Speech Acts in the History of English

333 Pages·2016·2.18 MB·English

by  Jucker A.H.

Speech Acts in the History of English
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work
covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within
language sciences.
Editor
Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich, English Department
Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
Associate Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Shoshana Blum-Kulka Susan C. Herring Emanuel A. Schegloff
Hebrew University of Indiana University University of California at Los
Jerusalem Angeles
Masako K. Hiraga
Jean Caron St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Deborah Schiffrin
Université de Poitiers Georgetown University
David Holdcroft
Robyn Carston University of Leeds Paul Osamu Takahara
University College London Kobe City University of
Sachiko Ide
Foreign Studies
Bruce Fraser Japan Women’s University
Boston University Sandra A. Thompson
Catherine Kerbrat-
University of California at
Thorstein Fretheim Orecchioni
Santa Barbara
University of Trondheim University of Lyon 2
Teun A. van Dijk
John C. Heritage Claudia de Lemos
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
University of California at Los University of Campinas, Brazil
Angeles Richard J. Watts
Marina Sbisà
University of Berne
University of Trieste
Volume 176
Speech Acts in the History of English
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
Speech Acts
in the History of English
Edited by
Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich
Irma Taavitsainen
University of Helsinki
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Speech acts in the history of English / edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 176)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Speech acts (Linguistics) 2. English language--History. I. Jucker, Andreas H. II.
Taavitsainen, Irma.
P95.55.S6344 2008
420.9--dc22 2008001429
isbn 978 90 272 5420 7 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V.
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Table of contents
Preface vii
Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of English 1
Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
Directives and commissives
Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? 27
Thomas Kohnen
Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings
and play texts, 1640–1760 45
Jonathan Culpeper and Dawn Archer
An inventory of directives in Shakespeare’s King Lear 85
Ulrich Busse
Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation
of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century
commercial community 1 15
Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti
“No botmeles bihestes”: Various ways of making binding promises
in Middle English 133
Mari Pakkala-Weckström
Expressives and assertives
Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi: Greetings in English language history 165
Joachim Grzega
“Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender
in the history of English 195
Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
 Speech Acts in the History of English
Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of
responsibility and regret 229
Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
Methods of speech act retrieval
Showing a little promise: Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary
acts from a corpus of written prose 247
Petteri Valkonen
Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic
compliment research 273
Andreas H. Jucker, Gerold Schneider, Irma Taavitsainen, Barb Breustedt
Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of a
corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis 295
Thomas Kohnen
Name index 311
Subject index 315
Preface
This book has been several years in the making. The need for further study on historical
speech act analysis first became evident with the inaugural issue of the Journal of His-
torical Pragmatics in 2000, and although individual case studies have been published, a
collective volume on the topic has been wanting. We decided to remedy the situation
and convene a seminar on diachronic speech act analysis at the ESSE-6 Conference of
the European Society for the Study of English held in August/September 2006 in Lon-
don. Earlier versions of most papers in this volume were presented there. All the papers
deal with specific speech acts in the history of the English language, and they all employ
corpus-based and empirical research methods. In the area of historical pragmatics,
such an approach is inevitable as native speaker intuition and experimental methods,
such as discourse completion tasks or role-plays, are not available to researchers.
This volume is organized into three parts. The first part is labeled “Directives and
commissives” as it contains papers on speech acts such as requests and commands on
the one hand, and promises on the other. These speech acts have an important feature
in common in that they deal with future events. In directives, the speaker attempts to
get the addressee to do something, and, in the case of commissives, the speaker com-
mits himself or herself to doing something. The second part, under the heading “Ex-
pressives and assertives”, comprises papers on greetings, compliments and apologies,
which share a concern not with actions to be carried out by the addressee or the speak-
er, but, in a fundamental sense, with expressing attitudes: attitudes of well-wishing, of
approval and of regret.
All papers in this volume offer both descriptions of specific speech acts and dis-
cussions of methodological issues, including the problem of data retrieval. The third
and last section of this volume, however, consists of three papers in which the techni-
cal aspects of retrieving specific speech acts from historical data takes center stage.
These papers were not presented at the conference in London but took their inspira-
tion from there and were added at a later stage. Earlier versions of two were presented
at the Conference of the International Pragmatics Association in Gothenburg in July
2007. This conference had adopted the special topic “Language data, corpora, and
computational pragmatics”: very fitting for these papers that explored the possibilities
of extracting speech acts from large historical corpora.
All the papers in this volume underwent revisions and a lengthy reviewing process
which started with very lively discussions at the two conferences, where contributors
acted as respondents to one another. Revisions continued with the circulation of earlier
 Speech Acts in the History of English
versions of papers. We hope that this process has helped to improve the coherency of the
volume so that we can have a more solid basis for further explorations on the topic.
We would like to take the opportunity and thank the contributors for their coop-
eration and patience and for their willingness to revise their papers wherever we, or
anonymous reviewers, felt this to be necessary. We would also like to thank the anony-
mous reviewers for the work they put into this volume by giving constructive criticism
about earlier versions of the chapters. We gratefully acknowledge the funding of the
Academy of Finland for Irma Taavitsainen’s research in 2007 (project number 1118478).
For our own chapters, we were fortunate to have the help of three doctoral students in
collecting the corpus data for the apologies paper (initiated in 2004). Turo Hiltunen
and Jukka Tyrkkö were working as research assistants at the time, funded by the Re-
search Unit of Variation, Contacts and Change at the University of Helsinki. We would
also like to thank Anu Lehto for collecting corpus data for the compliments paper. For
help in editorial work and language checking, we thank Danielle Hickey, and we are
grateful to Barb Breustedt for her invaluable assistance in the editorial work.
December 2007
Andreas H. Jucker Irma Taavitsainen
Speech acts now and then
Towards a pragmatic history of English
Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
University of Helsinki and University of Zurich
We may climb a mountain with various types of equipment, and starting from
any of its slopes, but we need be aware that they may be slippery and treacherous
in various ways. And the history of language is a very difficult mountain to
climb. (Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 64)
1. Introduction
Histories of the English language continue to be published in great numbers and re-
cent years have seen an upsurge in such publications in the form of handbooks, schol-
arly treatises or introductory textbooks for students. However, in spite of the wealth of
knowledge that we already have in large areas of the development of the English lan-
guage from its earliest written records in the seventh century to the present day, equal-
ly large areas are still, more or less, unexplored. While we know much about the devel-
opments in the more traditional areas of phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax
and even semantics, we still know very little about the developments in pragmatic pat-
terns of language use.
In the seven volumes of the Cambridge History of the English Language published
in the 1990s, sociolinguistics and pragmatics are virtually non-existent. In more recent
authoritative single-volume histories of English, such as Hogg and Denison (2006) and
Mugglestone (2006), pragmatics is still not included. The Handbook of the History of
English (van Kemenade and Los 2006) is a notable exception. It devotes one of its six
parts (with three chapters) to pragmatics. Another exception is the book Alternative
Histories of English (Watts and Trudgill 2002), which is explicitly devoted to lesser
known varieties of English and to the communicative and pragmatic aspects of Eng-
lish. There are also some independent studies that deal with individual aspects of the
history of English, several of which are devoted to pragmatics, for instance, Traugott
and Dasher (2005) on grammaticalisation, Brinton (1996) on discourse markers,
Watts, Ide and Ehlich (1992) on politeness and Arnovick (1999) on speech acts.