Diachronic corpus pragmatics demonstrates the rich and exciting combination of historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. The contributions to the present volume all focus on using corpus linguistic methods to chart the diachronic change of linguistic units ranging from individual words to phrases, clauses, and utterances that consist of at least two clauses. The volume comprises an introduction and twelve chapters that can be divided into three sections. The volume opens with a general introduction to the whole book and elaborates on the relationship between historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics.
Based on data that spans over eighty years, the five chapters in Part 1 examine diachronic change of individual words in the history of a specific language from a pragmatic angle. Using a sample corpus of the Old Bailey Corpus, Claudia Claridge & Merja Kytö are concerned with the degree modifiers pretty and a bit and their semantic and syntactic development. Taru Nordlund & Heli Pekkarinen deal with the semantic change of the Finnish adverbial muka ‘as if, allegedly’, and reveals that the present meanings of muka can be traced back to a causal element or a reportative marker. Rumiko Shinzato examines synchronic and diachronic variation in the two Japanese adverbs of degree (amri ‘extremely’, bakari ‘about, to the extent’) and an adverb of manner (yahari ‘being still’). Employing two sources of data, Annika Küngas touches on semantic-pragmatic analysis on the Estonian adverbial word täpselt ‘exactly, precisely’, and reports that the word täpselt functions as both an adverb and a pragmatic marker. By inspection of three large corpora, Davide Ricca & Jacqueline Visconti explore the meanings and uses of two Italian adverbs of truth and truthfulness: davvero and veramente.
The four chapters in Part 2 shift to longer pragmatic units, that is, strings of words in phrases and clauses. Jukka Tyrkkö focuses on the frequency and use of multi-adjectival premodifiers in early modern English medical texts. Drawing mainly on the data from the Helsinki Corpus, María José López-Couso & Belén Méndez-Naya are devoted to elaborating on individual clausal parentheticals with seem and impersonal think. Trimothy Colleman & Dirk Noël explore the development of a clausal construction in the history of Dutch, the nominative + infinitive construction. Based on the analysis of a corpus of drama dialogue, Jan K. Linström discusses the Swedish negating adverb inte ‘not’, which usually appears in the middle of a clause but also can be topicalized in the syntactic front field in Finland Swedish. The analysis reveal that fronted negation was more frequently used in the spoken Finland Swedish than that used in the spoken language in Sweden.
Part 3 reports corpus-based studies of the diachronic development of utterances and dialogues. Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen deal with meta-communicative expression analysis, a method that could be used to search for compliments from a 400-million-word corpus of historical English. Dawn Archer develops an automatic tagging system to examine pragmatic phenomena regarding the speech act of verbal aggression, such as politeness and impoliteness, respect and lack of respect, and violence or anger. Based on a corpus of Old Spanish texts and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, Angela Schrott contributes to counselling discourse within the framework of diachronic corpus pragmatics and dialogue analysis.
