{"title":"A diachronic corpus-pragmatic approach to democratization","authors":"Elena Seoane, Lucía Loureiro-Porto","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00074.seo","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00074.seo","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Democratization is often invoked as an explanatory factor for diachronic linguistic developments. We believe that\u0000 at the root of democratization often lies the pragmatic negotiation of power relations, whereby a more democratic use of language\u0000 can reduce the distance between addresser and addressee. This article examines the evolution of power relations in the New\u0000 York Times editorials from 1860 to 1979 as represented in COHA. After a quantitative analysis of the evolution of\u0000 three pragmatic variables that index democratization, the study offers a qualitative analysis with the aim of anchoring them to\u0000 the situational context of newspaper editorials, especially regarding the power relations negotiated in this register over time.\u0000 This paper also examines the impact of socio-historical events on the evolution of power relations and shows that they are\u0000 intimately linked.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141924200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A corpus-pragmatic analysis of linguistic democratisation in the British Hansard","authors":"Turo Hiltunen, Turo Vartiainen","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00075.hil","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00075.hil","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, we investigate changes in British parliamentary discourse by using the Hansard Corpus\u0000 (1803–2005). Our first goal is to determine whether parliamentary speeches have become colloquialised by studying frequency\u0000 changes of select features associated with informal spoken language. Second, by analysing data from the House of Commons and the\u0000 House of Lords separately, we show that the texts from the two Houses should be considered distinct sub-registers, each with their\u0000 own conventions and development paths. Finally, we analyse a pattern that seems particularly relevant to parliamentary debates:\u0000 one where speakers imply disagreement by referring to their peers in the third person, thus circumventing a parliamentary\u0000 regulation whereby speakers are prohibited from addressing one another directly. Our findings support the idea of an ongoing\u0000 colloquialisation/democratisation trend affecting parliamentary discourse while also suggesting that this process is not entirely\u0000 transparent in the written record because of editorial interference.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141923510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Tyrkkö, Sophie Raineri, Jenni Räikkönen, Alžběta Budirská, Mai Nabawy, Amanda Silfver
{"title":"Speaking for the downtrodden","authors":"J. Tyrkkö, Sophie Raineri, Jenni Räikkönen, Alžběta Budirská, Mai Nabawy, Amanda Silfver","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00076.tyr","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00076.tyr","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on\u0000 speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less\u0000 attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights activists and campaigners for other progressive causes. To fill this gap,\u0000 the present paper focuses on political speaking occurring outside of the party-political setting. The data comprises 120 American\u0000 activist speeches from the years 1808–2016. The analysis focuses on the construction of ingroups and outgroups, and whether the\u0000 use of personal pronouns is affected by the type of audience. The frequency trends bring forth new information about the\u0000 referential complexity of pronouns within individual speeches.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141923932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Family, politics and media","authors":"Helen Baker, Tony McEnery","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00078.bak","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00078.bak","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting\u0000 surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not\u0000 only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those\u0000 hustings. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen 2008), approached through\u0000 collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection\u0000 of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became\u0000 an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political\u0000 tool.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141924256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colloquialisation","authors":"Christian Mair","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00073.mai","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00073.mai","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to\u0000 spoken usage, the chapter explores:\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 \u0000 the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and\u0000 informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application,\u0000 standard written English of the ENL type.\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 \u0000 There are two major findings. Colloquialisation works less well in the study of ESL varieties than ENL ones. In\u0000 addition, recent real-time analyses of change in spoken English suggest that the supposedly homogeneous baseline style of informal\u0000 conversational English is more internally variable than is assumed in current work on colloquialisation.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141923427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women’s voices in the public sphere","authors":"Birte Bös","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00077.bos","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00077.bos","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As alternative media, suffrage periodicals played an important role in women’s fight for universal suffrage, which\u0000 marked a milestone on the road to democracy. Opening up a space for women in public discourse, these papers shaped and were shaped\u0000 by processes of democratisation. This study explores how they balanced informative, propagandistic and commercial functions, and\u0000 how women positioned themselves and others as social actors in the context of the movement, challenging gender ideologies. In line\u0000 with Rühlemann and Aijmer’s (2015) notion of corpus pragmatics, the study combines the\u0000 assets of corpus-linguistic methods, e.g., by drawing on keywords as pointers to relevant areas of interest, with a pronounced\u0000 qualitative perspective, complementing the search results by features demanding manual analysis and discussing the findings in\u0000 their socio-historical context.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141921737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Judges’ reformulations in judicial interpretation in Chinese judgments","authors":"Liping Zhang, Tingting Zhang","doi":"10.1075/jhp.21002.zha","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.21002.zha","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In hybrid legal contexts in China, judges’ speech acts of reformulating rules serve to demonstrate their\u0000 ideological and linguistic preferences in law enforcement. A comparative analysis of judges’ reformulations in judgments in the\u0000 traditional (imperial) and contemporary periods in this study discloses a disparity in their speech style over time. Though judges\u0000 in the two periods both navigate between the ethical discourse and the legal discourse in the negotiation of meaning in law,\u0000 traditional judges are found to have reformulated rules from various sources, particularly those of Confucian classics, acting as more\u0000 of a constructive legal interpreter. In contrast, contemporary judges tend to reformulate rules of the codified law in a more\u0000 monologic style, thereby displaying greater respect for the autonomy of law in their reformulations. These differences are\u0000 interpreted from a socio-cultural standpoint.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141927811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Yet ar ye not lyche, for thu art a fals strumpet”","authors":"Olga Timofeeva, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka","doi":"10.1075/jhp.22006.tim","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.22006.tim","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Late Middle English, the system of second-person pronouns with singular referents is characterised by\u0000 retractable choices based on the interactional status of interlocutors. This system has until recently been documented mostly in\u0000 studies based on poetic texts, such as the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and, to a lesser extent, private\u0000 correspondence and mystery plays. We use the Book of Margery Kempe as a primary source and offer the perspective\u0000 of a middle-class female author from early-fifteenth-century Norfolk. Conventional politeness of Margery Kempe requires the\u0000 default use of ye/you/your forms, especially when addressees are unfamiliar, older or socially superior, but also\u0000 in situations of mutual acceptance and deference. Thou/thee/thine forms, on the other hand, indicate social or\u0000 intellectual superiority as well as, at the interactional level, condescension, contempt, annoyance, defiance and abuse. Their\u0000 use, therefore, is typically marked.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141685176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiating converso identities in the inquisition courtroom","authors":"Javier E. Díaz-Vera","doi":"10.1075/jhp.22011.dia","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.22011.dia","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper explores the processes of identity construction and negotiation through face work in a Portuguese\u0000 Inquisition record, corresponding to the trial for Judaism of Catarina de Orta. Concentrating as much on the inquisitor’s\u0000 questions as on the answers offered by the defendant, I show here that impoliteness and self-politeness co-occur in interaction in\u0000 the Portuguese Inquisition courtroom discourse. On the one hand, the inquisitor makes abundant use of impoliteness strategies with\u0000 at least three main aims: to exert his power over the defendant, to trigger specific negative emotions, and to attack her face and\u0000 her credibility. On the other hand, the defendant’s answers display numerous features of self-politeness, aimed at saving her face\u0000 from the inquisitor’s attacks and accusations. It is precisely through the interplay of impoliteness and self-politeness that the\u0000 two competing narratives proposed by the accuser and the defendant are constructed and re-elaborated during every\u0000 interrogation.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140695798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}