numerous non-literal meanings of impoliteness. An utterance can be judged as impolite on the basis of its surface representations (“overt impoliteness”), or the impoliteness of an expression has to be inferred and takes the form of an implicature (“covert impoliteness”). Thus, the final interpretation would depend both on the speaker’s intention when producing an utterance, its (perlocutionary) effect(s) on the addressee, and the overall context. Finally, all these variables cut across the socio-historical dimension.
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The use of videlicet in Early Modern slander depositions: A case of genre-specific grammaticalization
Author(s): Colette Moorepp.: 245–263 (19)More LessTrial proceedings and depositions are textual genres that create particular demands for speech marking in discourse. This study examines the use of the expository apposition marker videlicet in both a sample of Early Modern depositions of defamation and several electronic corpora. It finds that videlicet developed a grammaticalized quotative sense concurrent with its borrowing into English and, further, that this grammaticalized sense developed only in legal records. Considering the evolution of videlicet shows us how functionality evolves to fit a particular set of generic needs. Videlicet provides a case of grammaticalization restricted to a single register, and can therefore be instructive about the diffusion of grammaticalized forms across genres and about the intersection of grammaticalization and code-switching.
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Speech reporting and the suppression of orality in seventeenth-century Russian trial dossiers
Author(s): Daniel E. Collinspp.: 265–292 (28)More LessIn comparison with Russian trial transcripts of the fifteenth century, trial transcripts of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show a drift toward compact, writer-based reporting styles. In an earlier study (Collins 2001), I suggested that this happened because of significant changes in legal institutions. From being primarily oral confrontations, trials became battles of documents filed in chanceries and scrutinized by bureaucrats oriented to the written word; concomitantly, the transcripts became dossiers of documents literally glued together and framed by short narrative passages, including reports of dialogue. In the present study I examine a representative sample of these trial dossiers to demonstrate the link between reporting and discourse-organization strategies and chancery practices. First, I discuss how the dossiers are arranged into episodes graphically and syntactically. Second, I investigate the methods of speech reporting utilized in the trial dossiers and the contextual motivation for the choice of one method over another.
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A diachronic speech act analysis of sworn testimonies in Polish criminal trials
Author(s): Wojciech Kwarcińskipp.: 293–314 (22)More LessIn this paper I employ a diachronic model of analyzing speech acts to trace the development of sworn testimonies through the history of the Polish criminal trial. The research is based on the complete collection of medieval testimonies in Old Polish that have survived to the present day and on a selection of legal texts recorded in modern criminal trials. My preliminary assumption is that a proper analysis of institutional acts such as testimonies can only be achieved when their socio-historical context is taken into account. This is due to the fact that the very existence of legal speech acts depends on a set of constitutive rules that are socially and historically variable. The study corroborates my hypothesis and offers evidence in favor of the view that the changing legal context in which testimonies occur affects not only the ways in which they are realized over time but also their performative function.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 26 (2025)
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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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Text-organizing metadiscourse
Author(s): Ken Hyland and Feng (Kevin) Jiang
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