Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English
A contribution to historical pragmatics
1st Edition
Published on 15. May 2012
VII, 292 pages
978-90-272-7461-8 (ISBN)
Description
The volume contributes to historical pragmatics an important chapter on what has so far not been paid adequate attention to, i.e. historical metapragmatics. More particularly, the collected papers apply a meta-communicative approach to historical texts by focusing on lexis that either directly or metaphorically identifies or characterizes entire forms of communication or single acts and act sequences or minor units. Within the context of their use, such lexical expressions, in fact, provide a key for disclosing historical forms of communication; taken out of context, they build the meta-communicative lexicon.
The articles follow three principal distinctions in that they investigate the meta-communicative profile of genres, meta-communicative lexical sets and meta-communicative ethics and ideologies. They cover a broad spectrum of text types that span the entire history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon chronicles to computer-mediated communication.
The articles follow three principal distinctions in that they investigate the meta-communicative profile of genres, meta-communicative lexical sets and meta-communicative ethics and ideologies. They cover a broad spectrum of text types that span the entire history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon chronicles to computer-mediated communication.
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Ulrich Busse | Axel Huebler
Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English
A contribution to historical pragmatics
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05/2012
John Benjamins Publishing Co
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Content
- Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. From a new vantage point
- 2. The metacommunicative lexicon as a (meta) pragmatic research paradigm
- 3. The significance of the metacommunicative lexicon for historical pragmatics
- 4. Previewing the papers of this volume
- References
- Part I. Metacommunicative profiles of communicative genres
- 1.1 Cross-sectional studies
- Sociability
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Talking on paper: Conversation and friendship
- 3. Performing epistolary friendship
- 4. Lexical interlude: Contemporary meanings of friend
- 5. Embodying friendship: An intimate correspondence
- 6. Friendship, conversation and epistolary metacommunicative language
- References
- "I write you these few lines"
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 The corpus under investigation
- 2. Metacommunicative vocabulary in emigrants' letters
- 2.1 Reifying the letter: Focus on intratextual reality
- 2.2 The emigrant letter as message: Focus on extratextual reality
- 3. Concluding remarks
- References
- 1.2 Longitudinal studies
- Inscribed orality and the end of a discourse archive
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Metapragmatic and metadiscursive expressions
- 3. Foucault's notion of the "archive"
- 4. Inscribed orality
- 5. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the archive it instantiated
- 6. Inscribed orality and the breakdown of the archive
- 7. The disappearance of the ASC: The end of a discourse archive
- References
- Managing disputes with civility
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The civility of scientific discourse
- 3. Linguistic clarity
- 4. Accuracy in reporting facts and expressing opinions
- 5. Objectivity
- 6. The explicitness of the argumentative structure
- 7. Conclusion
- References
- The metapragmatics of civilized belligerence
- 1. Pretext
- 2. Antecedents
- 2.1 The metapragmatic lexicon and me
- 2.2 An ecology of the public sphere
- 3. From the Indian Mutiny to Laws and Customs of War
- 4. Laws and customs of war
- 4.1 Performative positioning
- 4.2 Ideological framing
- 4.3 Language-ideological framing
- 4.4 Variable legal framing
- 4.5 Performative reflexivity
- 4.6 Directive and commissive terms of agreement
- 4.7 Intratextual and intertextual reflexivity
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- The metapragmatics of hoaxing
- 1. Introduction: Genre theory vs. metapragmatics
- 2. What is a hoax? A genre theorist's attempt at definition
- 3. Origins: Etymology and conditions of emergence
- 4. Variation and change in the metapragmatics of hoaxing
- 4.1 "Authored" hoaxes from the 18th and 19th centuries
- 4.2 "Unauthored" anonymous hoaxes from the 20th century
- 4.3 Digital hoaxes from the turn of the 20th to the 21th century
- 5. A recent metapragmatic twist: Attributions of "hoaxing" in political debates
- 5.1 Global warming/climate change
- 5.2 Evolution/creationism/intelligent design
- 6. Conclusion
- References
- From speaker and hearer to chatter, blogger and user
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Interactivity and mediation
- Mediated communication
- 3. Participation and the duality principle
- 4. Participation and meaning negotiation
- 5. Forms of communication and degrees of interactivity
- 5.1 One-way (unilateral) forms of communication
- 5.2 Two-way (bi- or multilateral) forms of communication
- 6. The concept of participation in Web 2.0 based forms of communication
- 7. Metacommunicative metaphors of participation
- 8. Estrangement
- 9. Conclusion
- References
- Part 2. Metacommunicative lexical sets
- Now as a text deictic feature in Late Medievaland Early Modern English medical writing
- 1. Conventions of guiding readers in a long diachronic perspective
- 2. Research questions
- 3. Communicative goals and textual organization
- 4. Material of the study: A new database
- 5. Method of study: A corpus-based approach to now and metacomments
- 6. Now and metadisourse in scientific and medical texts
- 6.1 Helsinki Corpus
- 6.2 Middle English Medical Texts (1375-1500)
- 6.3 Early modern English medical texts (1500-1700)
- 7. Now + metatext as a discourse structuring device
- 8. Conclusions
- References
- Performative and non-performative usesof speech-act verbs in the history of English
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Background and data
- 3. Performative vs. non-performative use of directive speech-act verbs
- 3.1 Frequency
- 3.2 Specificity
- 3.3 Speech-act conventions
- 3.4 Genre requirements
- 4. Conclusions
- References
- Verbs of answering revisited
- 1. Aims of this study
- 2. Corpora and methodology
- 2.1 Corpora used for this study
- 2.2 Search methodology
- 3. Frequencies of the verbs
- 4. answer
- 5. reply
- 6. respond
- 7. rejoin and retort
- 8. Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- References
- A lexical approach to paralinguisticcommunication of the past
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Voice figures, interjections, and metacommunicative lexemes
- 3. A historical survey of paralinguistic lexemes8
- 3.1 Selectional procedure
- 3.2 Findings
- 4. Some assessments
- 5. Résumé
- References
- Appendix
- Part 3. (Meta-)communicative ethics and ideologies
- Historical evidence of communicative maxims
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Maxim-driven language change?
- 3. Evidence of communicative maxims in historical texts
- 4. Metacommunicative comments on maxims in EME
- 5. Metacommunicative lexemes in EME
- 5.1 Single-word lexemes
- 5.2 Phrasal lexemes reflecting pragmatic maxims
- 6. Conclusions
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
