The purpose of Diachronic Pragmatics is to exemplify historical pragmatics in its twofold sense of constituting both a subject matter and a methodology. This book demonstrates how diachronic pragmatics, with its complementary diachronic function-to-form mapping and diachronic form-to-function mapping, can be used to trace pragmatic developments within the English language. Through a set of case studies it explores the evolution of such speech acts as promises, curses, blessings, and greetings and such speech events as flyting and sounding. Collectively these “illocutionary biographies” manifest the workings of several important pragmatic processes and trends: increased epistemicity, subjectification, and discursization (a special kind of pragmaticalization). It also establishes the centrality of cultural traditions in diachronic reconstruction, examining various de-institutionalizations of extra-linguistic context and their affect on speech act performance. Taken together, the case studies presented in Diachronic Pragmatics highlight the complex interactions of formal, semantic, and pragmatic processes over time. Illustrating the possibilities of historical pragmatic pursuit, this book stands as an invitation to further research in a new and important discipline.

Based on a corpus of Old Spanish texts, the discourse traditions of counselling are analysed within the framework of diachronic corpus pragmatics and dialogue analysis. On a methodological level, the study distinguishes three types of pragmatics and offers a clear-cut distinction between language change and cultural changes in the realm of discourse traditions. In order to clearly define the different interaction patterns in these dialogues, the qualitative approach of traditional philology is combined with quantitative methods that extract lexical clusters which are typical of counselling dia.

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages. Detailed case-studies covering central semantic domains, such as concession, evidentiality, intensification, modality, negation, scalarity, subjectivity, and temporality, allow the authors to test and refine current models of semantic change, by focusing, for instance, on the respective roles of speakers and hearers in the process and on the relationship between semantic and syntactic reanalysis. Key theoretical notions, such as presuppositions, paradigms, word order, and discourse status are revisited in a diachronic perspective to provide innovative accounts of causes and motivations for linguistic changes. A prominent theme is the evolution of procedural meanings of various kinds. Thus, several papers feature different types of pragmatic markers as their object of study, while others are concerned with items and constructions expressing modality, evidentiality, negation, and relational meanings. Closely related themes are: the interface between semantics and pragmatics/discourse, with figurative uses of language, rhetorical-argumentational strategies, discourse traditions, information structure, and the importance of dialogic contexts in change playing a salient role in several papers; the relationship between meaning change and processes such as grammaticalization, subjectification and pragmaticalization; and, the thorny issue of the categorization of linguistic items such as discourse markers or modal particles, evidentials or epistemic modals, to which the diachronic data are shown to contribute substantially. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics.

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

With the “discursive turn” has come a distrust – a complete rejection by some – of theories that seek deeper reasons for surface phenomena. Rong Chen argues that this distrust, with its accompanying overemphasis on specificity and fluidity of linguistic meaning and social values, is unwarranted and unhelpful. Drawing on insights from social theories and various strands of pragmatics, he proposes a motivation model of pragmatics (MMP), contending that language use can be adequately, coherently, and elegantly studied via the motivation behind it in its varied and dynamic contexts. The model, with its well-laid out components, is then applied to (im)politeness research, cross-cultural pragmatics, diachronic pragmatics, discourse and genre analysis, conversation analysis, identity construction, and the study of metaphor, sarcasm, parody, and lying. MMP is thus a framework aimed at accounting for fluidity with stable notions, specificity with general principles, and differences with similar underlying factors. As such, the book should appeal to students of pragmatics, (im)politeness, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, communication, sociology, and psychology.

Pragmatics has grown considerably in its relatively short history, from its original disciplinary influences in philosophy and linguistics, into a multidisciplinary field that encompasses a range of theoretical and empirical concerns. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the diversity of these intellectual interests in a comprehensive, single-volume edition. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia covers concepts and theories that have traditionally been associated with pragmatics, but also recent areas of development within the field, scholars who have had a significant influence on pragmatics, interdisciplinary exchanges between pragmatics and other areas of enquiry and all major research trends. Extensive cross-references between entries, along with suggestions for further reading at the end of entries, ensure that the interested reader can pursue additional study of chosen topics. With over 200 entries, written by leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the rich complexity of pragmatics in an accessible manner. This reference will be relevant to students of pragmatics as well as to established scholars in the field.