Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.
1. Preface;
2. Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of
English (by Taavitsainen, Irma);
3. Part I. Directives and commissives;
4.
Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? (by Kohnen, Thomas);
5.
Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and
play-texts, 1640-1760 (by Culpeper, Jonathan);
6. An inventory of directives
in Shakespeare's King Lear (by Busse, Ulrich);
7. Two polite speech acts from
a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and
undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community (by
Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella);
8. "No botmeles bihestes": Various ways of
making binding promises in Middle English (by Pakkala-Weckstrom, Mari);
9.
Part II: Expressives and assertives;
10. Hal, Hail, Hello, Hi: Greetings in
English language history (by Grzega, Joachim);
11. "Methinks you seem more
beautiful than ever": Compliments and gender in the history of English (by
Taavitsainen, Irma);
12. Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and
lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret (by Jucker, Andreas H.);
13. Part III: Methods of speech act retrieval;
14. Showing a little promise:
Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of
written prose (by Valkonen, Petteri);
15. Fishing for compliments: Precision
and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research (by Jucker, Andreas H.);
16. Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of
corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis (by Kohnen, Thomas);
17. Index
