Historical pragmatics is the study of
linguistic pragmatics over time. Research in historical pragmatics is mainly carried out on written
corpora
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts
* Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files
* Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics
Music
* ...
as recordings of spoken language are a relatively recent phenomenon.
State of the art
Since the late 1970s, historical linguists have discovered their growing interest in pragmatic questions—first in German, then in Romance linguistics. The field has also been attracting more and more colleagues from English linguistics since the mid-1990s, with
Andreas Jucker being one of the first and most influential proponents. In Romance linguistics, work by
Ulrich Detges,
Richard Waltereit,
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen is a linguist and Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK.
Biography
Hansen studied at the University of Copenhagen, where she received an MA (Cand.mag.) in 1992, a PhD in 1996 (d ...
and Jacqueline Visconti has led to a resurgence of historical pragmatic work focusing on the role of the listener in language change. The ''Journal of Historical Pragmatics'' is edited by Dawn Archer.
Methodology
Historical pragmatics has to rely exclusively on written corpora. This leads to the question how can we find out about the ways people talked to each other in medieval and early modern times? The difficulty of unmasking spoken language in earlier periods has been discussed several times; for medieval times there are practically no reflexes of or on spoken language, and a majority of studies on historical pragmatics do not delve into text prior to the 17th century.
[Cf., e.g, the overviews in Jucker et al. 1999b and Jucker 2000.]
See also
*
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
*
Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
*
Speech act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" ...
*
Text linguistics
Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in ...
*
Henry Cecil Wyld
Notes
References
*Jucker, Andreas H. (1995), ''Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English'', Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
* Jucker, Andreas H./Fritz, Gerd/Lebsanft, Franz (eds.) (1999a), ''Historical Dialogue Analysis'', Amsterdam: Benjamins.
* Jucker, Andreas H./Fritz, Gerd/Lebsanft, Franz (1999b), “Historical Dialogue Analysis: Roots and Traditions in the Study of the Romance Languages, German and English”, in: Jucker/Fritz/Lebsanft 1999a (eds.), 1-33.
*Jucker, Andreas H. (2000), “English Historical Pragmatics: Problems of Data and Methodology”, in: di Martino, Gabriella / Lima, Maria (eds.), ''English Diachronic Pragmatics'', 17-55. Napoli: CUEN.
External links
Bibliography on historical pragmatics compiled by Andreas Jucker, with over 450 entries
*
Journal of Historical Pragmatics'
Onomasiology Online internet journal, edited by Joachim Grzega, Alfred Bammesberger and Marion Schöner, that also includes works on historical pragmatics
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Historical Pragmatics
Historical linguistics
Pragmatics