Until very recently, pragmatics has been restricted to the analysis of contemporary spoken language while historical linguistics has studied historical texts and language change in a decontextualized way. This has now radically changed and scholars from around the world are trying to build a new theoretical framework that integrates recent advances both in pragmatics and in historical linguistics. The volume, which contains 22 original articles, starts with an introduction that is both a state-of-the-art account of historical pragmatics and a programmatic statement of its future potential and its different subfields. Part I contains seven pragmaphilological papers that deal with historical texts and their interpretations by paying close attention to the communicative context of these texts. The second and third parts comprise papers in diachronic pragmatics. The ten papers of part II take a linguistic form as their starting point, e.g. particular lexical items or syntactic constructions, and study their pragmatic functions at different times (diachronic form-to-function mappings), while the four papers of part III take a particular pragmatic function as their starting point, e.g. discourse strategies or politeness, and study their linguistic realisation at different times (diachronic function-to-form mappings).

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.

The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in pragmatics devoted to a diachronic study of language use and human interaction in context. It covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and politeness to individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

The 19 papers in this volume are a selection from a UCLA conference intended to take stock of the state of the field at the beginning of the new millenium and to stimulate research in English Historical Linguistics. The authors are predominantly U.S. scholars. The fields represented include morphosyntax and semantics, grammaticalization, discourse analysis, dialectology, lexicography, the diachronic study of code-switching, phonology and metrics.

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009), this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics has a central focus on historical language use in its situational contexts, and how those situational contexts engender norms which speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. The chapters represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The reader will find English texts from the 15th century through to the 18th, a variety of genres (including personal correspondence, trial proceedings and plays), and both qualitative and (corpus-based) quantitative analyses. Importantly, attention is given to how contexts can be (re)constructed from written records, a sine qua non of the field. It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in pragmatics, especially socially-oriented pragmatics, and/or historical linguistics, especially the history of English.

Uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches, this is an advanced textbook on the study of English historical linguistics.

The purpose of Diachronic Pragmatics is to exemplify historical pragmatics in its twofold sense of constituting both a subject matter and a methodology. This book demonstrates how diachronic pragmatics, with its complementary diachronic function-to-form mapping and diachronic form-to-function mapping, can be used to trace pragmatic developments within the English language. Through a set of case studies it explores the evolution of such speech acts as promises, curses, blessings, and greetings and such speech events as flyting and sounding. Collectively these “illocutionary biographies” manifest the workings of several important pragmatic processes and trends: increased epistemicity, subjectification, and discursization (a special kind of pragmaticalization). It also establishes the centrality of cultural traditions in diachronic reconstruction, examining various de-institutionalizations of extra-linguistic context and their affect on speech act performance. Taken together, the case studies presented in Diachronic Pragmatics highlight the complex interactions of formal, semantic, and pragmatic processes over time. Illustrating the possibilities of historical pragmatic pursuit, this book stands as an invitation to further research in a new and important discipline.