Full Description
Providing an ideal introduction to historical pragmatics, this guide gives students a solid grounding in historical pragmatics and teaches the methodology needed to analyse language in social, cultural and historical contexts. Using a number of case studies including politeness, news discourse, and scientific discourse, this book provides new insights into the analysis of discourse markers, interjections, terms of address and speech acts. Through focusing on the methodological problems in using historical data, students learn the key concepts in historical pragmatics, as well as covering recent work at the interface of between language and literature.
Contents
1 Historical pragmatics: Communicative patterns of the past
2 Data in historical pragmatics: The widening perspectives of the digital era
3 Excavating usage patterns: Methods in historical pragmatics
4 "Lo, which a greet thyng is affeccioun!": Discourse markers and interjections
5 "For I thou thee, thou Traitor": Terms of address
6 "No one can flatter so prettily as you do": Speech acts
7 "For your curteisie": Forms of politeness and impoliteness
8 The pragmatics of language change: Grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation
9 "Take a pounde of sugir and halfe a pounde of tendir roses lyues...": Genres and text types
10 "I pray thee friend Humfrey, what is phisicke?": Scientific and medical discourse
11 "By letters from Riga we have advice": Historical news discourse
12 "Fire! Help! Sir Walter has studied till his Head's on fire": Narrative patterns and historical pragmatics.
