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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 rece

In Early Modern Britain, new publication channels were developed and new textual genres established themselves. News discourse became increasingly more important and reached wider audiences, with pamphlets as the first real mass media. Newspapers appeared, first on a weekly and then on a daily basis. And scientific news discourse in the form of letters exchanged between fellow scholars turned into academic journals. The papers in this volume provide state-of-the art analyses of these developments.

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).

Abstract
This paper argues for a distinction between "conduct politeness" and "etiquette politeness", where the former refers to the propriety of what people do and the latter to the decorum of how people do things. In everyday discourse, the distinction is often fuzzy, but as a second order distinction the terminology provides a useful analytical tool. In the history of politeness in English, a bifurcation into the two types of politeness can be observed in the eighteenth century, and today the distinction provides additional conceptual clarity of the changing theoretical focus during the three waves of politeness theory. After a review of the historical link between morals and manners, a brief case study focuses on their separation in the eighteenth century. A final discussion applies the distinction to the paradox that politeness is often seen as a positive thing that, unfortunately, is on the decline and as a negative thing because it is insincere, superficial and hypocritical.

AbstractFictional texts constitute complex communicative acts between an author and an audience, and they regularly depict interactions between characters. Both levels are susceptible to an analysis of politeness. This is particularly true for early eighteenth-century drama, which – in the context of the age of politeness – established new dramatic genres to educate and edify their audiences. Characters were used to demonstrate good or bad behaviour as examples to be followed or avoided. Early eighteenth-century drama was a reaction against what was considered to be the immorality and profanity of Restoration drama of the seventeenth century. Two plays serve as illustrations and a testing ground for an analysis of fictional politeness that considers both communicative levels; the play itself and the interactions within the play. Richard Steele's sentimental comedy "The Conscious Lovers" (1722) gives an example of good behaviour by being exceedingly polite to the audience in the theatre through characters that are exceedingly polite to each other; and George Lillo's domestic tragedy "The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell" (1731) shows the "private woe" of everyday characters in order to warn the younger generation against wrongdoing and to propagate middle-class virtues and moral values.

Intro -- Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Preface -- Manners, norms and transgressions: Introduction -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Three waves of politeness theory -- 3. The diachrony of manners and politeness -- 4. Norms, blunders and transgressions -- 5. Literary and linguistic approaches to data analysis -- 6. Conclusion -- Primary sources -- Corpora and dictionaries -- References -- 'Ipomedon' and the elusive nature of blunders in the courtly literature of medieval England -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The tale of Ipomedon as a succession of blunders -- 2.1 The incident with the boteler -- 2.2 The Proud One's blunder -- 2.3 Ipomedon the troublemaker -- 3. The evolution of politeness strategies in the Middle English retellings of Fr. 'Ipomedon' -- 3.1 The refashioning of minor transgressions -- 3.2 The reinvention of Ipomedon as a fallible human being 'and' a model of courtly values -- 4. Conclusion -- Sources -- Dictionaries -- References -- Unrestrained acting and norms of behaviour: Excess and instruction in 'The Legend of Good Women' -- 1. Introduction -- 2. 'Exempla' and the idea of good women -- 3. The representation of despicable actions -- 4. The legend of Thisbe -- 5. The legend of Lucretia -- 6. Conclusions: Unrestrained gestures as norms of behaviour -- Sources -- References -- Blunders and (un)intentional offence in Shakespeare -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Blunders: Pragmatic description and their effects -- 2.1 Blunders as FTAs -- 2.2 Blunders, intentionality and impoliteness -- 2.3 Blunders as speech acts: Illocutionary force and unintentional perlocutionary effects -- 2.3.1 Embarrassment and embarrassability -- 2.3.2 Humour -- 3. Blunders in 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' and 'King Henry IV, Parts 1' and '2' -- 3.1 Mistress Quickly.

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 between language and literature

Your guide to historical pragmatics in English studies. Historical pragmatics is an emerging branch within linguistics and one of the most versatile fields in the historical study of English. It is placed at the intersection between pragmatics, historical linguistics and neighbouring disciplines like (historical) sociolinguistics. It is at such interfaces where exciting new developments take place. English Historical Pragmatics introduces this field to advanced linguistic students coming to the topic for the first time. It critically evaluates data sources and methodological approaches and takes a broad social pragmatics approach to micro issues within historical pragmatics such as discourse markers, terms of address and actions performed through language. It also covers macro issues of genre, medical and news discourse and fictional literature, and it outlines the underlying principles of language change through grammaticalisation, subjectivisation and pragmaticalisation. With engaging examples throughout and thought-provoking student exercises, this advanced textbook provides students with a thorough grounding in historical pragmatics.

The eleven original papers collected in this volume address themselves to some of the central issues in the relevance theoretic research programme since the 1995 publication of the second edition of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance. Communication and Cognition.Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour.Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory's application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory's usefulness in accounting for certain types of "grammatical" constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.