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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 28:2 (2018) ► pp.253–270

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Refusals in Early Modern English drama texts

New insights, new classification

 | University of Kent
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 7 May 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17017.rei
Abstract
Due to their largely non-routinized forms and their not being retrievable in computerised corpus searches, refusals have hitherto not been examined from a diachronic perspective. The present paper presents an inventory of refusal strategies in Early Modern English drama texts. Five comedies from two periods (1560–1599 and 1720–1760), respectively, taken from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (Kytö, Merja, and Jonathan Culpeper, eds. 2006. A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) were examined manually and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis lead to an alternative classification of refusals which differs considerably from the frequently used taxonomy by Beebe, Leslie, Tomoko Takahashi, and Robin Uliss-Weltz. 1990. “Pragmatic Transfer in ESL Refusals.” In Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language, ed. by Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine Slosberg Andersen, and Stephen Krashen, 55–73. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. The proposed classification takes into account three levels of analysis: the propositional content of the utterance, the functional super-strategy, and the speaker’s stance. The development of refusal within the period under investigation partially matches findings regarding related speech acts that show a development towards increased indirectness (Culpeper, Jonathan, and Jane Demmen. 2011. “Nineteenth-century English Politeness. Negative Politeness, Conventional Indirect Requests and the Rise of the Individual Self.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1–2): 49–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Pakkala-Weckström, Mari. 2008. ““No botmeles bihestes”. Various Ways of Making Binding Promises in Middle English.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 133–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. 2008. “Two Polite Speech Acts from a Diachronic Perspective. Aspects of the Realisation of Requesting and Undertaking Commitments in the Nineteenth Century Commercial Community.” In Speech Acts in the History of English, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 115–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1 Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990) – Taxonomy and impact
    • 1.2Historical development of commissives and directives
    • 1.3Defining refusals
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Classification of strategies
      • 3.1.1Definite refusals
      • 3.1.2Attempts at dissuasion
      • 3.1.3Attempts at deflection
    • 3.2An alternative classification – Differences and advantages
    • 3.3Most frequent strategies – Comparison to BTU’s findings
    • 3.4Differences in the use of super-strategies and stance as time and interactions progress
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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