HUMSS - Laurel Brinton

Historical Pragmatics: Exploring language use and conventions of communication over time

Historical Pragmatics (HP) is a relatively new, cross-disciplinary field of linguistic research combining the study of language use in context with the study of the history of language(s). The phenomena studied in HP include words and phrases (e.g. discourse markers, address terms), utterances (e.g. speech acts such as commands and promises), and discourse genres (e.g. recipes, newspapers, medical discourse). In HP, the focus may be on how these manifest in particular historical periods or on how they change over time. One of the major difficulties for HP is what has been termed the “bad data” problem. In synchronic pragmatics, the subject of study is almost exclusively everyday oral discourse. This paper will discuss some of the ways in which the lack of such data for historical periods has been addressed, primarily with the collection of corpora of “speech-like” data including personal letters, court transcripts, wills, testaments, and drama texts.