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… read more
This study investigates the morpho-syntactic variability of the second person pronouns in the Shakespeare Corpus, seeking to elucidate the factors that underlie their choice. The major part of the work is devoted to analyzing the variation between you and thou, but it also includes chapters that… read more
The present study investigates the treatment of the term Americanism and its plural form in their generic sense in selected British and American reference works of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It concentrates on two special types of reference books, namely dictionaries of Americanisms and… read more
This paper applies a pragmatic approach to King Lear’s questions. To this end the communicative function of different types of questions is worked out first. In a second step Lear’s questions are correlated to the dramatic development of the play. In terms of dramatic text construction, the two… read more
The present contribution investigates two handbooks on English usage dating from the late nineteenth century, one British (i.e. Alford’s The Queen’s English, of 1864) and the other American (i.e. White’s Words and their Uses, of 1871). Both manuals were important and successful in their time and… read more
The relationship between lexicon and syntax poses a problem to theoretical linguistics but also to the normal language user as the theoretical division is reflected in a division of labour between dictionaries on the one hand and grammars on the other; and it seems as if only usage guides deal with… read more
