{"title":"The pragmatics of royal discourse in William Shakespeare’s <i>Henry vi</i>","authors":"Urszula Kizelbach","doi":"10.1075/jhp.19012.kiz","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Politeness ( Brown and Gilman 1989 ; Rudanko 1993 ; Kopytko 1995 ) and impoliteness ( Culpeper 1996 , 2001 ; Bousfield 2007 ) have a prominent place in the reading of Shakespearean drama and serve as a means of characterisation. In this study, I utilise (im)politeness and face theory to characterise the royal discourse in 1, 2, 3 Henry vi . The study aims to analyse the linguistic behaviour of King Henry vi to see how well his royal discourse reflects his kingship and how his linguistic inadequacy contributes to his political failures. I investigate Henry’s use of (im)politeness and facework to handle political negotiations and I evaluate his level of awareness of the “political face”, which is the king’s desire to preserve a positive public image and to save face in social interactions. I look at the examples of Henry’s inadequate linguistic behaviour and try to establish why this behaviour was inefficient in a given scene and context.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.19012.kiz","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Politeness ( Brown and Gilman 1989 ; Rudanko 1993 ; Kopytko 1995 ) and impoliteness ( Culpeper 1996 , 2001 ; Bousfield 2007 ) have a prominent place in the reading of Shakespearean drama and serve as a means of characterisation. In this study, I utilise (im)politeness and face theory to characterise the royal discourse in 1, 2, 3 Henry vi . The study aims to analyse the linguistic behaviour of King Henry vi to see how well his royal discourse reflects his kingship and how his linguistic inadequacy contributes to his political failures. I investigate Henry’s use of (im)politeness and facework to handle political negotiations and I evaluate his level of awareness of the “political face”, which is the king’s desire to preserve a positive public image and to save face in social interactions. I look at the examples of Henry’s inadequate linguistic behaviour and try to establish why this behaviour was inefficient in a given scene and context.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Historical Pragmatics provides an interdisciplinary forum for theoretical, empirical and methodological work at the intersection of pragmatics and historical linguistics. The editorial focus is on socio-historical and pragmatic aspects of historical texts in their sociocultural context of communication (e.g. conversational principles, politeness strategies, or speech acts) and on diachronic pragmatics as seen in linguistic processes such as grammaticalization or discoursization. Contributions draw on data from literary or non-literary sources and from any language. In addition to contributions with a strictly pragmatic or discourse analytical perspective, it also includes contributions with a more sociolinguistic or semantic approach.