The paper investigates whether the notion of impoliteness worked out for synchronic pragmatics is also applicable in diachronic pragmatics. An analysis of two Early Modern English court trial records demonstrates that the answer is positive provided some new dimensions are added. My model of impoliteness cuts across the following axes: structural, semantic, and pragmatic. Structural impoliteness ranges from words and phrases to portions of texts, thus the syntactic dimension cuts across the complexity dimension. The semantic/pragmatic dimension includes numerous non-literal meanings of impoliteness. An utterance can be judged as impolite on the basis of its surface representations (“overt impoliteness”), or the impoliteness of an expression has to be inferred and takes the form of an implicature (“covert impoliteness”). Thus, the final interpretation would depend both on the speaker’s intention when producing an utterance, its (perlocutionary) effect(s) on the addressee, and the overall context. Finally, all these variables cut across the socio-historical dimension.
2017. (Im)politeness in Legal Settings. In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ► pp. 713 ff.
Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad
2019. Register, Genre, and Style,
Cecconi, Elisabetta
2011. Power confrontation and verbal duelling in the arraignment section of XVII century trials. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 7:1
Chaemsaithong, Krisda
2011. In Pursuit of an Expert Identity: A Case Study of Experts in the Historical Courtroom. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 24:4 ► pp. 471 ff.
Chaemsaithong, Krisda
2015. Communicating with silent addressees: Engagement features in legal opening statements. Language & Communication 43 ► pp. 35 ff.
Chaemsaithong, Krisda
2021. Naming as doing: Identities, positioning, and ideologies in capital trials. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 57:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
Harris, Sandra
2011. Chapter 3 The limits of politeness re-visited: Courtroom discourse as a case in point. In Discursive Approaches to Politeness, ► pp. 85 ff.
Havasi, Zsuzsanna
2023. Diszkurzív gyakorlat és férji hatalom összefüggései középmagyar kori úriszéki periratok forráskiadásában. Társadalmi Nemek Tudománya Interdiszciplináris eFolyóirat 12:2 ► pp. 150 ff.
Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara
2009. Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials. Journal of Pragmatics 41:3 ► pp. 440 ff.
2021. Impoliteness as a result of power asymmetry in selected social contexts. In Angewandte Linguistik – Neue Herausforderungen und Konzepte, ► pp. 41 ff.
2022. El Análisis de Categorías Sociopragmáticas en Textos de Carácter Civil y sus Representación a través de la (Des)cortesía e Intensificación. Desafios Jurídicos 2:2
Rissanen, Matti
2012. Power and Changing Roles in Salem Witch Trials: The Case of George Jacobs, Sr.. Studia Neophilologica 84:sup1 ► pp. 119 ff.
2017. Impoliteness in EFL: Foreign Language Learners’ Complaining Behaviors Across Social Distance and Status Levels. SAGE Open 7:3 ► pp. 215824401773281 ff.
Willumsen, Liv Helene
2020. Anders Poulsen—Sámi Shaman Accused of Witchcraft, 1692. Folklore 131:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
李, 静
2023. A Review of Foreign Courtroom Discourse Studies. Modern Linguistics 11:05 ► pp. 2311 ff.
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