Speech Acts in the History of English

Editors

Andreas H. Jucker | University of Zurich

Irma Taavitsainen | University of Helsinki

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027254207 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027291417 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 176] 2008. viii, 318 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 July 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.176

Table of Contents

Preface | pp. vii–viii

Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of English

Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker | pp. 1–23

Part I. Directives and commissives

Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness?

Thomas Kohnen | pp. 27–44

Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760

Jonathan Culpeper and Dawn Archer | pp. 45–84

An inventory of directives in Shakespeare's King Lear

Ulrich Busse | pp. 85–114

Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community

Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti | pp. 115–131

"No botmeles bihestes": Various ways of making binding promises in Middle English

Mari Pakkala-Weckström | pp. 133–162

Part II: Expressives and assertives

Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi: Greetings in English language history

Joachim Grzega | pp. 165–193

"Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever": Compliments and gender in the history of English

Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker | pp. 195–228

Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret

Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen | pp. 229–244

Part III: Methods of speech act retrieval

Showing a little promise: Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of written prose

Petteri Valkonen | pp. 247–272

Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research

Andreas H. Jucker, Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen and Barb Breustedt | pp. 273–294

Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis

Thomas Kohnen | pp. 295–310

Index | pp. 311–318

“In a joint effort to continue developing the field of historical pragmatics, the editors of this volume successfully achieve their aim to learn more about how earlier speakers of English used language to communicate and negotiate meaning and to further develop new or already existing methodologies to improve diachronic speech act analysis. Through innovative case studies and addressing the question "Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts as we use today?", all the papers in this volume cover a series of different speech act from Old English to Present-day realizations to offer diachronic speech act analysis. [...] this volume constitutes the corner stone towards diachronic speech acts analysis based on automatically readable corpora. Though not exhaustive, it sheds light on the nature of major groups of speech acts in the history of English and seems to have laid the foundations for further research to develop more sophisticated tools. As for style, its straightforward discourse enriched with convenient illustrative instances provides an overall picture of the development of speech acts, and brief but concise theoretical issues that allows the reader an easy grasp of the book.”

María Etelvina Richard, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina, in pragmalingüística, Vol. 15 (2008)

“This is an excellent collection of papers in the field of diachronic speech act analysis that would appeal to anyone interested in the history of English, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and the philosophy of language. All of the papers, which focus on intriguing problems and challenges in the field, are clearly written, and the authors carefully describe their goals and methodologies, and offer fascinating examples of speech acts they collected for their data. Their analyses of the data and the results are thorough and thoughtful. An additional strength of this book is that the introduction and each paper discuss earlier research in pragmatics and include extensive bibliographies for further exploration.”

Julie Winter, on Linguist List, Vol. 19.1622 (2008)

“The papers in this collection prove that historical speech act research contributes not only to a deeper understanding of communicative practices in the past (and in the present), but also to a reconsideration of classic pragmatic concepts and theories. This makes the volume a recommendable read for any scholar interested in pragmatics.”

Birte Bös, in Anglia, Band 128, Heft 1 (2010)

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Cited by 45 other publications

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2022. “Sorry for your consideration”: The (in)adequacy of English speech act labels in describing ‘apologies’ and ‘thanks’ in Japanese. Intercultural Pragmatics 19:5 ► pp. 621 ff.

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2020. Transgressions as a socialisation strategy in Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734). In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 165 ff.

Su, Hang

2020. Local grammars and diachronic speech act analysis. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21:1 ► pp. 109 ff.

Taavitsainen, Irma

2020. A medical debate of “heated pamphleteering” in the early eighteenth century. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 141 ff.

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2020. Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin. Discourse Studies 22:2 ► pp. 146 ff.

Włodarczyk, Matylda

2020. “I am desired (…) to desire”. In Late Modern English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 214], ► pp. 333 ff.

Dossena, Marina

2019. Singular, plural, or collective?. In Keeping in Touch [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 10], ► pp. 67 ff.

Elsweiler, Christine

2019. Pragmatic and formulaic uses of shall and will in Older Scots and Early Modern English official letter writing. In Norms and conventions in the history of English [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 347], ► pp. 167 ff.

Elsweiler, Christine

2023. The Influence of French Pragmalinguistic Patterns on the Requestive Style in 16th-Century Scottish Letters. Linguistica 63:1-2 ► pp. 63 ff.

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2019. Blame Avoidance. In The Discursive Construction of Blame, ► pp. 103 ff.

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2018. Történeti beszédaktus-kutatás: a középkori katalán plaure ’tetszik’ igével alkotott szerkezetekről. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat 5:1 ► pp. 215 ff.

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2021. Politeness in 13–16th Century Catalan. Acta Hispanica :III ► pp. 49 ff.

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2022. (Polite) directives in mediaeval Catalan. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 23:1 ► pp. 54 ff.

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2017. Introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2 ► pp. 159 ff.

Brinton, Laurel J.

2015. Historical Discourse Analysis. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 222 ff.

Brinton, Laurel J.

2017. K. Aijmer & C. Rühlemann (Eds.) (2015). Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook . International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 299 ff.

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2014. Diachronic corpus pragmatics. In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 243], ► pp. 3 ff.

Kohnen, Thomas

2012. Review of Cummings (2010): The Pragmatics Encyclopedia. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 13:1 ► pp. 164 ff.

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2014. Speech acts: a diachronic perspective. In Corpus Pragmatics, ► pp. 52 ff.

Placencia, María Elena & Carmen García

2012. Speech Acts Research. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,

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2012. Oral practices in the history of English. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 285 ff.

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2010. Variational pragmatics. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 1 ff.

Schneider, Klaus P.

2022. Variational pragmatics. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 1472 ff.

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[no author supplied]

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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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