Historical pragmatics is the study of language use (especially in spoken language) in its historical dimension.
Contents
State of the art
Since the late 1970s, historical linguists have discovered their growing interest in pragmatic questions—first in German, then in Romance linguistics. Especially thanks to Andreas Jucker this field has also been attracting more and more colleagues from English linguistics over the past ten years. Meanwhile there is also a Journal of Historical Pragmatics, which is edited by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen. Retta, Alicia, and Jessy
Methodology
Historical pragmatics has to rely exclusively on written corpora. This leads to the question how can we find out about the ways people talked to each other in medieval and early modern times? The difficulty of unmasking spoken language in earlier periods has been discussed several times; for medieval times there are practically no reflexes of or on spoken language, and a majority of studies on historical pragmatics do not delve into text prior to the 17th century.