The scope of historical pragmatics

Under the heading historical pragmatics various linguistic research efforts can be given a historical dimension (cf. Cherubim 1984: 807f): e.g. a pragmaticalised semantics, speech act theory, the research into function words, the analysis of maxims of conversation, text analysis (text types, communication forms, text pragmatics; cf. Gumbrecht 1977), conversation analysis, language change, language norms and varieties.

In general, some pragmatic frameworks might be more suitable than others for research into historical pragmatics. Pragmatics comprises an extremely diverse range of research efforts not all of which seem equally suitable for contrastive pragmatics in general and for historical pragmatics in particular. Research efforts in pragmatics can be split up into general pragmatics, socio-pragmatics and pragma linguistics (Leech 1983: 10-11). General pragmatics concentrates on the general conditions of the communicative use of language. Such frameworks do not lend themselves easily to contrastive studies because these general conditions are taken to be relatively language independent. Socio-pragmatics concentrates on the local conditions of language use. Grice's cooperative principle and Leech's politeness principle, for instance, operate variably in different cultures and in different language communities. This is amply demonstrated by the different ways in which politeness is interpreted in cultures such as Japan, Britain and India.

Pragma linguistics analyses the linguistic (syntactic, lexical, etc.) means that a language makes available to fulfil certain functions and to realize particular speaker intentions. Speech act theory is one such framework. Both sociopragmatic and pragma linguistic frameworks should lend themselves not only to contrastive analyses but also to historical comparisons.

At the present state of research two approaches to the pragmatic study of earlier language states may be distinguished. We shall call them pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics. In the following we are going to introduce these approaches as we see them, review some of the existing literature, and indicate briefly how the articles of this volume fit into them.