Historical text linguistics
Investigating language change in texts and genres
This paper advocates a systematic distinction between the fields of Historical Pragmatics and Historical Discourse Analysis on the one hand and Historical Text Linguistics on the other. Building on basic distinctions introduced in Brinton (2001), it traces three major perspectives of research (Historical Text Linguistics proper, diachronically oriented text linguistics, and text-oriented historical linguistics), giving an overview of relevant linguistic studies on texts and genres in the history of English. It also sketches out a plan for a history of English as a history of its texts and genres, illustrating the outline with the domain of religious discourse.
