This chapter provides a summary of the book, which has attempted to describe the scope and nature of historical pragmatics in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and bring together a wide range of studies in the field. The chapter then reflects on issues arising from such studies and on gaps or limitations of existing work. Finally, it looks ahead to future research possibilities in the field of historical pragmatics.
9.1 Summary
This book begins with two chapters delimiting the field of historical pragmatics. These set the groundwork for six focused, topical chapters exemplifying the range and scope of historical pragmatic study.
Historical pragmatics has been defined as “a field of enquiry that investigates patterns of language use in earlier periods, the diachronic development of such usage patterns, and pragmatic explanations for language change in general” (Reference Jucker, Allan and JaszczoltJucker 2012b: 510). It represents a convergence of historical linguistics (the study of language variation and change) and pragmatics (the study of language in use). The rise of historical pragmatics in the mid-1990s was the result of changes in both linguistics and pragmatics. The field of linguistics in the post-generative era underwent a number of paradigmatic shifts: a reawakened interest in historical study in the latter part of the twentieth century, combined with an emphasis on language as performance, not competence, on the everyday and sometimes ephemeral aspects of language, on meanings as negotiated in use rather than inherently stable, with the importance of social and cultural factors in shaping language use, and the increased importance of the collection and analysis of empirical data, made easier by the development of computer corpora. Changes in the field of pragmatics also enabled the development of historical pragmatics. Early work in pragmatics focused exclusively on oral conversational data as the source of pragmatic meaning. However, it came to be acknowledged that all discourse, whether spoken or written, consisted of communicative acts produced in a social and cultural context and is thus a valid subject of pragmatic study. We see the scope of historical pragmatics spanning the two branches of pragmatics, the Anglo-American or “micro-pragmatic” branch and the European Continental or “macro-pragmatic” branch, with two aligned fields – historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics – having affinity with the latter.
The field of historical pragmatics encompasses “historical pragmatics (proper),” with a synchronic focus on pragmatic forms and functions in an earlier stage of the language, and “diachronic pragmatics,” with a dynamic focus on changes in pragmatic forms and functions over time. Within each subfield, it is also possible to study different linguistic levels, from either a synchronic or a diachronic perspective (either in or over time). On the level of expressions – words, phrases, and clauses – the approach taken is typically form-to-function, moving from a concrete linguistic form to its discourse-pragmatic functions. On the level of utterance – for example, speech acts or strategies of politeness – the approach taken is typically function-to-form, moving from a speech act function or politeness phenomenon to its formal exponents. And on the level of discourse, including register and genre, the approach may move from the formal conventions of a genre to their pragmatic functions or from the pragmatic dimensions of a genre to their formal expression. The lack of naturally occurring oral conversation and oral narrative from the past, where pragmatic meaning, especially relating to speaker attitude and speaker–hearer interaction, would be most obviously manifest, has been termed the “bad data” problem and seen as a challenge for historical pragmatic study. Nonetheless, the recognition that there is not an absolute dichotomy between speech and writing goes some way in addressing this concern. Medieval prose and verse growing out of the ancient oral tradition is known to retain many oral features. Moreover, from early periods, we have records which, while they come down to us in written form, represent authentic (“speech-based”) dialogue (court transcripts, depositions, parliamentary proceedings), constructed or “speech-purposed” dialogue (dramatic and fictional dialogue), or material intended for oral delivery (sermons, prayers), and “speech-like” texts that are more or less colloquial in nature (personal letters, diaries). It is the “digital turn” in linguistics that has made many of these documents accessible for study in multi-genre and more specialized single-genre electronic corpora. The pragmatic annotation of these corpora, however, remains in its infancy.
A central area of study within historical pragmatics concerns the rise and function of pragmatic markers – or discourse markers – in the history of English. Here, the focus may be either on the function of pragmatic markers during a particular period or on their development over time. An underlying assumption of diachronic study is that pragmatic markers develop from content words, phrases, or clauses that acquire a distinctive syntactic form and discourse-pragmatic functions over time. In their development pragmatic markers follow various pathways, from adverb > conjunction > pragmatic marker, from sentence-internal adverb > sentential adverb > pragmatic marker, from main clause > ambiguous clause > parenthetical, from adverbial or imperative clause > pragmatic marker. Detailed studies of pragmatic markers in the history of English have shown that the historical data may be inconclusive about the pathway followed and require nuanced interpretation. The “matrix clause hypothesis” – the hypothesis that clausal pragmatic markers begin as main clauses and develop through an indeterminate stage following that-deletion into moveable parentheticals – does not always find confirmation in the historical data. The process of language change that best accounts for the development of pragmatic markers, including lexicalization, pragmaticalization, grammaticalization, and cooptation, is still a matter of scholarly debate, though the majority view is that if “grammar” is broadly understood, pragmatic markers are best seen as undergoing grammaticalization (including decategorialization and desemanticization).
The choices one makes for how the speech and thought of others is incorporated onto one’s discourse are pragmatically motivated by, for example, how one evaluates this speech and thought or how one wishes to organize the discourse by foregrounding or backgrounding the quoted material. The categories of speech and thought representation have undergone change over time, as have the norms of speech and thought representation in different genres. Tracing the norms of speech and thought representation and the distribution of the different categories over time poses difficulties because different categories predominate in different genres, and existing historical studies do not give a comprehensive account of all genres in different periods. Overall, we can say with confidence that in all periods, speech presentation is more common than thought presentation and there is a general trend from more indirect (narrator-controlled, summarizing) forms of representation, such as indirect speech and narrative representation of thought, to more direct (autonomous or non-narrator-controlled, verbatim) forms, such as direct thought. (Free) direct speech is almost universally the norm for speech representation. In Old and Middle English we find mixed forms involving “slippage” between direct and indirect speech, but the conventionalization of quotation marks in Early Modern English led to the clearer marking of direct speech. For the representation of thought, internal narration takes over in the modern period from narrative representation of thought and indirect thought. Free indirect discourse did not exist in earlier English, arising perhaps in proto-form in the seventeenth century, but conventionalized fully only in the course of the nineteenth century. It is now used more often for the representation of thought than of speech. The inventory of reporting verbs has also changed over time. The most common verb of Old English, cweþan, developed into an invariable quotative marker, quoth, which then became obsolete. It was replaced in Middle English by seien ‘say’, which has remained the most common, neutral reporting verb. Present-day English is characterized by the rise of new reporting verbs, especially go and be like.
Politeness is at its core a pragmatic phenomenon, and we see changes in both the types of politeness and the forms of politeness used over time. Politeness has been conceptualized as the avoidance of face-threatening acts or as the enhancement of communicative concord. The Old English period was an era of “discernment” politeness, stemming from the fixed social hierarchy of the time; Christianity introduced politeness of humility. The Middle English period saw the rise of “deference” politeness following the French fashion (i.e., the honorific system of second-person pronouns). A face-based system began in Early Modern English, but studies are not consistent in finding this to be a positive or negative politeness system. Changing social structures led to the loss of the deference politeness system. The eighteenth century extolled polite manners and behavior and the use of highly formalized compliments, thus earning the designation “compliment culture.” The modern period is characterized by “non-imposition” politeness, most obvious in the development of indirect directives (negative politeness) of the can/could/will/would you type in the twentieth century. At the same time, a system of “camaraderie” politeness, which increases solidarity and eliminates distance between individuals, coexists (positive politeness). Four case studies of politeness exemplify changing politeness forms in the history of English: (i) compliments, showing a change from ritual to personal compliments; (ii) insults, likewise changing from ritual to personal insults, with ludic ritual insults continuing in certain cultural contexts; (iii) thanking, showing the rise of elliptical expressions (thanks, thank you), highly codified forms in the eighteenth century, and the development of a discourse (closing) function for thanks in the modern period; and (iv) responses to thanks, showing increasing frequency after Early Modern English and the development of different types and forms in the modern period (no problem, no worries).
The study of speech acts presents a number of challenges for historical pragmatics. Given the relatively rare use of performative verbs, the form-to-function approach offers limited possibilities, though it has been shown that speech-act uses of verbs develop from non-performative origins. Identifying speech-act functions in historical texts/periods and their formal manifestations (i.e., the function-to-form approach) is fraught with difficulties. Methods that have been devised for the study of speech acts that address these difficulties include close readings of texts/corpora and speech-act annotations of corpora, or focus on performative verbs, illocutionary-force-indicating devices, and/or metacommunicative labels. Historical studies of a range of speech acts, including directives, commissives, and expressives, have exposed changes not only in the formal manifestations of speech acts over time but also in the nature of the speech acts themselves. Directives in earlier English would seem to be more direct than we find today, but this can be attributed to the more fixed social structure, not to less politeness. In Middle English society, commissives were “binding,” regardless of the conditions under which they were uttered, whereas now they rest fundamentally upon the sincerity condition of the speaker. Apologies, curses, greetings, and leave-takings represent expressives that have undergone change in the history of English, both in respect to their formal expression and their functional profile. Secular apologies begin to appear in Middle English, with speaker-oriented (I’m sorry) coming to replace addressee-oriented (excuse me) apologies and a weakening of the force of apologies in general in contemporary society. Curses evolved from execratory (declarative) to exclamatory (expressive) in nature. Forms of greeting and leave-taking proliferated over time and often weakened in meaning, such as how do you do no longer serving as an inquiry about one’s well-being or goodbye (< God be with you) no longer serving as a blessing.
Address terms, both second-person pronouns and nominal terms of address (used vocatively), serve essential pragmatic functions in negotiating interpersonal relations, for example in expressing closeness, affection, distance, respect, and so on, and are fundamentally related to matters of politeness. Both systems have changed in the history of English in the direction of less honorific-based, more camaraderie-based systems. While data in Old English are scanty, in Middle English we begin to have texts in which address terms are common, including constructed dialogue (in drama and fiction) and authentic dialogue (in personal letters, court proceedings, and witness depositions). Second-person pronouns, originally distinguishing singular and plural in Old English, began in Middle English to distinguish differences between interlocutors, with the singular thou denoting lesser rank/status/age/power or increased solidarity, intimacy, or informality and the plural you denoting higher rank/status/age/power or greater social/emotional distance or formality. The use of these pronouns for a range of affective purposes became prominent in Early Modern English, especially in literary texts, where sometimes bewildering shifts between the pronouns (what has been called “retractability”) were used for literary purposes. Nonetheless, loss of thou for a variety of sociolinguistic reasons was complete by 1700 or even earlier in the “standard” dialect of London and the East, leaving English without an honorific form or a number distinction in the second person. The nominal system of address underwent less systematic change, but moved in the same general direction. The elaborate vocative system we see in Early Modern English, which carefully delineated a person’s rank and status, was replaced by a more diffuse collection of vocative terms, with preference increasingly given to personal names (especially first names), familiar family names, “familiarizers,” and endearments, all of which serve to increase rapport between individuals and create a sense of equality. They are part of the phenomenon of camaraderie politeness, which is dominant in Present-day English.
Finally, pragmatic factors operate on the discourse level, including register, genre, and style. Applying a multidimensional analysis to style, Reference Biber and FineganBiber and Finegan (1989, Reference Biber, Finegan, Rissanen, Ihalainen, Nevalainen and Taavitsainen1992) reveal a gradual drift from “literate” to “oral” style over the history of English, but not by an entirely direct path and not in all genres universally. Registers, or discourse domains, are shaped by pragmatic factors over time. For example, the news register has undergone substantial change with the rise of the newspaper in the seventeenth century leading to the introduction of numerous new types of publications, such as television, radio, and internet news, and new genres, such as editorials, obituaries, or weather forecasts. In contrast, the religious register has a history going back to Old English and has shown remarkable stability. Two genres within the religious register, prayers and sermons, have undergone little change in respect to function, structure, and linguistic characteristics. The recipe genre, in contrast, exhibits a substantial set of changes. While the function of recipes remained constant (i.e., instructions on how to prepare or do something), thus accounting for the imperative as the defining linguistic form, we find differences in the content of recipes (medicinal vs. culinary, with the gradual demise of medicinal recipes over time), in the audience of recipes (e.g., the professional vs. the amateur cook, or the professional doctor vs. the lay healer), in the structural elements found in recipes (e.g., separation of the ingredients and the procedural steps), and in characteristic linguistic features (such as the introduction of null objects and telegraphic style).
9.2 Future Directions
This book has focused on historical pragmatic study exclusively in English. While early work in the field was primarily (though not exclusively) focused on English, the expansion of the field has led to historical pragmatic studies in a large variety of languages, including ancient (e.g., Greek, Latin, Egyptian), medieval (e.g., Old Occitan, Old Italian, Old High German), and contemporary (e.g., Italian, French, German), as well as non-Indo-European languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean, Chinese), as is obvious by a glance through the table of contents of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics. We can expect that an ever increasing variety of languages will come under the scrutiny of historical pragmatists.
As we have seen throughout this book, electronic corpora have played a central role in (almost) all historical pragmatic study and have become the methodological norm today. We can expect to see the increasing development of genre-specific (“second generation”) corpora which are more and more sophisticated (with access to source manuscripts, variant editions, original and standardized spelling and so on, and with part-of-speech and syntactic tagging). Indeed, a number of genre-specific corpora are currently under construction, partially completed, or recently released; others are available, but not in the public domain. A few of these include the following:Footnote 1
A Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) – Some but not all of this corpus (letters dated from 1731 to 1940) is available (CORIECOR visualized. Irish English in writing across time [a longitudinal historical perspective]).Footnote 2
Corpus of Early English Recipes (CoER) – See Reference Alonso-Almeida, Ortega-Barrera and Quintana-ToledoAlonso-Almeida et al. (2012).
Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing – This corpus includes subcorpora on chemistry, life sciences, history, and astronomyFootnote 3 – See also Reference Moskowich, Puente-Castelo, Crespo-García and GonzaloMoskowich et al. (2021).
The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose – The Late Middle English (1350–1500)Footnote 4 and Early Modern English (1500–1700)Footnote 5 subcorpora are available; these include unedited material dealing with medicine. A Late Modern English subcorpus (1700–1900) of printed texts is being prepared. See Reference Miranda García and Calle-MartínMiranda García and Calle-Martín (2012).
We also look forward to more of The Old Bailey Proceedings Online being coded as part of the Old Bailey Corpus (a 3rd edition is to be released), as well as further updates and expansions of the ARCHER corpus.Footnote 6 We would also hope to see advances in the automatic pragmatic annotation of (historical) corpora, which a decade ago, Reference Jucker, Östmann and VerschuerenJucker (2013: 4) was pessimistic about (“Pragmatic information still seems to defy automatic processing”).
A number of the distinctions set out in the first two chapters of this book may need to be re-evaluated. First, as many of the studies summarized here have made obvious, the distinction between form-to-function and function-to-form is often difficult to maintain, as form and function are intrinsically interconnected. Nor is it necessarily a useful distinction or one that can always easily be made. Second, also difficult to maintain is the division between the subfields of historical pragmatics (proper) and diachronic pragmatics. The function of pragmatic forms, like all linguistic forms, is in constant flux, responding to the needs of interlocutors and the effects of contextual interactions. When viewing large periods of time, such as Middle English or Early Modern English, we should have no expectation that pragmatic forms and functions would remain unchanged. The extent to which the separation between historical pragmatics (proper) and diachronic pragmatics can be maintained, however, rests on the focus in the latter on the syntactic origins of and processes of semantico-syntactic change affecting pragmatic forms; this emphasis is especially the case in regard to pragmatic markers, which are assumed to originate in fully referential forms and undergo semantic and syntactic change on their path to pragmatic markers (whether they are understood to undergo grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or cooptation). Third, the division between historical pragmatics and what has been termed “historical sociopragmatics” is often blurred. The two approaches in fact work in tandem: historical sociopragmatics seeks to understand how the sociohistorical conditions of language use provide motivations for pragmatic forms and processes over time, while historical pragmatics examines the ways in which pragmatic forms and processes of pragmatic change give us insight into the sociohistorical context. As Archer notes, it might be better to speak of “historical (socio)pragmatic linguistics,” since pragmatic is by definition social: “[m]any studies with historical pragmatics combine the sociopragmatic and the pragmalinguistic perspective … or the component and perspective views” (Reference Archer2017: 332).
In coming years, register and genre offer many new possibilities for pragmatic study. Chapter 8 was able only to scratch the surface by looking at the register of religion (the genres of prayer and sermons) and the genre of recipes, with briefer attention to the news register and the genre of the personal letter. Within the field at large, the focus of such studies to date has been the registers of science and medicine, religion, law (and the courtroom), news, and correspondence and their associated genres. But there are a myriad of other registers and genres awaiting pragmatic study. One area that is receiving increased attention is the “pragmatics of fiction” (see, for example, Reference JuckerLocher and Jucker 2017). But in many ways, this is not new. The field of “literary pragmatics” can be traced back to the early 1990s (e.g., Reference SellSell 1991). Linking pragmatic theory with literary analysis, it “uses ideas from pragmatics to the benefit of literary analysis” and is “inevitably interpretive” (Reference Pilkington and CummingsPilkington 2010: 251). Pragmatic concepts such as deixis, presupposition, implicature, relevance, the cooperative principle, speech acts, (im)politeness, and turn-taking are analyzed in literary texts (plays, novels, poems) in order to enhance or justify particular literary interpretations of those texts. In contrast, the focus of the “pragmatics of fiction” is essentially not interpretive. Reference JuckerJucker (2015: 67) argues “that a pragmatic analysis might possibly provide some additional layers of literary interpretation but also – and perhaps more importantly – that fictional language provides a fertile data source for pragmaticists if it is not seen as a deviation from more basic forms of language but as a specific form of communication with its own characteristic features that warrant an analysis in and of itself.” Reference JuckerJucker (2015: 63) first emphasizes that fictive language may in many ways “seem an unlikely candidate for pragmatic analyses” because it is far removed from spontaneous oral conversation (the usual data for pragmatic analysis); fiction is typically written (though drama is intended for oral delivery), carefully planned and edited, and often subject to artificial conventions such as meter and rhyme. But Jucker argues that if fiction is accepted for what it is and not apologized for as an imperfect representation of “actual speech,” then pragmatic analysis is possible. More importantly, the pragmatics of fiction has as its focus the identification of the pragmatic features of a genre, that is, the pragmatic forms which characterize fictive texts in general. Areas of interest include the pragmatic resources used for characterization, voice, stance, emotion, (im)politeness, speech representation, et cetera. The pragmatics of fiction has not to date had a strong historical focus (see the handbook by Reference JuckerLocher and Jucker [2015], which has only one chapter on language change, but see Reference FitzmauriceFitzmaurice [2010]). However, as we have seen throughout this book, historical pragmaticists have relied heavily on literary texts for their data sources, because until recently, non-literary texts were not always easily available and conversational data was nonexistent. For example, historical pragmatic studies for Middle English have relied heavily on Chaucer and for Early Middle English on Shakespeare. While it is not necessary to throw out such studies, it is perhaps necessary to moderate the pragmatic conclusions arrived at in these earlier studies in light of what is emerging within the growing field of the pragmatics of fiction. That is, it cannot be assumed that the use of thou and you in Shakespeare, for instance, is consonant with the everyday language of the time, but it must be recognized that it is shaped by the demands of the dramatic genre. We have actually seen quite a few examples in the course of the preceding chapters where genre plays a highly significant role, whether in the use of thou and you in witness depositions as opposed to trial proceedings and in contrast to Shakespeare or in the representation of speech in witness depositions in contrast to that in novels or newspapers.
Despite thirty years of concentrated work, there remains much to be done in the study of pragmatics in the history of English. While there are always more and newly emerging pragmatic markers to be studied (see, e.g., Reference McColm, Trousdale, Yáñez-Bouza, Moore, Linda and HollmanMcColm and Trousdale 2019 on whatever) and more debate about the process(es) responsible for the development of pragmatic markers (see, e.g., Reference Heine, Kaltenböck, Kuteva and LongHeine et al. 2021), a fruitful approach taken in recent work by Reference TraugottTraugott (2020, Reference Traugott2022) is a historical constructionalist perspective. Examining an interrelated set of discourse structuring markers, including elaborative markers (also, further(more), moreover), contrastive markers (but, all the same, instead), digressive markers (by the way, by the by, incidentally, parenthetically), and ‘return to topic’ markers (to return to X point, back to X point/topic), Traugott argues that these constitute a constructional schema generalizing over individual micro-constructions which develop from different sources, generally circumstance adverbials, occurring in recurrent discourse contexts, following similar paths, and progressing either to the stage of “minimally pragmatic,” monofunctional discourse structuring markers or conjuncts (e.g., in addition, instead) or to the stage of fully pragmatic, multifunctional Discourse markers (e.g., after all, by the way) by processes of “constructionalization” and “post-constructionalization.” No matter what theoretical perspective one adopts, Traugott’s work shows clearly the importance of seeing pragmatic markers not as individual and autonomous forms but rather as parts of larger (and overlapping) networks of similarly behaving (and similarly developing) constructions. We might, for example, wish to examine the rise of epistemic parentheticals in a similar framework, where we see some as more fully pragmaticalized, such as I reckon, I gather, I find, and others as more contentful, such as I think, I believe, I guess. Do these arise in similar discourse contexts and follow similar paths of development?
In the chapter on speech and thought representation, we saw that it was difficult to compare studies because they were disparate not only in period covered but also in genre or register examined. Register/genre seems to be a strong factor in respect to the types and norms of speech and thought representation used. There is considerable room, therefore, for historical studies (similar to that of Reference Semino and ShortSemino and Short [2004] for Present-day English) that take a cross-genre approach. In addition, although we have studies of Middle English and Early Modern English speech and thought representation, with the exception of B. Busse’s study of the nineteenth-century novel and research on free indirect discourse (e.g., Reference FludernikFludernik 1993; Reference VandelanotteVandelanotte 2009) mainly focused on contemporary English, the Late Modern English period has been relatively neglected.
While we have a recent monograph on politeness in the history of English (Reference JuckerJucker 2020), there remain unanswered questions. As we saw, for example, scholars are divided as to whether Early Modern English can be characterized as a period of positive or negative politeness and what changes, if any, occurred over the course the period. Reference JuckerJucker’s (2020: 187–188) description of the period as one of both “deference” and “solidarity” politeness is not entirely successful in avoiding the contradiction between “negative” and “positive” politeness. Likewise, Present-day English has been characterized as a period of both negative (non-imposition) politeness and positive (camaraderie) politeness. Reference LeechLeech (2014) ends his discussion of politeness by questioning whether politeness is declining in English. He cites Reference Lakoff, Lakoff and SachikoLakoff’s (2005) examples of instances where politeness has come under pressure, in large part from electronic media, where interactions are frequent, multiple, and often anonymous, where speaker and hearer are unlikely ever to enter into a social relationship, where informalization is predominant, and where an adversarial system (adopted from politics and law) is institutionalized. Lakoff lists nine cases of “impoliteness,” such as cursing and non-politically correct language, sexual coarseness in public, violence in the media, “agonism” (unwillingness to acknowledge middle ground), negative political advertising, displays of hostility (e.g., road/air rage), “flaming” on the internet and/or loss of polite conventions (e.g., thank you, please). Nonetheless, Leech believes that impoliteness is a “minority phenomenon,” and that while bivalent politeness has declined, trivalent politeness remains strong. This is certainly a question that requires further investigation.
Speech acts are a functional category, depending on the illocutionary force of an utterance, or the communicative intention of the speaker. The study of speech acts thus requires a function-to-form approach, which would seem to necessitate a close reading of a text or corpus extract. In order to study speech acts (semi-)automatically in a corpus – which requires a search string – a number of work-arounds have been developed, namely, searches for performative verbs, for illocutionary-force-indicating devices (IFIDs), for syntactic patterns typical of particular speech acts, and for metacommunicative speech-act labels. These are all essentially form-to-function approaches and are thus fundamentally problematic: they require pre-existing knowledge of the relevant speech-act forms in earlier stages of the language. We can hope that with improved pragmatic annotation of corpora (see above), we will have more trustworthy means of studying speech acts in earlier English corpora. Not only do the forms used for expressing the speech acts change in significant ways over time, but also the very nature of the speech act, its illocutionary force, or what Reference JuckerJucker (2018) calls its “functional profile,” may change over time. And this can pose a problem since we usually take the illocutionary force of a speech act as the starting point of diachronic studies. What counts as a particular speech act in earlier English and in Present-day English may be very different. For example, we have seen that curses, which originally served as declaratives that (were believed to) bring the wrath of God upon their recipients, have become expressives, merely giving voice to the ill will of the speaker against the hearer. Promises, which in the “binding promises” of medieval times did not depend upon the sincerity condition of the speaker, now rest fundamentally upon this condition. The religious invocation expressed by the leave-taking expression God be with you/God by you has now become a neutral form of leave-taking, Goodbye. Greetings such as How are you? and especially How do you do?, originally serving as requests concerning the well-being of the recipient, are now conventionalized and propositionally empty greetings. In the case of thanking, fully performative forms (I give you thanks/I thank you) have given way to shortened forms (thank you/thanks), which Reference AijmerAijmer (1996: 72, 76–77) says do not express “real gratitude” but are used more in response to polite greetings or in response for minor services or trivial acts of kindness. Moreover, thanking is frequently used as a means to close a discourse segment, where it serves as a “discourse marker” and has “very little meaning” (Reference AijmerAijmer 1996: 52–66). Thank you/thanks can also be used ironically (e.g., thank you for nothing). Similarly, responses to thanks that express pleasure or appreciation (e.g., my pleasure, you’re welcome) or those that minimize the favor (e.g., don’t mention it, it was no trouble) are being replaced by simple acknowledgments (e.g., okay, all right). Responses to thanks also come to reinforce the discourse function of thanking, and an ironic use of you’re welcome is also possible (see Reference BrintonBrinton 2021).
Reference JuckerJucker (2019) sees these changes in speech acts as a unidirectional process of weakening or “attenuation.” He notes that apologies have become more common, often uttered for minor infractions, which the apologizer playfully calls attention to with new expressions such as oops, whoops, my bad. Thus, the “illocutionary potential [of apologies] has been maximally weakened, i.e. attenuated, and they are fully pragmaticalized, i.e. the semantic transparency has largely been lost and their interpretation increasingly relies on the specific context in which they occur” (16). Jucker suggests that other speech acts such as promises (which have become insincere and devoid of commitment) may undergo similar attenuation. Reference LeechLeech (2014) sees the bleaching of meaning in these cases as what he calls “pragmaticalization,” in which forms become devoid of meaning and develop into pragmatic markers (e.g., in the case of pardon). This is a topic which requires further study. We know that in language change processes of weakening are typically balanced by processes of strengthening. We also know that new IFIDs for the expression of speech acts are always entering the language (e.g., apologize for apologies) or IFIDs are coopted for new purposes (e.g., promise or insist as strong representatives). Thus, a unidirectional and irreversible process of speech-act weakening would deplete the language of true speech acts and reduce language to a series of minimal speech acts with reduced or empty force.
While the use of thou and you and the eventual replacement of the former by the latter in English would seem to have been exhaustively studied, we saw that scholarly attention has been strongly focused on the use of these pronouns in Shakespeare. In these dramatic texts, intricate switches between thou and you – or what has been termed “retractability” – make it clear that the pronouns’ use is in large part motivated by literary demands (of characterization, plot development, and so on). Thus, the use of the second-person pronouns in Shakespeare perhaps tells us more about the dramatic genre in Elizabethan times than it does about contemporary (non-literary) usage. As U. Busse notes at the conclusion of his study of the use of thou and you in Shakespeare, “Although we should not believe that Shakespeare had any reason to present inauthentic language, it must be emphasised that some of the pronoun choices may have been made for the sake of rhyme and metre, the requirements of genre, plot or a particular scene, to achieve a certain dramatic effect, etc. … we should not conclude that the language of drama with its carefully constructed speeches bore any close resemblance to real people talking …” (Reference Busse2003: 216). As more studies appear on the use of thou and you in non-literary genres, such as witness depositions, trial proceedings, and personal letters, we may begin to acquire a somewhat clearer understanding of pronoun usage in Elizabethan England and the extent to which sociolinguistic factors, including socioeconomic class, gender, age, and regional variety, influenced usage – and ultimately led to the loss of thou.
Another aspect of pronoun usage which bears closer study is the way in which speakers have restored the singular–plural distinction in the second person by innovating new plural forms. A wide variety of these new pronouns are found in regional American English dialects (as well as other dialects), including yous (variously youse, yez, yiz, yooz, youze, etc.), you-all, y’all, youse-all, you-uns, you-uns all, you guys, and youse guys. There is some evidence that y’all, characteristic of the Midland and Southern US, is now spreading throughout American English (see Reference BlackBlack 2019). The Dictionary of American English (DARE) cites all of these forms from the early to mid-nineteenth century; similar datings are given for most of these recorded in the OED. The editors of DARE admit, however, that for you-all “its early history is poorly documented.” Examples of y’all appear in EModE verse, for example, where the contractions would seem to be required by the demands of the verse:
a. The captiue men of strength I gaue to you,
The weaker sold; and this y’all know is true,
The free-borne women ransom’d, or set free
For pittie sake, the seruile sort had yee: (1631 Lisle, The Faire Æthiopian; cited in Reference BlackBlack 2019; https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A02903.0001.001?view=toc)
b. Ta. A race of Criples, are y’all
Issue of Snayles, he could not else have scap’t us.
Now, what newes bring you? (1646 Suckling, The Goblins; ED)
Fuller historical study is obviously called for. Interestingly, both you-all/y’all (DARE, s.v. you-all, pron, def. A2) and youse (DARE, s.v. youse, pron, def. 2) can be used for singular reference as well. According to DARE, you guys (DARE, s.v. you guys, pron), though originally referring to males, is “now generally used as a genderless pron[oun].” This statement may need to be re-evaluated, however, given contemporary views of gender and pronoun usage. Reference BlackBlack (2019) speculates that y’all may be developing as the gender-neutral form of you guys. In general, of course, gendered/non-gendered pronoun usage has become a pragmatically fraught area deserving of more careful study.
With obsolescence of the honorific system of second-person pronouns in English, the pragmatic importance of vocatives has grown. Yet apart from B. Busse’s monumental study of vocatives in Shakespeare (Reference Busse2006) and some attention to vocatives in letters of the time (e.g., Reference NevalaNevala 2003, Reference Nevala2004, Reference Nevala2010), historical study of vocatives has been limited. Changing patterns of vocative use over time call for more careful and detailed study (see, for example, the sample study of lady which begins Chapter 7).
In conclusion, while we have witnessed the expansion and growing maturity of the field of historical pragmatics since its inception in the 1990s, it remains in some respects an emerging field which presents a rich potential for future research.
