Politeness in Chaucer: Suggestions towards a methodology for pragmatic stylistics

Contrastive Pragmatics in a Diachronic Perspective: Insights from Othello

“…Studies that probe into the historical dimension of these areas coincide with topics of historical pragmatics which springs off from pragmatics combined with historical linguistics and philology. In the 1980s, however, pragmatic studies on historical data were conducted under various labels.1 Topics of early studies that have proved important for historical pragmatics include politeness that has broadened to impoliteness and become a main trend; the politeness notion was first applied to Chaucer's texts at the interface of literary pragmatics (Sell 1985a and1985b). Another much discussed topic is the relation between the written and the spoken modes (Österreicher and Koch 1985); the line continues with speech-related studies (e.g.…”

Historical Discourse Analysis

“…For example, it has been suggested that the demonstrative pronoun this in ME (as in "this Pandarus") functions as a foregrounder (Fludernik 1995;Sell 1985). Work on EModE has attributed a discourse function to the variant personal pronominal forms you/thou (see references in Stein 1985b: 348): Calvo (1992) 144 Laurel J. Brinton argues that in addition to negotiating social identities and expressing attitudinal features, these forms may denote a change in conversational topic and mark discourse boundaries; similarly, Hope (1994) sees these forms as having not only a "macropragmatic" function in encoding the differential status of the interlocutors, but a "micro-pragmatic" function in expressing emotional attitude.…”

1. Trends and developments in historical pragmatics

“…His view puts literature within the remit of a general theory of communication and makes it possible to talk about the politeness of an author, e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer, towards his readers (Sell 1985; see also Fitzmaurice, this volume).…”