The concepts of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics have also informed the field of study generally known as Historical Pragmatics. Still a relatively young field of linguistics, historical pragmatics takes a broad, sociologically based view of patterns of intentional human interaction, as these are determined by the condi- tions of societies of earlier periods (see Jucker 2006 for a brief overview).5 One ap-
proach to historical pragmatics, pragmaphilology, describes the contextual aspects of historical texts and is essentially synchronic. It refers to the identities of speak- ers and addressees, their social and personal relationship, the physical and social setting of text production and reception and the goals of the text (Jacobs and Jucker 1995). Another approach, diachronic pragmatics, concerns form-to-function and function-to-form mappings across different historical stages of the same language. Apparently, form-to-function mappings correspond to a pragmalinguistic perspec- tive on the analysis of phenomena such as deixis (Fries 1993), discourse markers (Brinton 1990), or interjections (Taavitsainen 1995). Diachronic function-to-form studies, adopting a sociopragmatic perspective, compare the realisation of speech acts, politeness formulae, text types, or forms of dialogue, at different points in the development of a language (Arnovick 1999; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008; Fritz 1995; Biber and Finegan 1992). Since the mid-1990’s the investigation of the rel- evant topics is based on available historical corpora (e.g. the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts), which are either read and annotated in an old-fashioned and time consuming way, or analysed by corpus-linguistic methods of data retrieval. Apart from written genres, such as essays, fiction, personal letters, and manuals for good
behaviour, speech-based genres have also been analysed, e.g. dialogues from plays and fiction, court proceedings, political debates, public speeches, and sermons (Biber and Finegan 1992; Jacobs and Jucker 1995).
Within this framework, historical sociopragmatics focuses on the interaction between specific aspects of social context and particular historical language use that leads to pragmatic meanings. More specifically, it concerns language use in its situational, local context and the ways in which situational contexts generate norms which interlocutors employ or exploit for pragmatic purposes. A synchronic approach to historical sociopragmatics consists in showing how language use shapes and is shaped by context at a particular historical period, while a diachronic perspective involves the investigation of how shifts in language use affect shifts in contexts, or how shifts in contexts shape language use over time. An important line of investigation in historical sociopragmatics concerns the reconstruction of con- texts on the basis of historical texts; the latter are viewed as carrying evidence of, or projecting, their own contexts (Culpeper 2009: 182–183).
As already mentioned, the local context, or the sociological context, of lan- guage use is of primary concern to sociopragmatics. For example, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1995) have studied the sociopragmatics of terms of address in Early English correspondence. Given that the way people address each other in interaction depends on social variables such as age, status, dialect, etc., the ques- tion arises as to the relation between sociopragmatics and sociolinguistics. Accord- ing to Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003), sociolinguistics comprises three areas of research, namely, social dialectology, interactional sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Parallel to this distinction, Culpeper (2009: 180) identifies three levels of what may constitute the context against which texts may be understood: the most local, immediate text and co-text of interlocutors, the medial level of social situation (including speech events, activity types, frames, etc.), and the most general level, making reference to national and regional cul- tures, institutional cultures, etc. As the author notes (Culpeper 2009: 181)
sociopragmatics should primarily, though not exclusively, concern itself with the medial context and the phenomena that constitute it. Social situations can provide a link be- tween micro, more linguistically-oriented considerations (the typical focus of pragma- linguistics), and macro, more sociologically-oriented considerations (the typical focus of a field such as Critical Discourse Analysis).6
According to this definition, sociolinguistics is concerned with mapping regular patterns of usage in interaction, while sociopragmatics is concerned with the ways in which these regular patterns are used and exploited in particular interactions. Given the concern of historical sociopragmatics for interactional data and the obvious non-availability of recorded forms of interaction of earlier periods, the question arises as to the availability of historical corpora that lend themselves to sociopragmatic research and the search tools required for this type of investigation.
Recent developments in historical corpus linguistics have allowed more pragmatic research questions in a way that is amenable to corpus-linguistic methodologies (see, e.g., Kohnen 2008; Jucker et al. 2008); but the need is still felt for the appro- priate pragmatic tagging of relevant pragmatic units, such as those of interest to so- ciopragmatic research. Within this framework, Culpeper and Kytö’s compilation of the Sociopragmatic Corpus, a subsection of the Corpus of English Dialogues: 1560–1760, has made sociopragmatic annotation possible. Facing the issue of the sociopragmatic variability of context, Archer and Culpeper (2003) devise and im- plement a tagging system that allows the annotation of speech changes that poten- tially affect the social meaning of interaction in drama and trial proceedings.7 The
variables include relatively static, sociolinguistic values, such as status (nobility, gentry, professional, ordinary commoners, lowest groups) and age (young, adult, old), as well as dynamic values, such as activity role (witness, defendant, cus- tomer), kinship role (father, daughter, mother, son, father-in-law), social role (sur- geon, baker, friend), and dramatic role (fool, villain, seducer, etc.). The signifi- cance of this type of work lies in capturing the utterance-by-utterance interaction between speakers and their addressees in terms of sociopragmatic variables, which enhance the dynamic aspects of the analysed texts.
Working with the same corpus, Archer and Culpeper (2009) develop the notion of keyness as the identification of keywords, key parts-of-speech and key semantic fields that are statistically characteristic of the speech of dyads in interaction, e.g. master/mistress with servant and examiner with examinee in trials. Examples in- clude the use of imperative verbs directed to servants by their masters in the parts- of-speech category and the use of the semantic domain of documents and writing in the speech of the same dyad. These social role dyads are a specific part of particular social situations, the latter constituting the local context relative to all the social roles and situations that make up the two genres under examination, i.e. drama and trial proceedings. Therefore, keyness analysis is a tool for the identification of the characteristic discourse norms of particular local contexts. While the authors use the term sociophilology to refer to their approach, their concern for the particular type of annotation and the analysis of the local conditions of language use indicates the deployment of a sociopragmatic orientation to their work.
The concept of sociopragmatics has also informed further studies focusing on the social conditions that affect the use of texts. Adopting the model of critical dis- course analysis and frame analysis, Wood (2009) examines personal letters from late 15th century English taken from the two volumes of the Paston Collection, and
Margaret Paston’s letters in particular. Wood (2009: 188) addresses the issue of authorship, which is important in historical sociopragmatics: “since some of Mar- garet’s letters were penned by her own sons, might we not be justified in ascribing the language of those letters to them, rather than representative of Margaret Paston herself?” Supporting the view that local contexts are culture specific, she shows that local context does not only make reference to a particular interactional dyad,
but also to a more extended speech community, to the discursive practices of that community, the text’s distribution and its consumption. Within this framework, she shows that on the one hand these letters evidence the manipulation of power struc- tures within a family and, on the other, they indicate Margaret Paston’s control over the form and content of the letters, thereby confirming authorship.
Viewed broadly, historical sociopragmatics includes the macro-level of social, socio-cultural and sociological factors as well as the micro-level of personal, situ- ational and stylistic factors. Nevala (2009) discusses the concept of person refer- ence and social deixis in Late Modern English letters and journals. Her data consist of the correspondence of some members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and the letters and journals of Agnes Porter, an eighteenth century governess. In par- ticular, she concentrates on the interactional aspects of the referential term friend as used by ‘public’ figures and ordinary people, as well as on the way in which self- and addressee-oriented third person reference is used to convey contextual shifts in interpersonal distance and authority. She demonstrates that the writers in the data strategically use different terms in order to alternate between specific social posi- tionings, but they also take into consideration the prevalent social and societal con- straints.
Examining the letters subcorpus of the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts within a relevance theoretic perspective, Fitzmaurice (2009) focuses on the sociopragmatic construction of implicature and inference in the illicit courtship correspondence between Edward Wortley and Mary Pierrepont. She argues that key historical and cultural reference points are necessary in understanding how communicative practices are embedded in the local context. Such practices are typically associated with certain activity types and social rituals including court- ing. Therefore, the understanding of implicated meanings in these letters makes reference to the cotext created by the discourse of the letter, the situational context constructed by the exchange of letters, and the broader historical context and the social constraints in which the correspondence is embedded. Fitzmaurice (2009) shows that it is at the discourse cotext that the participants in the interaction enact their sociopragmatic roles and fight for dominance of their relationship.
It transpires from all the above that the concepts of pragmalinguistics and so- ciopragmatics have been particularly useful in historical pragmatics and enhance the possibilities of historical corpus linguistics. Also notice that, within the frame- work of historical sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistic concerns are also accommo- dated, as, for example, the study of the forms used to perform a particular function in Nevala’s (2009) work. On this understanding, sociopragmatics is broadly con- strued as referring to both the micro and macro levels of pragmatic analysis. It is possible that the success in the application of the two concepts under investigation to historical pragmatics depends partly on the availability of appropriate corpora and partly on appropriate retrieval methods that facilitate the analysis.