Impoliteness in women’s specialised writing in seventeenth-century English

The notion of impoliteness may not trigger prompt associations with earlier women writing, especially non-fiction, in the pre-scientific period. Evidence drawn from seventeenth-century scientific and technical writings reveals that women make use of impoliteness strategies in order to claim and delineate their place within their community of practice. In our texts, we have detected that membership to communities of practice justifies the women’s use of positive impoliteness and sarcasm devices. Interestingly, the stereotypical female weakness represents a source for sarcastic speech, as this may offer women writers a protective shield against male critical stance. Negative impoliteness seems to be potentially related to establish power relationships and position in relation to knowledge. The idea is that scientific and technical contributions should be impartially appraised without considering the sex of the author. Impoliteness appears to be a potential means of legitimising women writers’ voices.

A Grammar of Authority?

Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative–functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying “grammar of authority”.

Systemic change and interactional motivation

The paper focusses on the language-internal and -external motivations for the development of Chinese sentence-final particle bucheng. This particle, from an initial state as a negative verb string, developed into a sentence-final particle through intermediate adverbial stages, and was recruited to interpersonal functions in final position by the sixteenth century. Key motivating factors are identified for the expansion of its functional range, with particular attention to the development of the Written Vernacular in Early Modern Chinese and to interactional echoic contexts that contribute to the right-ward movement and thence the rise of the particle. Exploration of the diachronic development of bucheng not only expands the known inventory of morphosyntactic processes and linguistic contexts that give rise to pragmatic devices clause-finally but also yields a better understanding of the right-ward movement of lexemes towards clause-/utterance-final position.

Turbulent periods and the development of the scientific research article, 1735–1835

The results of a previous study (Banks 2018) suggest that the development of scientific writing is more conservative in times of great turbulence. In an attempt to verify this, samples were taken from the Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences and the Philosophical Transactions for the years 1735, 1785 and 1835. The development over the years 1735 to 1785 was compared to that between 1785 and 1835. Analysis of the grammatical functions and semantic categories of themes and of process types indicates that there is some evidence in favour of the conjecture that scientific writers are more conservative in times of turbulence. Whilst this is not conclusive, it suggests that further research would be fruitful.

Pragmatic uses of ‘I say’ in Latin

This paper examines the pragmatic uses and functions of the Latin verb inquam (‘I say’) and compares it with three synonyms – dico (‘I say, I speak, I declare’), loquor (‘I speak, I say, I utter’) and aio (‘I say yes, I say, I affirm’). Verbs of speech and thought in the first person are (cross-linguistically) a source of pragmatic markers, because the first person of these verbs is necessarily speaker-orientated and is also apt for expressing the speaker’s attitude. This can be seen in English pragmatic markers developed from verbs, such as I mean, I think and I say, and Romance ones, such as the Italian credo (‘I think’). Latin verbs with the meaning ‘I say’ (henceforth used as a hypernym for all of the verbs examined herein) also show pragmatic uses, as is clear from Latin dictionaries. The issue addressed in this paper is the extent to which they are interchangeable and how advanced they are in their development towards becoming pragmatic markers. For this goal, the paper will focus on a variety of pragmatic uses of ‘I say’, the contexts in which they appear, and the influence of genre on their distribution. Drawing on Bazzanella (2006) and Ghezzi (2014), the pragmatic uses will be divided into three main categories: textual, cognitive and interactional. It will be shown that the border between different pragmatic functions or readings is not neat and one instance can have various pragmatic uses at the same time.

“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”

Building on Goldberg’s (2006: 52) observation regarding the existence of “a family of related constructions in English” centred around the verb go, this article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title (“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”) and its relation to other members of the network of go-constructions. The analysis, conducted using three large corpora, shows that the Go VPing construction emerges from two source constructions (one with an –ing participle following the verb go and the other with an infinitive) which exhibit overlap in terms of certain aspects of their form and meaning. From its earliest attestations in the eighteenth century, the Go VPing construction has grown increasingly more interpersonal, and has become conventionalized as a marker of admonitive mood (Bybee et al. 1994: 321) which serves to dissuade or limit the performance of an activity that is apprehended as undesirable and counter-normative.

Parallels between the negative cycle and the rise of interrogative marking in French

In this paper, I discuss a type of construction that is rarely if ever mentioned in connection with diachronic cyclicity: wh-interrogative marking. In particular, I shall compare sentential negation with wh-marking in French and point to interesting commonalities between the prototypical diachronic cycle (negation) and interrogative marking. The pragmatic contrast between question types in Old French is shown to be mirrored in a similar contrast in Modern French, with the previously “strong” est-ce que interrogative now being a weaker one. In addition, I argue that reversal of anaphoric direction is another shared feature in the history of negation and of the est-ce que interrogative.

Semasiological cyclicity in the evolution of discourse markers

This study addresses the evolution of the Sicilian discourse marker mentri to explore the concept of cyclicity in semantic–pragmatic change. Stemming from Latin dŭm ĭntĕrim (‘while, in the meantime’), the temporal conjunction develops – like its Romance cognates – an adversative function meaning ‘whereas’, which further evolves from an oppositional to a counter-expectational contrast value meaning ‘though’. The latter serves as a bridging context for the emergence of discourse-pragmatic uses and is examined below. Mentri evolves as discourse marker: formally, it gains greater syntactic and positional independence, and it increases in scope; functionally, it displays both textual and interpersonal values. In its overall path, mentri shows a cyclical change in respect to the adversative function: oppositional contrast emerges out of the temporal meaning, it then develops into counter-expectation, and it eventually fades into the discourse-pragmatic values. The rise of mentri as a discourse marker is thus interpreted as a case of cyclicity from a semasiological perspective.