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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 21:1 (2020) ► pp.1–27

Visual pragmatics of abbreviations and otiose strokes in John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes

| Adam Mickiewicz University

This paper [1] 1 addresses the visual-pragmatic functions of the so-called common mark of abbreviation, or macron, in a section of BL Royal MS 18 D II (ff. 147v–162r) – one of the best known “deluxe” manuscripts containing Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Contextualised within the framework of visual pragmatics, or Pragmatics on the Page (Carroll et al. 2013), the manuscript in question is considered here as a visual text (Kendall et al. 2013) – one for which the readers construe the meaning through internalising the physical organisation of discourse. The paper attempts to unpack the ways in which the common mark of abbreviation, employed by the scribes as a visual-pragmatic marker, organises the discourse of the manuscript page on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional and metalinguistic (following Erman 2001). The pragmatic roles of the macron are then confronted with the visual forms and possible functions of its notorious graphic doppelgänger (i.e., the otiose stroke).

Keywords: abbreviation, macron, otiose stroke, visual pragmatics, visual text
Article outline
  • 1.Mediaeval manuscript as a visual text
  • 2.Visual pragmatics
  • 3.Pragmatic markers in manuscript discourse
  • 4.The macron
  • 5. Siege of Thebes in BL Royal MS D 18 II
    • 5.1Abbreviations in the Siege of Thebes
    • 5.2Textual function
    • 5.3Interactional function
    • 5.4Metalinguistic function
    • 5.5Otiose strokes
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00034.rog
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