Jnl of Historical Pragmatics: TOC & abstracts

[Paul Peranteau]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is the table of contents and abstracts from Volume 1, No. 1 (2000) of 
the new journal

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL PRAGMATICS
Edited by Andreas Jucker (Justus Liebig University) and Irma Taavitsainen 
(University of Helsinki)
published by John Benjamins Publishing

Articles
Susan M. Fitzmaurice (pp. 1­6)
Some remarks on the rhetoric of historical pragmatics

Scott A. Schwenter and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (pp. 7­25)
Invoking scalarity: The development of in fact

Noriko O. Onodera (pp. 27­55)
Development of demo type connectives and na elements: Two extremes of 
Japanese discourse markers

Marcella Bertuccelli Papi (pp. 57­66)
Is a diachronic speech act theory possible?

Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (pp. 67­95)
Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming

Jonathan Culpeper and Elena Semino (pp. 97­116)
Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and activity types in Early 
Modern England

Thomas Honegger (pp. 117­150)
‘But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe’: Towards a typology of 
opening moves in Courtly
Amorous Interaction

Book Reviews
Gerd Fritz: Historische Semantik (Brigitte Nerlich)

Forthcoming Papers

Authors in this Issue

ABSTRACTS:

Invoking scalarity: The development of in fact
Scott A. Schwenter and Elizabeth Closs Traugott

The discourse contexts are analyzed in which clause-internal in fact 
developed pragmaticalized
meanings and came to invoke scalarity in two domains: epistemic sentence 
adverb (IPAdv), and additive
discourse marker (DM). In both these uses, in fact tightens word to world 
fit (Powell 1992): the world of
epistemic belief in the case of the IPAdv, the world of evaluative, 
rhetorical perspective in the case of
the DM. The analysis therefore provides further evidence for (i) pragmatic 
ambiguities across these
worlds (Sweetser 1990), (ii) subjectification that shifts perspectives from 
interpersonal (adversative) to
personal evaluation (Traugott 1989), (iii) the pragmatic relationship 
between scalarity, adversativity and
additivity (Schwenter 1999). The different orientations of the two uses 
suggest they are polysemous, not
contextually bound.

Development of demo type connectives and na elements: Two extremes of 
Japanese discourse
markers
Noriko O. Onodera

This paper suggests the independence of grammaticalization and 
pragmaticalization processes. These
two processes are originally and self-evidently autonomous evolutionary 
paths that occur independently
of each other. However, grammaticalization is often discussed, indeed in 
the majority of the recent
studies, in correlation to some unidirectional features that co-occur with 
grammaticalization. Such
features include, structurally, for example, “bondedness” and “structural 
scope” (Lehmann 1995), and
functionally, for example, “increase in abstraction” and 
“pragmaticalization”. These unidirectional
features are at times even considered too authoritatively criterial to 
judge a given language change as an
instance of grammaticalization.This study illustrates a piece of evidence 
for the asymmetric relationship
of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. That is, the two groups of 
Japanese discourse markers —
(1) demo type connectives and (2) na elements — experience quite different 
historical changes. The
group (1) undergoes both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, but the 
group (2) undergoes
pragmaticalization without involving grammaticalization.

Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming
Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen

In this paper we want to develop a model for the diachronic analysis of 
speech acts by tracing one
particular speech act through the history of English, viz. insults. Speech 
acts are fuzzy concepts which
show both diachronic and synchronic variation. We therefore propose a 
notion of a multidimensional
pragmatic space in which speech acts can be analyzed in relation to 
neighboring speech acts.Against
this background we discuss both the changing cultural grounding in which 
insults occur and the
changing ways in which they are realized. Our data is drawn from the Old 
English poem Beowulf and
the Finnsburh fragment, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and from 
Shakespeare’s plays, and from a
variety of non-literary sources such as personal letters, court records and 
an internet discussion group.
The scale ranges from everyday communication to ritualized behavior. When 
written materials of the
past periods are analyzed, the bias towards the conventionalized insults is 
evident. Most early examples
are found in literary texts and seem to reflect generic conventions of the 
time and the culture that gave
rise to these literary forms.

Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and activity types in Early 
Modern England
Jonathan Culpeper and Elena Semino

In this paper, we highlight the centrality of verbs relating to verbal 
activities in witchcraft narratives in
the Early Modern English period, and focus on speech act verbs used to 
refer to witches’ curses. In the
first part, we refer to various classifications of speech act verbs and to 
Searle’s felicity conditions for
speech acts, in order to describe the different meanings of verbs such as 
to curse, and to show how
their central meaning has shifted over time. In the second part, we show 
how the speech act verbs form
a structured set, which — in appropriate circumstances — could be used as 
an interpretative frame to
create witchcraft events out of relatively trivial arguments within village 
communities. Here, we refer to
Levinson’s notion of activity types as a possible explanatory framework.

‘But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe’: Towards a typology of 
opening moves in Courtly
Amorous Interaction
Thomas Honegger

In this paper, I look at how medieval and early modern poets present and 
exploit the potential inherent
in opening moves in (love) relationships for the purpose of plot motivation 
and protagonist
characterisation. The depiction of the opening moves depends on three 
interrelated pairs of variables: 1)
legalistic tradition (marriage as the reason for initiating a relationship) 
vs emotional tradition (focus is on
the beloved person’s affection), 2) plot motivation vs protagonist 
characterisation, and 3) brevity vs
length. Longer texts that focus on the lovers’ feelings and that pay some 
attention to protagonist
characterisation are more likely to feature relatively complex linguistic 
strategies presented in a basically
realistic interactional manner. In shorter texts of the emotional 
tradition, the complexity is reduced, and
poets working in the legalistic tradition often pay hardly any attention at 
all to the finer points of
opening moves in love interaction.

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