LINGUIST List 22.4944 Fri Dec 09 2011 Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Ling.; Pragmatics: Culpeper (2011) Editor for this issue: Joseph Salmons <jsalmonslinguistlist.org> New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Lelija Socanac , Historical Sociopragmatics Message 1: Historical Sociopragmatics Date: 09-Dec-2011 From: Lelija Socanac <lelijasocanacyahoo.com> Subject: Historical Sociopragmatics E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-2818.html EDITOR: Culpeper, Jonathan TITLE: Historical Sociopragmatics SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics, 31 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2011 Lelija Socanac, Centre for Language and Law, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia SUMMARY The book was originally published as a special issue of ''Journal of Historical Pragmatics'', 10:2 (2009), as the first book to present different methods and approaches to historical sociopragmatics. Historical sociopragmatics concerns itself with any interaction between specific aspects of social context and particular historical language use that leads to pragmatic meanings. It focuses on historical language use in its situational contexts and analyzes how those situational contexts produce norms which speakers engage in or exploit for pragmatic purposes. It can be either synchronic, describing how language use shapes and is shaped by context at a particular point of time in the past, or diachronic, describing how shifts in language use shape context, shifts in context shape language use, and/or shifts occur in the relationship between language use and context over time. An important issue for historical sociopragmatics concerns the (re)construction of contexts on the basis of written records. The chapters in this book represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The analyses are based on English texts from the 15th to the 18th century, including a variety of genres such as personal correspondence, trial proceedings and plays. In the first chapter, ''Structures and expectations: A systemic analysis of Margaret Paston's formulaic and expressive language'', Johanna L. Wood examines the late fifteenth-century letters of Margaret Paston, spanning 37 years. None of the letters were written in her own hand so that it is assumed that she could not write. Drawing from Tannen's (1992) work on frame analysis and Fairclough's (1992) work on discursive and social practices, Wood examines the concept of local context, placing it within the framework of macro-sociological notions of context encompassed within the field of Critical Discourse Analysis. It is argued that in this framework all contexts are ''local contexts'' because it appears that anything that is culture specific has to be local, so that it is only when we look for universal pragmatic principles that apply in all societies that we are not in a ''local'' context. An innovation here is that Wood uses the metacommentary of participants (e.g. their evaluations) to reveal their perspective on what would count as normal or expected. Letters present particular difficulties because they are partly formulaic and partly expressive. It is shown that this characteristic may be exploited to facilitate the identification of expressive text. It is further shown that variation in the formulae has a practical application. The formulaic parts of letters that scribes wrote for Margaret Paston may be compared with letters they wrote for themselves. This provides evidence that Margaret was responsible for the wording of her letters. Thus Wood shows how historical pragmatics can help with sociohistorical questions, such as how much control women who used scribes had over the forms produced. Since little scribal influence was found in the rhetorical formulae, where it would be expected most, the language appears to be attributable to Margaret Paston, not the scribes. It was also apparent, especially when looking at the ending in letters, and from the contrast between the formulae and the creativity, that the more expressive parts are sometimes contained within the conventional. In ''The sociopragmatics of a lovers' spat: The case of the eighteenth-century courtship letters of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley'', Susan M. Fitzmaurice also uses the participants' commentary, to be more specific, their responses, as a source of evidence of their understandings. She examines the eighteenth-century courtship of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley through letters, focusing on the sociopragmatic roles afforded the participants in their correspondence and on ways how sociopragmatic meanings expressed by participants might be reconstructed. What makes this courtship correspondence different is that it was illicit, and hence some of the usual conventions did not apply, thus calling for some rather complex negotiating of role relationships. The chapter shows how Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) can be applied in the explanation of the complex interactions between language and contexts. Uncovering the meanings of the letters consists of negotiating multiple literary, cultural, historical and linguistic contexts. The first, most local contextual layer is the context created by the discourse of the letters. The second is the situational context constructed by the process involved in the original exchange of letters. The third is the broader historical context in which the social constraints, linguistic complexity and historically specific circumstances of the correspondence are embedded. The method of analysis relies on identifying key historical and cultural reference points in order to understand how communicative practices are embedded in the local material context. The goal is to construct a later (con)textual setting in which later readers can ascertain the extent to which original participants were able to calculate their correspondents' intentions and how they in turn responded. It is also a warning that the analyst must carefully consider the historical evidence in order to ascertain the credibility of an interpretation. ''Altering distance and defining authority: Person reference in Late Modern English'' by Minna Nevala studies the use of nominal terms and pronouns as a means to refer to a third party, as well as to the writer and the addressee in written interaction. The purpose is to discuss the concepts of person reference and social deixis by looking at how the interactants' social identities and interpersonal relationships are encoded in the use of referential terms in Late Modern English, drawing from data from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension and other sources. Her approach is based on the hypothesis that the use of reference is deeply rooted in social hierarchy as well as in individual social roles. She focuses on third person referential terms but also shows how these have implications for social identities mediated between the addresser and the addressee. She also examines the term ''friend'' and shows that it may be used when the writer has something to gain from it: an actual favour, a reciprocal act of solidarity, or an access to the addressee's/referent's in-group. Shifting between in-group/out-group memberships appears to be a common function for the use of ''friend''. The use of addressee- and self-oriented reference is in turn determined by the social and contextual aspects of appearance, attitude, and authority. In ''Variation and change in patterns of self-reference in Early English correspondence'', Minna Palander-Collin focuses on referential expressions, specifically on the self-referential first-person pronoun ''I'' and its usage in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. Starting from the claim that ''I'' not only indexes the speaker or writer in place and time but also situates them in the moral order of speaking as the person responsible for what is uttered, she examines what participants could attribute to themselves, and how that might vary in family and non-family letters, across time, and in other contexts where the participants' rights and obligations might be different. She stresses the importance of integrating macro-social structures with local practices in understanding meanings, and discusses self-reference in the light of early modern socio-historical research. The study relies on integrationist social theory and employs a set of quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of recurrent word clusters. As a methodological innovation, she uses the cluster facility in WordSmith Tools to reveal the words that frequently co-occur with the pronoun ''I''. The results point to increasing self-reference and the prominence of mental verb clusters that often serve interpersonal functions. In the final chapter,'' Identifying key sociophilological usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640-1760): An empirical approach via corpus annotation'', Dawn Archer and Jonathan Culpeper use the contextual categories captured by a set of tags appended to participants' utterances to discover how historical contexts, including the co-text, genre, social situation and/or culture, shape the functions and forms of language use. They label this approach ''sociophilology''. To be sure, the relationship between context and language is not one-way (i.e. context shaping language); rather, it is interactive (i.e. language can also shape context). Using the Sociopragmatic Corpus (1640-1760), an annotated subsection of comedy plays and trial proceedings taken from the Corpus of Dialogues (1560-1760) which offer interactive, face-to-face, speech-related data, they combine two corpus linguistics techniques, namely corpus annotation and a ''keyness analysis'' (i.e. identifying the key words, key parts of speech and key semantic fields) as a means of identifying the statistically-based style markers, or key items, associated with a number of social role dyads (including examiner to examined in trials and master/mistress to servant in plays). They show how such approach can be used to reveal differential distributions of personal pronouns, interjections, imperative verbs, politeness formulae, etc. In a more qualitative fashion, they scrutinize these results for pragmatic meanings, and in particular point out how their results establish local contextual norms which can be exploited to generate particular meanings and effects. EVALUATION This is the first book to map out historical socio-pragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics and overlapping with socially-related fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Overall, it could be said that the aim of the book, namely to raise the profile of historical sociopragmatics, give it more solidity and inspire future research efforts, has been achieved. As far as methodology is concerned, the chapters aim to show that diversity is possible. They are organized so that they vary from the more qualitative to the more quantitative. The selection and order of contributions results in a coherent and comprehensive volume of cutting-edge research. The range of methodologies employed and spectrum of linguistic features investigated make this volume a valuable resource for scholars in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, socio-pragmatics, social history and the history of English who want to familiarize themselves with recent methodological advances in the field. By offering a wide range of approaches and methodologies, the book opens the way to future research in the field of historical socio-pragmatics. REFERENCES Jacobs, Andreas; Jucker, Andreas H. 1995. The historical perspective in pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.). Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 3-33. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Sperber, Dan; Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. (2nd ed.) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Tannen, Deborah. 1993. What's in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In: Tannen, Deborah (ed.). Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 14-56. Wodak, Ruth. 2001. What CDA is about - A summary of its history, important concepts and its development. In: Ruth Wodak; Michael Meyer (eds.) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage Publications, 1-13. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Lelija Socanac is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the coordinator of the Centre for Language and Law, and she currently directs the project Legal and Linguistic Aspects of Multilingualism. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, historical sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and legal linguistics. 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