Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Current Issue

Abstract

This paper offers a diachronic analysis focussing on the different uses and forms that the expression stay safe acquired throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. It makes an original contribution to the study of historical pragmatics by drawing on data traditionally examined in the field of linguistic landscape studies and produced during a global health crisis, resulting in an innovative, real-time study of pragmatic change in progress.

Drawing on a corpus of 3,032 public signs photographed in London between March 2020 and December 2021, the paper shows how the expression stay safe was used as a wish and a parting formula in the early stages of the pandemic, and then reverted to a directive function on signs implementing containment measures, illustrating a trend opposed to that typically found in historical pragmatics. It also discusses the variability characterising the data, and the ambiguity of the expressions that are analysed, typical of ongoing pragmatic change.

Abstract

This article provides an initial approach to historical (im)politeness strategies in the context of letter writing. It uses a sub-corpus of coriecor which contains letters written by Irish immigrants that relocated to the US and their intimates. The article focusses on reproaches (Albelda Marco 2023; Tulimirović 2023) and it applies Archer’s (2017) model to all instances of this speech act extracted from the data. This results in two different sub-corpora, one containing what is here defined as “Face Enhancing Reproaches” (fer) and “Face Aggravating Reproaches” (far). These two sub-corpora are contrasted through the Sketch Engine software and the most predominant lemmas in fer (still, before, what, your, account, home, uneasy, dear, like and wish) are analysed and discussed in relation to their function for (im)politeness purposes. This article sheds light on the face-enhancing value of these linguistic items to encode this speech act within the specific context in question.

Abstract

This study examines the use of qingwen (an honorific request marker) across three different historical periods in China and unravels the evolved relationship between qingwen-initiated directives of information-seeking and Chinese politeness. Drawing on the CCL Corpus, this study reveals that: first, qingwen is employed by the socially more powerful to solicit thoughts, ideas or simply answers with gong (treating others with respect) in positive standard situations of ancient and vernacular Chinese, thereby achieving traditional Chinese politeness; second, given the collapse of the feudal dynasties and the modernisation of society, a remarkable decline in qingwen usage from vernacular Chinese to modern Chinese can be discerned in official settings of negative standard situations; finally, qingwen is frequently used to echo apparent directives with a dissociative attitude in vernacular and modern Chinese, signalling ostensible politeness. This study contributes to historical pragmatics in Chinese by focussing on the evolution of qingwen-initiated directives of information-seeking.

Abstract

This study investigates the viability of using large language models (llms) to conduct pragmatic annotations of historical texts. The investigation employs a small corpus of witness depositions and compares Claude 3.5 Sonnet — an llm that excels in reasoning over text — with two human annotators over their performance in the pragmatic annotation of Early Modern English (emode) texts. The study also compares the model’s annotations on modernised and original versions of the corpus to explore if emode spelling variations affect its performance. The results revealed that although the model’s annotations were less satisfactory than human annotators’, it achieved moderate inter-coder agreement and balanced precision and recall, which is desirable in this particular task by maximising identification without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, the prevalent spelling variations did not significantly impair the model’s ability to recognise epistemic stance in the original emode texts. Therefore, we propose a human–ai collaboration approach for historical pragmatic annotation.

Abstract

This study examines late-imperial Chinese criminal trials, starting from the observation that, in historical Chinese criminal trials, the speech act Complain is not only surprisingly frequent but is also often realised by the magistrate conducting the trial. We examine Complains in a corpus drawn from late imperial Chinese gong’an 公案 (literally, ‘criminal case’) novels. Whilst fictive in nature, such novels feature courtroom interactions in a turn-to-turn fashion, imitating spoken language. Gong’an novels are perhaps the best available sources for pragmatic analysis, since in historical China criminal trials were not transcribed. We examined our data through the lens of ritual, a finite typology of speech acts, and an interactional system. Our analysis shows that Complains represent an important part of historical Chinese courtroom investigations because they allowed magistrates to win over the trial’s audience and also to justify their judgments morally.

This article reviews Doing Corpus Linguistics