Historical language use in Europe from a contrastive pragmatic perspective
An exploratory case study of letter closings
Juliane House | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics | University of Hamburg
Dániel Z. Kádár | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
Fengguang Liu | Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Wenrui Shi | Dalian University of Foreign Languages
This paper presents a case study which brings together the fields of contrastive pragmatics and historical
pragmatics. Specifically, we contrastively investigate the ways in which the speech act set of “farewell” – representing the
closing phase of an interaction – was realised in nineteenth-century historical letters in different linguacultures, including the
English, German and Chinese ones. We argue that contrastive pragmatics provides a fruitful contribution to historical research for
two inter-related reasons. First, contrastive pragmatics allows us to identify similar pragmatic patterns between typologicially
“close” linguacultures, such as the English and the German ones. Second, it prompts researchers to attest the validity of such
patterns by comparing such typologically close linguacultures with more distant ones such as the Chinese. Our study is based on a
corpus of family letters written to elderly relatives.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Kádár, Dániel Z., Gudrun Held & Annick Paternoster
2023. Introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
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