Historial sociopragmatics is a collection of five academic articles that relate to the newly established multidisciplinary field of historical sociopragmatics. Despite the fact that sociopragmatics stems from a rich tradition of pragmatics, where the term was first used by, most notably, Geoff Leech in his Principles of pragmatics (Longman, 1983), notable academic work in the field only began to appear more than twenty-five years later, in a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics (10(2), 2009), on which this book is based. Its editor, Jonathan Culpeper, points out that this is therefore the first collection of articles related to this field.

Historical sociopragmatics “concerns itself with any interaction between specific aspects of social context and particular historical language use that leads to pragmatic meaning” (4). Its focus is language in situational context, more precisely, how the situational norms that language users can use are exploited for pragmatic purposes. As shown in this collection, studies can be synchronic or diachronic, however, the sine qua non of the field is said to be a (re)contruction of historical contexts based on written evidence as well as the ways this evidence is presented. As such, it partially overlaps with sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis.

The five articles demonstrate various possibilities of analysis of material spanning from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and including a variety of genres and methods (qualitative and corpus), all aiming to demonstrate the various angles that each method of analysis highlights. The first two chapters, by Johanna L. Wood and Susan M. Fitzmaurice, use qualitative methods for the analysis of fifteenth- and eighteenth-century letters, respectively. While Wood analyses Margaret Paston's writing to her sons, Fitzmaurice focuses on the correspondence and courtship between two lovers—Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley. They both use commentaries, but while Fitzmaurice focuses on the negotiation of role relationships (for example, related to usual conventions) and the role of (re)construction of context in understanding the intentions of the correspondents, Wood aims to identify expressive and formulaic text as well as looking at structures of expectation.

In Chs. 3 and 4 Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin use a corpus in their analysis of Late Modern English reference expressions. Nevala explores person reference, and, in particular, ways of distancing and defining authority. Palander-Collin, by contrast, discusses self-reference in correspondence, especially variation and change in its patterns. The last chapter, by Dawn Archer & Jonathan Culpeper, tries to identify key sociophilological usages in plays and trial proceedings between 1640 and 1760 using the Sociopragmatic Corpus. They are interested in style markers that help identify social roles as well as the ways in which contexts shape language use. This is the most quantitative chapter of all, as they base their analysis on keyness in their data.