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Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English
A contribution to historical pragmatics
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.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 220] 2012. vii, 292 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 26 April 2012
Published online on 26 April 2012
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii
- IntroductionAxel Hübler and Ulrich Busse | pp. 1–16
- Part 1. Metacommunicative profiles of communicative genres
- 1.1 Cross-sectional studies
- Sociability: Conversation and the performance of friendship in early eighteenth-century lettersSusan Fitzmaurice | pp. 21–44
- “I write you these few lines”: Metacommunication and pragmatics in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ lettersMarina Dossena | pp. 45–64
- 1.2 Longitudinal studies
- Inscribed orality and the end of a discourse archive: Metapragmatic and metadiscursive expressions in the Peterborough ChronicleRichard J. Watts | pp. 67–88
- Managing disputes with civility: On seventeenth-century argumentative discourseMaurizio Gotti | pp. 89–110
- The metapragmatics of civilized belligerenceJef Verschueren | pp. 111–128
- The metapragmatics of hoaxing: Tracking a genre label from Edgar Allan Poe to Web 2.0Theresa Heyd | pp. 129–150
- From speaker and hearer to chatter, blogger and user: The changing metacommunicative lexicon in computer-mediated communicationWolfram Bublitz | pp. 151–176
- Part 2. Metacommunicative lexical sets
- Now as a text deictic feature in Late Medieval and Early Modern English medical writingIrma Taavitsainen and Turo Hiltunen | pp. 179–206
- Performative and non-performative uses of speech-act verbs in the history of EnglishThomas Kohnen | pp. 207–222
- Verbs of answering revisited: A corpus-based study of their pragmatic developmentAnne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and Tine Defour | pp. 223–246
- A lexical approach to paralinguistic communication of the pastAxel Hübler | pp. 247–268
- Part 3. (Meta-)communicative ethics and ideologies
- Historical evidence of communicative maximsAlexander Brock | pp. 271–288
- Name index | pp. 289–290
- Subject index | pp. 291–292
“Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English is a masterful and frontline demonstration of the vibrant field of meta-pragmatics in terms of the analysis presented. Its completely engaging style is a testimony to the authoritative scholastic depth both of the editors and of the authors. I strongly commend it to all scholars who are interested in pragmatics and other related disciplines, such as discourse analysis, stylistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, historical linguistics and semiotics.”
Akin Odebunmi, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in Discourse Studies Vol. 16:6 (2014)
Cited by (14)
Cited by 14 other publications
Peikola, Matti & Mari-Liisa Varila
2025. Presenting manuscript tables and diagrams to the Middle English reader. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 26:1 ► pp. 69 ff.
Heliasz-Nowosielska, Celina
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Annick Paternoster
2022. Historicity in metapragmatics – a study on ‘discernment’ in Italian metadiscourse. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 369 ff.
Verschueren, Jef
Paternoster, Annick
2019. Politeness and evaluative adjectives in Italian turn-of-the-century etiquette books (1877–1914). In Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 299], ► pp. 107 ff.
Saltamacchia, Francesca & Andrea Rocci
2019. The Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’, 1802) by Melchiorre Gioja, politeness (pulitezza) and reason. In Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 299], ► pp. 75 ff.
Reilly, Ian
Whitt, Richard J.
2018. “And all this is spoken of the naturall byrth …”. English Text Construction 11:2 ► pp. 226 ff.
Dossena, Marina
Jucker, Andreas H. & Irma Taavitsainen
2014. Diachronic corpus pragmatics. In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 243], ► pp. 3 ff.
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