This volume presents a variety of pragmatic and discourse analytical approaches to a wide range of linguistic data and historical texts, including data from English, French, Irish, Latin, and Spanish. This diversity of research questions and methods is a feature of the field of historical pragmatics, which by its very nature has to take into account the multiplicity of historical contexts and the infinite variety of human interaction. This is highlighted in the book’s introduction by means of the metaphor of "opening windows". Each chapter is a window affording a different view of the linguistic and textual landscape. Some of these windows were opened by historical linguists who have acquired discourse perspectives, some by pragmaticians with historical interests, and others by literary scholars drawing from linguistic pragmatics.

Table of contents

A frame for windows: On studying texts and discourses of the past Matti Peikola and Janne Skaffari 1–4 News discourse: Mass media communication from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century Andreas H. Jucker 7–21 Advertising discourse in eighteenth-century English newspapers Maurizio Gotti 23–38

Presidential inaugural addresses: A study in a genre development Natalia Kovalyova 39–52

Freedom of speech at stake: Fallacies in some political discourses in the Early Republic Juhani Rudanko 53–63

Text-initiating strategies in eighteenth-century newspaper headlines Patrick Studer 65–79

Patterns of agentivity and narrativity in early science discourse Heidrun Dorgeloh 83–94 The economics academic lecture in the nineteenth century: Marshall's Lectures to Women Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti 95–107

Contesting authorities: John Wilkins' use of and attitude towards the Bible, the classics and contemporary science in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) Marko Oja 109–122 Personal pronouns in argumentation: An early tobacco controversy Maura Ratia 123–141 Criticism under scrutiny: A diachronic and cross-cultural outlook on academic conflict (1810–1995) Francoise Salager-Meyer 143–160 The underlying pattern of the Renaissance botanical genrepinax Philippe Selosse 161–178

Genres and the appropriation of science: Loci communes in English in the late medieval and early modern period Irma Taavitsainen 179–196 Chaucer's narrators and audiences: Self-deprecating discourse in Book of the Duchess and House of Fame Michael Foster 199–213

Discourse on a par with syntax, or the effects of the linguistic organisation of letters on the diachronic characterisation of the text type Javier Pérez-Guerra 215–235

Verba sic spernit mea: The usage of rupture of coherence in Seneca's tragedies Augustin Speyer 237–256

'Ther been thinges thre, the whiche thynges troublen al this erthe': The discourse-pragmatics of 'demonstrative which' Alexander T. Bergs 259–277 Processes underlying the development of pragmatic markers: The case of (I) say Laurel J. Brinton 279–299

From certainty to doubt: The evolution of the discourse marker voire in French Amalia Rodríguez Somolinos 301–317

Politeness as a distancing device in the passive and in indefinite pronouns Junichi Toyota 319–339

Language contact and discourse 341

Discourse features of code-switching in legal reports in late medieval England Mary Catherine Davidson 343–351

Focusing strategies in Old French and Old Irish Barbara Wehr 353–379

Medieval mixed-language business discourse and the rise of Standard English Laura Wright 381–399