Historical corpus pragmatics: Focus on speech acts and texts

TL;DRAbstract

This paper gives an overview of the major research in historical corpus pragmatics on speech acts and texts, adding new suggestions and insights. The section on speech acts deals with corpus-based diachronic descriptions of speech acts in the history of English and the methodological problem of retrieving speech acts in diachronic corpora. The section on texts contains a short overview of corpus-based descriptions of genres in the history of English and addresses the problems connected with the corpus-based analysis of functions and sections in texts. The final section, combining both perspectives, gives suggestions for a history of English as a history of genres and speech acts.

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