Historical (socio)pragmatics at present
Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk and Irma Taavitsainen
Special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2 (2017) v, 180 pp.
Matylda Włodarczyk
List of John Benjamins publications for which Matylda Włodarczyk plays a role.
Title
Subjects Discourse studies | Historical linguistics | Pragmatics
Articles
2020 “I am desired (…) to desire”: Routines of power in the British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1827–1830) Late Modern English: Novel encounters, Kytö, Merja and Erik Smitterberg (eds.), pp. 333–356 | Chapter
Historical pragmatic analyses have underlined the discourse dependence and pragmatic sensitivity of speech acts. As a result, researchers’ attention has shifted from form, structure and tokenisation of utterances to interactive frameworks. This paper follows suit and argues that speech acts in… read more
2017 Initiating contact in institutional correspondence: Historical (socio)pragmatics of Late Modern English literacies Historical (socio)pragmatics at present, Włodarczyk, Matylda and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), pp. 271–294 | Article
When addressing family members or friends, letter writers enter a common ground of some sort, where, as research has shown, the rules of everyday interaction apply (Nurmi and Palander-Colin 2008). In different historical periods, familiar correspondence is thus very much about maintaining… read more
2017 Introduction: Historical (socio)pragmatics at present Historical (socio)pragmatics at present, Włodarczyk, Matylda and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), pp. 159–174 | Introduction
This introductory paper defines the present state of the art of historical (socio)pragmatics. We single out interactional and social foci as the most important, and we briefly characterise some more narrowly defined perspectives. These involve a politeness-related view that relies on relational… read more
2015 Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness: Responses of the Colonial Office to letters from William Parker, 1820 settler Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English, Dossena, Marina (ed.), pp. 153–177 | Article
This contribution aims to assess the possibility of filtering reflexive, i.e. intentional and strategic linguistic choices from the politic and highly conventionalised language of historical letters (see Wood 2009). As I would like to argue, an analysis of some “backstage” epistolary data could be… read more
2013 1820 Settler petitions in the Cape Colony: Genre dynamics and materiality Journal of Historical Pragmatics 14:1, pp. 45–69 | Article
The received view has it that the language of petitions aims at elevating the addressee and demeaning the author. Recent studies into historical (im)politeness interpret it as epistolary facework, i.e. “politic” rather than “polite” behaviour (Bax 2010). Drawing on evidence of the genre dynamics… read more
2013 Community or communities of practice? 1820 petitioners in the Cape Colony Communities of Practice in the History of English, Kopaczyk, Joanna and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), pp. 83–102 | Article
2013 Self-reference and ego involvement in the 1820 Settler petition as a leaking genre Touching the Past: Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents, Wal, Marijke J. van der and Gijsbert Rutten (eds.), pp. 201–224 | Article
This article illustrates the complexity of the official/personal interface in nineteenth-century letters of petition addressed to the British colonial authorities in Cape Town (1820–25). Despite the rigid institutionalised demands on message clarity and petitioner’s detachment, the author’s ego… read more