Article published In:
Journal of Historical PragmaticsVol. 21:1 (2020) ► pp.109–136
Local grammars and diachronic speech act analysis
A case study of apology in the history of American English
This paper proposes a method that is designed to facilitate diachronic speech act analysis. The proposed method
draws on the corpus linguistic concept of local grammar – an approach which seeks to account for, not the whole of a language, but
one meaning or function only. Local grammar descriptions capture both formal and semantic regularities of speech act realisations,
and local grammars offer a more reliable way to quantify speech act realisations across time. It is particularly in this respect
that it is argued that a local grammar approach can be useful for diachronic speech act studies, which is demonstrated
subsequently by tracing one particular speech act, namely “apology”, in a sample of the Corpus of Historical American English
(coha).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Local grammar
- 3.Corpus and data retrieval
- 4.A local grammar analysis of apology
- 5.Results and discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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