Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund

UID:

Format: viii, 318 p. : , ill.

Edition: 1st ed.

ISBN: 1-282-15208-4 , 9786612152085 , 90-272-9141-1

Series Statement: Pragmatics & beyond ; 176

Content: 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.

Note: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph , Speech Acts in the History of English -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Preface -- Speech acts now and then -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Previous research on the history of speech acts -- 3. Key issues in historical linguistics and historical pragmatics -- 3.1 Language universals -- 3.2 Context -- 4. Pragmatic space -- 5. Speech acts and politeness -- 6. Research methods and research questions -- 7. The papers in this volume -- References -- Directives and commissives -- Directives in Old English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Methodology and data -- 3. Old English directives: Four case studies -- 3.1 Directive performatives -- 3.2 Constructions with þu scealt / ge sculon -- Table 1. þu scealt-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- Table 2. ge sculon-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- 3.3 Constructions with uton -- Table 3. uton-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- 3.4 Constructions with neodþearf -- 4. Conclusions -- References -- Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640-1760 -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Requests -- 2.1 Towards a definition of the speech act of request -- 2.2 The structure of requests: A starting point -- 2.2.1 Distinguishing the structural categories of a request -- 2.2.2 Features of the head act -- 3. (In)directness and requests -- 3.1 (In)directness: Some theoretical background -- 3.2 Classifying requests for (in)directness: A starting point -- 4. Historical methodology: Problems, solutions and implications -- 5. Our data and its sociopragmatic annotation -- 6. Requests and directness: Patterns of distribution in the Sociopragmatic Corpus (trials and plays, -- 6.1 Overall distribution. , Table 1. Frequencies of requests in the SPC -- 6.2 The distribution of broad categories of directness -- Table 2. Frequencies of types of request in the SPC -- Figure 1 and 2. The distribution of conventional indirectness in the CCSARP project (Figure 1, from -- 7. Specific strategies for conventional indirect requests and their distribution -- 8. Impositive strategies and their context -- Table 3. Impositive strategies -- Table 4. The frequencies of support moves in impositive requests -- Table 5. The frequencies of types of support move in drama and trials -- 9. Summary and discussion of major findings -- 10. Concluding remarks -- References -- An inventory of directives in Shakespeare's King Lear -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Forms and functions -- 2.1 The Early Modern inventory of imperatives and related speech forms to express directives -- 2.2 Directive speech acts - a working definition -- 2.3 Directive speech acts and their illocutionary force -- 2.4 The communicative functions and the manipulative strength of imperative clauses -- 2.5 Indirect speech acts -- 3. Shakespearean directives - methodological problems -- 4. Corpus study: King Lear's directive speech acts -- 4.1 Analysis of King Lear Act I -- 4.1.1 Scene 1 "The state division scene" (1.1.34-266) -- 4.1.2 Act I, Scene 4 "Lear and his fool" (105-117 -- 163-181) -- 4.1.3 Act I, scene 4: "Lear and Goneril" (236-278) -- 4.1.4 Summary -- 4.2. Analysis of Act II -- 4.2.1 Scene 4 "Lear and Regan" (88-119 -- 133-182 -- 188-271) -- 4.2.2 Summary -- 4.3 Analysis of Act III -- 4.3.1 Scene 2 "Storm on the Heath" (1-78) -- 4.3.2 Act III, Scene 4 "Storm still" (1-28 -- 170-180) -- 4.3.3 Summary -- 4.4 Analysis of Act IV -- 4.4.1 Scene 6 "Lear [still mad] and Gloucester" (130-180) -- 4.4.2 Act IV, Scene 7 "Lear and Cordelia" (25-83) -- 4.4.3 Summary -- 4.5 Analysis of Act V. , 4.5.1 Scene 3 "Lear and Cordelia" (8-11 -- 306-12) -- 5. Summary and conclusion -- Sources -- References -- Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Data and methodology -- 3. Analysis and discussion of findings: Form and function of requesting and undertaking commitments -- 4. Concluding observations -- References -- No botmeles bihestes -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Method and material -- 3. Speech acts and their linguistic realisations in history -- 4. Promises as speech acts -- 5. The "binding promise" in the medieval period -- 6. The "magic words" - different ways of making a commitment -- 7. The texts studied -- 8. The magic words in use -- 9. Summary of ways of promising and eliciting promises -- References -- Expressives and assertives -- Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi -- 1. Introductory remarks -- 2. The chronological development of greeting terms -- 3. Iconemes and etymologies: Where do greetings come from? -- 3.1 Expressive phrases, attention-getters -- 3.2 Phrases with a performative verb -- 3.3 Wish for a good time of the day -- 3.4 Wish for God's protection -- 3.5 Wish for peace -- 3.6 Wish for well-being -- 3.7 Inquiry about well-being -- 3.8 Sign of subversiveness -- 3.9 Happy about seeing each other -- 3.10 Loan expressions -- 4. Formal and functional developments: Where do greetings go? -- 4.1 Functional changes -- 4.2 Discursive changes -- 4.3 Morphonetic changes -- 4.4 Morphosyntactic changes and anomalies -- 4.5 Morphosyntactic conservation -- 4.6 Stylistic changes and conservations -- 4.7 The need for innovation -- 5. Conclusions -- "Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever" -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Face-threatening and face-enhancing acts -- 3. Present-day compliments -- 4. Compliments in the past -- 5. Methodologies of compliment research -- 6. Locating compliments in historical materials. , 7. Two examples in their sociohistorical context -- 8. Fiction as data -- 9. Gender differences in early fiction corpora -- 9.1 Female authors' compliments -- 9.2 Male authors' compliments -- 10. Discussion and conclusion -- Corpora -- References -- Apologies in the history of English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Apology as a speech act: Criteria for comparison -- 3. Contrastive versus historical speech act analysis -- 4. Apology as a speech act in Present-day and Renaissance English -- 5. Data -- 6. Negotiations of interpersonal relations: Typical manifestations of apologies in our data -- 7. Forms of apologies in Renaissance prose fiction and prose drama -- 8. Functions of apologies: Types of offences -- 9. Addressee- and speaker-oriented apologies -- 10. Conclusion -- Methods of speech act retrieval -- Showing a little promise -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Aim and method -- 3. Corpus-based studies of speech acts -- 4. The corpus data -- 5. Identifying prototypical promises -- 6. Results and analysis -- Figure 1. Performative verb frequencies in the testing data -- Table 1. Performative verb frequencies in the training data -- Table 2. Performative verb frequencies in the testing data -- Figure 2. Performative verb frequencies by author -- Figure 3. Pattern frequencies in the testing data -- Figure 4. Pattern frequencies by performative verb -- 7. Retrieval software performance -- Table 3. Precision and recall rates for performative verbs -- Table 4. Precision and recall rates for query patterns -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Appendix A: Penn Treebank part-of-speech tagset -- Fishing for compliments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Methodological challenges -- 3. Points of departure -- 3.1 Definitions of compliments -- 3.2 Method: Combining quantitative and qualitative assessment -- 3.3 Inter-annotator agreement -- 4. Assessment of the patterns -- 4.1 Pattern 1. , 4.2 Pattern 2 -- 4.3 Pattern 3 -- 4.4 Pattern 4 -- 4.5 Pattern 5 -- 4.6 Pattern 6 -- 4.7 Pattern 7 -- 4.8 Pattern 8 -- 4.9 Pattern 9 -- 5. Discussion -- 5.1 Query problems -- Table 1. Compliment pattern frequencies in Manes and Wolfson's data and in the BNC -- Figure 1. Compliment pattern frequencies in the BNC graphically compared to Manes and Wolfson's (M& -- W -- 5.2 Precision and recall revisited -- Table 2. Frequencies of compliment patterns in BNC, manual assessment -- 6. Conclusions -- References -- Tracing directives through text and time -- 1. Introduction -- 2. A genre-based bottom-up methodology: The basic steps -- 3. A study of directives -- 3.1 The data -- 3.2 Manifestations of directives -- 3.3 Results: Variability and retrievability -- Figure 1. Distribution of manifestations of directives in the data (in per cent) -- 3.4 Results: Distribution across genres -- Figure 2. Frequency of directives in sermons, letters and prayers (freq. per 1,000 words) -- Figure 3. Distribution of manifestations of directives in sermons (in per cent) -- Figure 4. Distribution of manifestations of directives in letters (in per cent) -- Figure 5. Distribution of manifestations of directives in prayers (in per cent) -- 3.5 Extending the analysis -- Table 1. Directives with let us / let's in the Early Modern part of the Helsinki Corpus (frequency p -- Figure 6. Frequency of directive performatives in sermons, letters and prayers (freq. per 10,000 wor -- 4. Conclusions -- Sources -- References -- Name index -- Subject index -- The Pragmatics & -- Beyond New Series. , English

Additional Edition: ISBN 90-272-5420-6

Language: English