Researching understatement in the history of English

A distinction is here introduced into restrictive, hedgy understatement^R and emphatic understatement^E, which are traced in historical data via the metalinguistic and the form-to-function approach. The metalinguistic approach found the modern sense of understatement^E with examples from mostly more formal, written registers, while understatement^R could hardly be found in works on rhetoric and etiquette. In contrast, understatement^R was generally more prominent in the instances found with the corpus linguistic form-to-function approach, based on negation, a bit of a and a N or two, although understatements made up only a tiny fraction of those constructions’ uses. Understatement^E could be attested from Middle English onwards, while understatement^R appeared later, with both becoming more common after 1800, pointing to late British preference for this speech style.