Abstract
With the flourishing of pragmatics over the past few decades, considerable advances have been made at the intersection between pragmatics and historical linguistics, namely the establishment and consolidation of historical pragmatics. Around 20 years of development has moved its position within pragmatics from marginal to central (Taavitsainen and Jucker, 2010). Now the first textbook of historical pragmatics has been completed based on pertinent studies in the English language and committed to providing a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to historical pragmatics for advanced undergraduates, research students and more advanced scholars.
The book has 12 chapters, which are devoted to approaching historical data from a pragmatic perspective. The first three chapters present the issues and methodologies that underlie the case studies of the following chapters. Chapter 1 not only unveils the nature of historical pragmatics through an overview of the scope of pragmatics plus the recent paradigms in pragmatics and historical linguistics, but also describes the general makeup of the whole book. Chapter 2 is concerned with the empirical problems in historical pragmatics. It discusses the widening perspectives on written language materials and displays a wide range of data sources. In Chapter 3, there is a systematic introduction of the methods available to historical pragmaticists, which will be applied to various actual issues in the subsequent chapters.
The following sequence of chapters moves on to analyses of specific historical pragmatic issues, with Chapters 4–7 concentrating on micro-elements of communication at the lexical and phrasal level, and Chapters 8–12 on the macrostructures of genre and discourse. Chapter 4 attends to the development of discourse markers and interjections in different genres. Chapter 5 looks at terms of address, such as terms of endearment, honorific titles, professional titles and expletives, while Chapter 6 deals with the different forms of speech acts in the history of the English language. In Chapter 7, the focus falls on how the expression of politeness and impoliteness has changed from Old English to Present-day English. As a link between the earlier and the later chapters, Chapter 8 lays weight on the pragmatic principles underlying different types of language change. Chapter 9 is devoted to a general introduction of genres and text types, which includes a short history of genre studies, a brief account of the terminology, a series of models and methodologies, along with examples of genre studies in a diachronic perspective. The three remaining chapters discuss concrete issues. Chapters 10 and 11 show the dissemination of knowledge in scientific and medical discourse and the development of news discourse from the early days of print media up to today’s electronic media, respectively. Finally, Chapter 12 discusses issues at the interface between language and literature, such as narrative patterns in fictional literature.
To sum up, this book has completed a full-scale picture of historical pragmatics in the English language and provided an ideal guide to the whole realm of historical pragmatics. The fundamental concepts in this field are clearly interpreted against the backdrop of English-specialized studies, which will help beginners to form a solid grounding in historical pragmatics. The book presents rich data sources and detailed exposition of the methods that apply to both micro-units (such as discourse markers, interjections and terms of address) and macro-elements (like medical discourse and news discourse) of communication. The case studies serve as good examples for following researchers. Furthermore, the present state of scholarship in historical pragmatics gets updated, from which more advanced researchers will profit. The book is enhanced by its guidelines on further research and predictions of future trends, which will help to inspire new developments in the field. This is a well-organized textbook of both theoretical significance and application value.
There are some inadequacies, however. In this picture of historical pragmatics, the depiction of some specific issues (e.g. impoliteness) appears to be somewhat sketchy or even patchy, with many gaps, as explicitly pointed out in Chapter 7. Apparently, there is still a long way to go and hence much space to cultivate before we reach the full bloom of historical pragmatics. Also, since existing knowledge of communicative patterns in earlier times and their developments centres on the English language, we should expect the study of historical pragmatics to be extended to a wider range of languages. This first textbook in the field would be more valuable if it covered even a modest introduction of relevant studies in other languages, without undermining the dominating position of English studies. This would contribute to a panorama of scholarship within the entire field of historical pragmatics, so as to open vast vistas for future development.