Diachronic pragmatics

While synchronic contrastive pragmatics compares the linguistic inventory and how it is used by communicators in different languages, diachronic pragmatics focuses on the linguistic inventory and its communicative use across different historical stages of the same language. Within the diachronic studies it is possible to distinguish two subtypes. Some studies may take a linguistic form (such as discourse markers, relative pronouns or lexical items) as a starting point in order to investigate the changing discourse meanings of the chosen element or elements while the other subtype takes the speech functions (such as a specific speech act or politeness) as their starting point in order to investigate the changing realizations of this function across time. We shall call the former approach diachronic form-to-function mapping and the latter diachronic function-to-form mapping.

One of the major problems of contrastive pragmatics - and hence also of diachronic pragmatics - is the tertium comparationis. Any comparison relies on an element that remains fixed. Krzeszowski (1984) suggests that formal, semantic, statistical, system or translation equivalence are inadequate concepts for contrastive analyses and that more subtle distinctions are required. A translation, for example, is not necessarily a good translation if it is formally equivalent to the original version. A good translation rather has to be pragmatically or functionally equivalent (Krzeszowski 1984: 303). Thus to analyze, for example, a particular discourse marker, i.e. the linguistic form, or a specific speech act, i.e. the speech function, at two stages of their development, we need to refer to the concept of pragmatic equivalence (cf. also Fillmore 1984; Kalisz 1986; Janicki 1990).

In both cases both the form and the function may change in the course of time, and therefore, there can be no hard and fast boundary between these two approaches (cf Fritz this volume). It is the perspective that differs, rather than any fundamental methodological issue.