Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English

A contribution to historical pragmatics

Editors

Ulrich Busse | Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

Axel Hübler | Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027256256 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027274618 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

The volume contributes to historical pragmatics an important chapter on what has so far not been paid adequate attention to, i.e. historical metapragmatics. More particularly, the collected papers apply a meta-communicative approach to historical texts by focusing on lexis that either directly or metaphorically identifies or characterizes entire forms of communication or single acts and act sequences or minor units. Within the context of their use, such lexical expressions, in fact, provide a key for disclosing historical forms of communication; taken out of context, they build the meta-communicative lexicon.
The articles follow three principal distinctions in that they investigate the meta-communicative profile of genres, meta-communicative lexical sets and meta-communicative ethics and ideologies. They cover a broad spectrum of text types that span the entire history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon chronicles to computer-mediated communication.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 220] 2012. vii, 292 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.220

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii

Introduction

Axel Hübler and Ulrich Busse | pp. 1–16

Sociability: Conversation and the performance of friendship  in early eighteenth-century letters

Susan Fitzmaurice | pp. 21–44

“I write you these few lines”: Metacommunication and pragmatics  in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ letters

Marina Dossena | pp. 45–64

1.2 Longitudinal studies

Inscribed orality and the end of a discourse archive: Metapragmatic and metadiscursive expressions in the Peterborough Chronicle

Richard J. Watts | pp. 67–88

Managing disputes with civility: On seventeenth-century argumentative discourse

Maurizio Gotti | pp. 89–110

The metapragmatics of civilized belligerence

Jef Verschueren | pp. 111–128

The metapragmatics of hoaxing: Tracking a genre label from Edgar Allan Poe to Web 2.0

Theresa Heyd | pp. 129–150

From speaker and hearer to chatter,  blogger and user: The changing metacommunicative lexicon in computer-mediated communication

Wolfram Bublitz | pp. 151–176

Part 2. Metacommunicative lexical sets

Now as a text deictic feature in Late Medieval and Early Modern English medical writing

Irma Taavitsainen and Turo Hiltunen | pp. 179–206

Performative and non-performative uses  of speech-act verbs in the history of English

Thomas Kohnen | pp. 207–222

Verbs of answering revisited: A corpus-based study of their pragmatic development

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and Tine Defour | pp. 223–246

A lexical approach to paralinguistic communication of the past

Axel Hübler | pp. 247–268

Part 3. (Meta-)communicative ethics and ideologies

Historical evidence of communicative maxims

Alexander Brock | pp. 271–288

Name index | pp. 289–290

Subject index | pp. 291–292

“ Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English is a masterful and frontline demonstration of the vibrant field of meta-pragmatics in terms of the analysis presented. Its completely engaging style is a testimony to the authoritative scholastic depth both of the editors and of the authors. I strongly commend it to all scholars who are interested in pragmatics and other related disciplines, such as discourse analysis, stylistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, historical linguistics and semiotics.”

Akin Odebunmi, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in Discourse Studies Vol. 16:6 (2014)

Cited by (14)

Cited by 14 other publications

Order by:

Peikola, Matti & Mari-Liisa Varila

2024. Presenting manuscript tables and diagrams to the Middle English reader. Journal of Historical Pragmatics

Heliasz-Nowosielska, Celina

2023. Multimodalność w narracjach o komunikacji. Relacjonowanie działań komunikacyjnych, a ich werbalne i niewerbalne sposoby realizacji,

Kádár, Dániel Z. & Annick Paternoster

2022. Historicity in metapragmatics – a study on ‘discernment’ in Italian metadiscourse. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 369 ff.

Verschueren, Jef

2021. Reflexivity and Meta-awareness. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 117 ff.

Evans, Mel

2020. Royal Voices,

Jucker, Andreas

2020. Politeness in the History of English,

Paternoster, Annick

2019. Chapter 3. Politeness and evaluative adjectives in Italian turn-of-the-century etiquette books (1877–1914). In Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 299], ► pp. 107 ff.

Saltamacchia, Francesca & Andrea Rocci

2019. Chapter 2. The Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’, 1802) by Melchiorre Gioja, politeness (pulitezza) and reason. In Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 299], ► pp. 75 ff.

Reilly, Ian

2018. F for Fake: Propaganda! Hoaxing! Hacking! Partisanship! and Activism! in the Fake News Ecology. The Journal of American Culture 41:2 ► pp. 139 ff.

Whitt, Richard J.

2018. “And all this is spoken of the naturall byrth …”. English Text Construction 11:2 ► pp. 226 ff.

Dossena, Marina

2015. (Re)constructed eloquence: rhetorical and pragmatic strategies in the speeches of Native Americans as reported by nineteenth-century commentators. Brno Studies in English 41:1 ► pp. 5 ff.

Jucker, Andreas H. & Irma Taavitsainen

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

[no author supplied]

2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff.

[no author supplied]

2022. Esperanto – Lingua Franca and Language Community [Studies in World Language Problems, 10],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 september 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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