16.3123, Review: Pragmatics/Historical Ling: Skaffari et al. (2005)

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Subject: 16.3123, Review: Pragmatics/Historical Ling: Skaffari et al. (2005)

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1)
Date: 25-Oct-2005
From: Giampaolo Poletto < janospal at libero.it >
Subject: Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 20:03:34
From: Giampaolo Poletto < janospal at libero.it >
Subject: Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past 
 

EDITORS: Skaffari, Janne; Peikola, Matti; Carroll, Ruth; Hiltunen, 
Risto; Wårvik, Brita
TITLE: Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past
SERIES: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 134
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1167.html 

Giampaolo Poletto, doctoral candidate, Doctoral School in Linguistics, 
University of Pécs, Hungary

DESCRIPTION

This volume displays a consistent collection of contributions. The field 
of interest is the newly born historical pragmatics, which is the most 
established term, with respect to historical discourse analysis (Brinton, 
2001) and historical discourse linguistics (Carroll et al., 2003). The 
object of such pragmatic and discourse-oriented research is early 
texts. The goal is to explore past stages of languages and relate 
linguistic phenomena to their historical context. The aim of the editors 
is to continue the debate in the field, without imposing fixed meanings. 
Therefore, a variety of research questions and methods is 
purposefully addressed here, through five chapters which hold twenty-
two differently shaped and sized windows open on different linguistic 
and textual landscapes. The first three are a subset based on related 
sources of data; the last two have theoretical affinities. The first 
chapter focuses on media discourse and political rhetoric; the second 
on the argumentative and expository functions of language exploited 
in texts; the third on men of letters and letter-writing; the fourth on 
pragmatic or discourse markers, grammaticalisation and politeness; 
the fifth on language contact situations and the role of contact. The 
contributions are papers read at the first conference on historical 
texts, discourse and pragmatic studies, held in Finland in 2002, at the 
University of Turku - Organization in Discourse II: The Historical 
Perspective. Papers present in detail, clearly and extensively, the 
material investigated, mostly diachronically, the data collection and 
analytical methodology, the outcome, its contribution to the insight on 
a given issue or to the development of the field. Each paper provides 
bibliographical references at the end, which as a whole offers a 
widespread overview on the literature of the field.

I. Discourse in the public sphere (pp.5-82)

Jucker's (pp. 7-21) diachronical exploration of the news discourse 
from the 17th to the 21st century emphasizes its evolution and the 
need for analytical tools operating also with non-linear texts, in a field 
such as historical pragmatics with no uniformly accepted division into 
subfields (see Jacobs and Jucker, 1995).

Gotti (pp.23-38) focuses on a discourse analytic study of 18th-century 
paper advertisements, in order to point out the main stylistic and 
linguistic features of such texts and compare the results with Leech's 
(1966), to find out systematisation or alteration in their writing which 
have manifested to date.

Kovalyova's (pp. 39-52) diachronical examination of presidential 
inaugural addresses, a genre of epideictic rhetoric (see Aristotle, 
1978), focuses on the specifics of speaker-listener relations, with a 
particular attention to the pronominal distribution, in the perspective of 
a ritual social action, performed so that an individual turns into a public 
figure, an audience into a nation. 

Rudanko (pp.53-63) investigates on two speeches in the House of 
Representatives, delivered in 1789 and 1798, with the aim to review 
the history of freedom of speech in the early American Republic. The 
notion of an informal fallacy (see Bentham, 1962) is employed with 
reference to two cases, ad socordiam and ad hominem, to underline 
the relevance of the awareness of fallacious arguments to political 
rhetoric and intentionally persuasive discourse.

Through a computer-assisted analysis of samples collected in the 
Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, along with the work of Bell (1991), 
among others, Studer (pp.65-79) addresses the textual organization 
in early newspapers, to highlight the evolution of the headline from a 
foregrounded to a separately printed element. The focus in on 
underlying syntactic processes involved in foregrounding and 
distribution patterns.

II. Science and academia (pp.81-198)

Through a corpus-based analysis of the organization of scientific 
discourse from the 15th century, Dorgeloh (pp.83-94) argues that 
what Biber & Finegan (1997) and Atkinson (1992) identify as 
developments towards more literate styles and less narrativity, 
respectively, affect the linguistic expression of agentivity, in particular. 
The shift from narratives in non-primary use to a more function-based 
argumentative pattern points out the experience nominalisation and 
the argument impersonalisation of modern scientific discourse and 
explains the general staticness and impersonality of scientific 
language.

Del Lungo Camiciotti's (pp.95-107) historical discursive insight in the 
recently critically edited (Raffaelli et al., 1995) lectures of the 
economist Marshall in Cambridge, in 1873, shows the lecturer's 
persona's textual construction through interactional and evaluative 
discursive strategies and metadiscursive devices engaging students' 
attention and signalling the lecturer's attitude to the audience and the 
content of the lecture.

By applying quantitative and qualitative methods in contemporary 
citation analysis (see Chubin & Moitra, 1975; Thompson, 1996, among 
others) to the synchronical exploration of Wilkins' scientific study of 
the 17th century, Oja (pp.109-122) shows how the Bible represents a 
special case with respect to the similar use of classical and 
contemporary sources.

Mostly drawing on Wales's work (1996), Ratia (pp.123-141) 
qualitatively examines the highly varied use of personal pronouns and 
argumentative strategies in a comparative study of two medical texts 
on the health effects of tobacco of the early 17th century.

Salager-Meyer's (pp.143-159) exam of the linguistic realisations of 
medical criticism in French, Spanish and English from the 19th to the 
20th century shows that the behavioural changes detected, e.g. 
oppositional discourse (see Valle, 1993, among others), fully mirror 
the latest evolution of scientific research.

Selosse's (pp.161-178) linguistic analysis compares how Gesner 
(1542) resorts to the medicinal custom and Bauhin (1623) to the 
botanical specialised scientific community to frame the definition of a 
botanical genre.

Taavitsainen (pp.179-196) applies the theory of appropriation 
(Chartier, 1995) and the notion of loci communes (McLean, 1980) to 
an investigation on appropriations of texts addressing a learned and a 
popular audience in late medieval and early modern English. Genres 
are crucial to different appropriations and differences between the 
layers of writing are only apparent.

III. Letters and literature (pp.197-258)

Foster (pp.199-213) synchronically and comparatively explores 
Chaucerian narrator-persona puzzle (see Garbáty, 1974; Sklute, 
1984, among others), to emphasize and show that the use of the 
rhetorical and stylistic technique of self-deprecation in discourse, in 
the Book of the Duchess and House of Fame, aims and effectively 
manages to alter an audience's perception.

Pérez-Guerra's paper (pp.215-236) attempts to integrate discourse-
based and formal phenomena in the analysis of 'marked' declarative 
sentences implying a deviation from the unmarked clausal pattern, as 
to a corpus of late Middle, Modern and Present-day English letters, 
sticking to Taavitsainen's definition of genre (2001) and arguing that it 
can be characterised as to both its complexity and its informative and 
linguistic organisation..

In his article (pp.237-256), Speyer draws on the notion of textual 
coherence, especially owing to Werth (1981) and the Centering 
Theory (Grosz et al., 1995), to explain that Seneca's are an exception 
to the model of coherent text of classical dramas, and that intended 
rupture of coherence in discourse highlights a character's mental 
challenge, certain character traits, or even that communication is 
impossible in given situations.

IV. Discourse and pragmatics (pp.257-352)

The largely qualitative corpus study of Bergs (pp.259-277) attempts to 
reconstruct the route of which as a demonstrative element, from late 
Middle English to early Modern English periods (see Jespersen, 1927; 
Fischer et al., 2000), in relation to information structuring and 
discursive organisation, as a discourse marker which backtracks to a 
previously mentioned element, ends one topic and provides a starting 
point for the next.

By diachronically analysing the uses as a conjunction, an adverb, a 
pragmatic marker of English (I) say,  Brinton (pp.279-299) shows how 
its development is best understood to involve processes of 
grammaticalisation, on the one side; how grammaticalisation, 
pragmaticalisation, lexicalisation, and idiomatisation (see Lehman, 
2002; Traugott, 2002, among others) overlap and intersect, on the 
other.

The diachronical argumentative and pragmatic approach of Rodríguez 
Somolinos (pp.301-317) to the French modal marker 'voire' follows 
Berrendoner (1987) and emphasizes how the weakening of its primary 
assertive value has resulted in a different marker, semantically close 
to the Modern French 'même' or English 'even'.

>From a functional perspective, Toyota (pp.319-339) points out how 
politeness (see Keenan, 1975; Kallia, 2002, among others) provides 
the linkage between the passive and the indefinite pronoun 
constructions, in that both create a pragmatic distance, known as 
impersonalisation, once in English rather loaded on the former now on 
the latter, given its permanent importance.

V. Language contact and discourse (pp.341-400)

Responding to the conclusions of Wright (1992), among others, on 
code-switching in late medieval Year Books legal texts, Davidson's 
(pp.343-351) exam of discourse strategies in switching between Latin 
and French to encode the reporting of pleading and procedure 
emphasizes what reports primarily and secondarily served and how 
code-switching is a formalised mode of discourse in the common law 
profession.

Wehr (pp.353-379) concentrates on the pragmeme (see 
Hammarström, 2000) focus and its subfunctions contrast, exhaustive 
listing, emphatic focus, to outline how they were marked in Old Irish 
through the cleft construction and in Old French, first by word order or 
through prosodic means, then through cleft construction in Middle 
French, which assumes there is a 'sentence-word' tendency common 
to the Celtic languages, French and Portuguese.  

After investigations on the origins of Standard English have drawn on 
the written production at Court and in the universities (see Ekwall, 
1956, among others) and in science and journalism (see Hiltunen, 
1990, among others), Wright (pp.381-399) shows the important role in 
its dissemination played by traders, through the exam of the written 
language of London merchants prior to the development of Standard 
English.

EVALUATION

The length of the review follows and attempts to witness the extension 
and consistency of the articles in this volume, which is rich and 
presents a variety of papers on very different issues, at the same time 
autonomous and worth a further insight on the one side, 
interdependent and contributing to reinforce the dynamic framework of 
historical pragmatics on the other.

REFERENCES

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Atkinson, D. (1992) The evolution of medical research writing from 
1735 to 1985. Applied Linguistics. 13: 337-374.

Bauer, L. (1983) English Word Formation [Cambridge Textbooks in 
Linguistics]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauhin, C. (1623) Pinax Theatri Botanici. Basel: König. 

Bell, A. (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1997) Diachronic relations between speech-
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770. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Giampaolo Poletto is doctoral candidate at the Doctoral School in 
Linguistics of the University of Pécs, in Hungary. His lingfields of 
interest are discourse analysis, pragmatics, and applied linguistics. His 
research focuses on humor as a discoursive strategy for young 
learners of Italian, in a cross-sectional and cross-cultural perspective.





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