Providing an ideal introduction to historical pragmatics, this guide gives students a solid grounding in historical pragmatics and teaches the methodology needed to analyse language in social, cultural and historical contexts. Using a number of case studies including politeness, news discourse, and scientific discourse, this book provides new insights into the analysis of discourse markers, interjections, terms of address and speech acts. Through focusing on the methodological problems in using historical data, students learn the key concepts in historical pragmatics, as well as covering recent work at the interface of between language and literature.

Product Description: The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in pragmatics devoted to a diachronic study of language use and human interaction in context. It covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and politeness to individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

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Product Description: This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Index of Middle English Prose will ultimately locate, identify and record all extant Middle English prose texts composed between c.1200 and c.1500. The initial volumes, the Handlistsgive descriptions of each item in a particular collection, with identification, categorisation, and full bibliographical data...read more