Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics

要旨

Research into pragmatic phenomena from a diachronic perspective has always relied on two seemingly distant approaches.On the one hand, a pragmaticist could engage in qualitative data assessments, requiring a more philological treatment of the sources, usually distant historically and embedded in a specific socio-cultural milieu; on the other hand, more quantitative, corpus-based studies have also been pursued, to meet the requirements of replicability and to add statistical precision.The realization that it is the combination of these two approaches which provide the most informative and reliable insights into various pragmatic phenomena could not be expressed in a more pronounced manner than in the volume under review.The editorial trio, Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker and Jukka Tuominen, have brought forward a timely collection of studies which show the modern face of diachronic pragmatic studies.The book originates from a thematic panel at the 12th International Pragmatics Conference in Manchester in 2011 and comprises chapters based on diachronic pragmatic developments in English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese.Bringing languages other than English into the picture is an undeniable asset of this enterprise.Far from a random selection, the chapters form a very coherent structure: from inquiries based on individual words, through larger units, to dialogues, across a wide linguistic typological background.The book is a truly interdisciplinary endeavour.In their introduction, Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen show how historical linguistics, pragmatics and corpus studies, the three disciplines which at their inception were quite distant from each other, have increasingly combined into an exciting newly emerging discipline.The authors are careful to address several methodological challenges which characterize this highly complex approach to language change, e.g.editorial conventions, spelling variation or corpus annotation.The field of diachronic corpus pragmatics is driven by two objectives: expanding the database and getting more context.This is reflected in the employment of megacorpora, such as COHA, on the one hand, and small philological, often single-genre corpora, such as EMEMT, on the other.Context is a central concept in a pragmatic inquiry.All contributions to the book aim to combine a high degree of contextualization with a quantitative assessment of emerging patterns.The attempt at balancing the two approaches is only very recent, which makes it a challenge also for the authors in this volume.The first part of the book is devoted to ''words''.The opening chapter in this section, by Claudia Claridge and Merja Kytö, is based on a subsection of the Old Bailey Corpus (1730s--1830s), which is vast enough (c.49.5 million words) to allow a study of low-frequency phenomena in a diachronic perspective.The analysis addresses the differences in the scope and pace of grammaticalization between degree modifiers a bit and pretty.The authors give an overview of the semantic (the downscaling and upscaling), collocational and syntactic behaviour of these units and concentrate on the most prolific time for the general grammaticalizing trends in modifiers.One aspect is particularly worthy of attention: the phrase a bit shows a different palette of meanings, and, in fact, an increase in its function as a degree modifier when extended to a bit of and a bit of a. Lexical bundle research (e.g.Biber et al., 1999) has shown that repetition and formulaicity in language do not work within the rigid confines of linguistic units and full phrases.Claridge and Kytö's paper shows that one has to separately consider the focal and the extended versions of what seems to be the same construction in a diachronic pragmatic study.Another paper on grammaticalization of stance markers, by Taru Norlund and Heli Pekkarinen, concentrates on the Finnish adverbial muka 'as if, supposedly, allegedly'.A very informati

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