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.

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages. Detailed case-studies covering central semantic domains, such as concession, evidentiality, intensification, modality, negation, scalarity, subjectivity, and temporality, allow the authors to test and refine current models of semantic change, by focusing, for instance, on the respective roles of speakers and hearers in the process and on the relationship between semantic and syntactic reanalysis. Key theoretical notions, such as presuppositions, paradigms, word order, and discourse status are revisited in a diachronic perspective to provide innovative accounts of causes and motivations for linguistic changes. A prominent theme is the evolution of procedural meanings of various kinds. Thus, several papers feature different types of pragmatic markers as their object of study, while others are concerned with items and constructions expressing modality, evidentiality, negation, and relational meanings. Closely related themes are: the interface between semantics and pragmatics/discourse, with figurative uses of language, rhetorical-argumentational strategies, discourse traditions, information structure, and the importance of dialogic contexts in change playing a salient role in several papers; the relationship between meaning change and processes such as grammaticalization, subjectification and pragmaticalization; and, the thorny issue of the categorization of linguistic items such as discourse markers or modal particles, evidentials or epistemic modals, to which the diachronic data are shown to contribute substantially. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics.

Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

Doing Pragmatics achieved success through its unparalleled capacity to render pragmatics truly accessible to students. Embracing the comprehensive and engaging style which characterised the previous editions, the third edition is fully revised and expanded. Grundy consolidates the strengths of the original version, reinforcing its unique combination of theory and practice with new theory, exercises and up-to-date, real data and examples. New chapters include pragmatic inference and language evolution, and intercultural pragmatics. Doing Pragmatics is designed for pragmatics courses both at an introductory and a more advanced level. It extends beyond theory to promote an applied understanding of empirical data and to provide students with the opportunity to 'do' pragmatics themselves, providing the ideal foundation for all those studying linguistics and ELT.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.