The historical; perspective in pragmatics

Introduction

Pragmatics is at present one of the most active and most prolific fields of linguistics. It has grown at an enormous rate during the last fifteen years or so but it is still, as Verschueren (1987: 4) called it, a "large, loose, and disorganized collection of research efforts". It ranges from discourse analysis to speech act theory and from the study of presuppositions to relevance theory. Some approaches in pragmatics focus on communication in general and on the human cognitive processes that make communication possible, while others concentrate on specific languages and on the communicative meaning of specific elements (e.g. speech acts or discourse markers) in specific languages.

There are also pragmatic analyses that compare the linguistic inventor/ and how it is used by communicators in different languages, that is to say studies in contrastive pragmatics, e.g. Blum-Kulka et al (1989), Oleksy (1988), and Wierzbicka (1991). However, there are as yet only few studies that focus on the linguistic inventory and its communicative use across different historical stages of the same language.

Diachronic studies have always had to rely on written data, while pragmatics has almost always preferred spoken data. It is therefore not surprising that few scholars have tried to integrate the two approaches. However, both historical linguistics and pragmatics have made a lot of progress recently in extending the scope of their databases. Historical linguistics has made some progress in investigating stylistic differences including approximations to spoken registers, while pragmatics has extended its field of analysis into the written language.

The step from contrastive pragmatics to historical pragmatics is not a conceptually difficult jump. Contrastive studies compare the realization of linguistic units (be they semantic, functional, pragmatic, or something else) in different cultures, in different languages, or in different varieties of one language. Historical studies, on the other hand, compare the realization of linguistic units at different stages in the development of one language. The historical dimension does not differ systematically from such other dimensions as the geographical, the social, the stylistic and so on (cf. Schlieben-Lange 1975: 87).

In this article we shall try to explore the field of historical pragmatics as we envisage it. We distinguish two different approaches that can be subsumed under the label of historical pragmatics: pragma philology and diachronic pragmatics. Our survey will take the form of a state-of-the-art report in that we will try to review the relevant literature in these fields. In spite of the scarcity of studies that deal explicitly with historical pragmatics, there are of course numerous studies that are more or less relevant to historical pragmatics as such.

It might be argued that historical pragmatics is just a new label for a range of research efforts that have existed for a long time. However, we feel that it is more than that. The label will give these research efforts a focus that has been lacking so far, and it sketches out the scope for future developments of the field.