Journal of Historical Pragmatics

Abstract This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin ( Dickey 2010 , 2012 , 2016b ), English ( Kohnen 2008 ; Ridealgh and Jucker…

Abstract Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004] and Tiisala [2004] ) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective ( Nevala 2004a ). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014) , we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguin…

Abstract Requests are speech acts that ask somebody to do something that they might not have done without being asked. They impose on the addressee. In Present-day English, a range of linguistic devices are often used to make this imposition more palatable, such as questions about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the required action and the use of the courtesy request marker pl…

Abstract This paper details two case-studies in which politeness strategies are conveyed through practices of mitigation in Italian merchant letters during the Renaissance. The first case-study concerns the successful negotiation of trade practices between Italian merchants working in London with the “merchant of Prato”, Francesco di Marco Datini. The second case-study looks at the collaboration …

Abstract This study investigates the viability of using large language models ( llm s) to conduct pragmatic annotations of historical texts. The investigation employs a small corpus of witness depositions and compares Claude 3.5 Sonnet — an llm that excels in reasoning over text — with two human annotators over their performance in the pragmatic annotation of Early Modern English ( em od e ) text…

Abstract Pragmatic studies have recently shown that volition ascription to the addressee corresponds to specific strategies and deserves more attention. This paper discusses a series of post-volitional developments attested by second-person forms of the Latin verb uolo (‘I want’). Whilst these grammaticalisation phenomena — some of which are also attested cross-linguistically — have mainly been d…

Abstract This paper examines authorial presence in late-Modern English scientific writing through a study of second-person pronouns in the chet (History texts) and cec he t (Chemistry texts) sub-corpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Although existing studies in this area have tended to focus on self-mentions ( Hyland 2001 , 2008 ; Flowerdew and Ho Wang 2015 ; Moskowich 2020 …

Abstract This paper offers a diachronic analysis focussing on the different uses and forms that the expression stay safe acquired throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. It makes an original contribution to the study of historical pragmatics by drawing on data traditionally examined in the field of linguistic landscape studies and produced during a global health crisis, resulting in an innovative, real…

Abstract The Modern Chinese concessive connective kě shì (e.g., kàn shàngqù bù zěnmeyàng, kě shì chī qǐlái què tǐng bùcuò [‘it looks not so good, but it tastes quite good’]) did not develop from a clause-initial emphatic kě shì structure that has a pragmatic counter expectation meaning (e.g., kě shì tā shuōde [‘it was really she who said it’]), but from an affirmative response marker kě shì in Ea…

Abstract Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and complications arising when colloquialisa…

Abstract Democratization is often invoked as an explanatory factor for diachronic linguistic developments. We believe that at the root of democratization often lies the pragmatic negotiation of power relations, whereby a more democratic use of language can reduce the distance between addresser and addressee. This article examines the evolution of power relations in the New York Times editorials f…

Abstract In this article, we investigate changes in British parliamentary discourse by using the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005). Our first goal is to determine whether parliamentary speeches have become colloquialised by studying frequency changes of select features associated with informal spoken language. Second, by analysing data from the House of Commons and the House of Lords separately, we show…

Abstract This paper studies the long-term diachronic development of the speech act of expressing gratitude in the history of English in Britain. The speech act underwent a considerable transformation from a religious-devotional practice and an expressive act with a high illocutionary weight addressed to a fellow human being towards a predominantly phatic routine in everyday conversation. Based on…

Abstract The paper focusses on ritual “politeness” in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia from a historical sociopragmatic perspective. The analysis of ceremonial literature and memoirs aims to highlight the instrumental role that the performance of conventional gestures and the use of conventional formulae have in presenting the self/oth…

Abstract Etiquette has only marginally attracted the attention of politeness scholars. This article aims to fill a knowledge gap as it explores the concept in a more systematic way, using nineteenth-century prescriptive metasources from four countries (Britain, France, Italy and the United States). Etiquette is found to form a complicated, all-encompassing body of tendentially amoral, mandatory n…

Abstract This paper presents a case study which brings together the fields of contrastive pragmatics and historical pragmatics. Specifically, we contrastively investigate the ways in which the speech act set of “farewell” – representing the closing phase of an interaction – was realised in nineteenth-century historical letters in different linguacultures, including the English, German and Chinese…

Abstract Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders’ own understandings – that is, French people living in Finland and Finns who live o…

Abstract This paper seeks to explain the development of European politeness as a result of courtly behaviour where “complaisance” played an important role. As traces left in the so-called “language of politeness” of numerous European linguacultures show, mutual “pleasing” determined social performance in hierarchically organised societies by merging aesthetic concepts of form and order with ethic…

Abstract This paper considers the guidelines for polite conversation and appropriate comportment presented in Cicero’s philosophical treatise De Officiis (44 bce ), examining them in the light of recent scholarship on modern conduct manuals (e.g., Terkourafi [2011] , Alfonzetti [2016] , Culpeper [2017] and Paternoster and Saltamacchia [2017] ). In particular, it considers: (1) Cicero’s attempt to…