Historical Sociopragmatics

Edited by Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University
Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009), this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics has a central focus on historical language use in its situational contexts, and how those situational contexts engender norms which speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. The chapters represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The reader will find English texts from the 15th century through to the 18th, a variety of genres (including personal correspondence, trial proceedings and plays), and both qualitative and (corpus-based) quantitative analyses. Importantly, attention is given to how contexts can be (re)constructed from written records, a sine qua non of the field. It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in pragmatics, especially socially-oriented pragmatics, and/or historical linguistics, especially the history of English.
[Benjamins Current Topics, 31]  2011.  vii, 135 pp.
Publishing status: Available
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027202505 | EUR 80.00 | USD 120.00
 
e-BookSold by e-book platforms
ISBN 9789027286604 | EUR 80.00 | USD 120.00
 
 

Table of Contents

About the Authors
vii–viii
Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction
Jonathan Culpeper
1–8
Structures and expectations: A systematic analysis of Margaret Paston's formulaic and expressive language
Johanna L. Wood
9–36
The sociopragmatics of a lovers' spat: The case of the eighteenth-century courtship letters of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley
Susan M. Fitzmaurice
37–59
Altering distance and defining authority: Person reference in Late Modern English
Minna Nevala
61–82
Variation and change in patterns of self-reference in early English correspondence
Minna Palander-Collin
83–108
Identifying key sociophilological usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640-1760): An empirical approach via corpus annotation
Dawn Archer and Jonathan Culpeper
109–132
Index
133–135

Quotes

“This is the first book to map out historical socio-pragmatics [...]. Overall, it could be said that the aim of the book, namely to raise the profile of historical sociopragmatics, give it more solidity and inspire future research efforts, has been achieved. [...] The selection and order of contributions results in a coherent and comprehensive volume of cutting-edge research. The range of methodologies employed and spectrum of linguistic features investigated make this volume a valuable resource for scholars in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, socio-pragmatics, social history and the history of English who want to familiarize themselves with recent methodological advances in the field. By offering a wide range of approaches and methodologies, the book opens the way to future research in the field of historical socio-pragmatics.”
Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb, Croatia, on Linguist List 22.4944

Subjects

Benjamins Subject classification

Sociology

BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2011014343
This page is part of John Benjamins Publishing Company website. Click 'embed' to view its contents in the fully-featured web application. Embed