This book belongs to the rapidly growing field of historical pragmatics. More specifically, it aims to lend definition to the area of historical sociopragmatics. It seeks to enhance our understanding of the language of the historical courtroom by documenting changes to the discursive roles of the most active participant groups of the English courtroom (e.g. the judges, lawyers, witnesses and defendants) in the period 1640 1760. Although the primary focus is on questions and answers, this book also analyses the use of eliciting and non-eliciting devices (e.g. requests and commands) as a means...

This book uses Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, presents speech-act theory and examines Grice s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted...

This volume presents a variety of pragmatic and discourse analytical approaches to a wide range of linguistic data and historical texts, including data from English, French, Irish, Latin, and Spanish. This diversity of research questions and methods is a feature of the field of historical pragmatics, which by its very nature has to take into account the multiplicity of historical contexts and the infinite variety of human interaction. This is highlighted in the book s introduction by means of the metaphor of "opening windows." Each chapter is a window affording a different view of the...

This volume deals with the theoretical, contrastive and lexicographical aspects of discourse particles, predominantly in German and English. The collection of papers maybe of interest to theoretical and contrastive linguists, language teachers and lexicogr

Offers snapshots of metaphor use in real language and in real lives across the different cultures of Europe and Brazil. This book contributes to the theorizing of metaphor in discourse.

A collection of essays in semantics and pragmatics that includes discussion of topics such as: distance in construction in grammar; and the conceptual basis of performativity.

Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective offers a pragmatic account of the effects achieved by the poetic use of rhetorical tropes and schemes. It contributes to the pragmatics of poetic style by developing work on stylistic effects in relevance theory. It also contributes to literary studies by proposing a new theoretical account of literariness in terms of mental representations and mental processes.
The book attempts to define literariness in terms of text-internal linguistic properties, cultural codes or special purpose reading strategies, as well as suggestions that the...

Covering nearly one thousand years, this volume explores medieval and modern English texts from fresh perspectives. Within the relatively new field of historical discourse linguistics, the synchronic analysis of large textual units and consideration of text-external features in relation to discourse has so far received little attention. To fill that gap, this volume offers studies of medieval instructional and religious texts and correspondence from the early modern period. The contributions highlight writer-audience relationships, the intended use of texts, descriptions of text-type, and...