Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

Fátima Faya Cerqueiro

doi:10.18172/cif.2955

Auteurs-es

Fátima Faya Cerqueiro Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.18172/cif.2955

Mots-clés :

performatives, requests, politeness, epistolary genre, eighteenth century

Résumé

In the second half of the eighteenth century the courtesy marker pray was the default pragmatic marker used in polite requests while the new form please started to emerge. Pray was a grammaticalized form originated in the longer performative expression I pray you/thee, whereas the verb please had a different syntactic pattern. In the same period there were other performative expressions, particularly common in the epistolary genre, with the same syntactic pattern observed in (I) pray (you) and also used in directives. They resorted to the wide variety of requestive verbs available in Late Modern English, such as beg, beseech, desire, entreat, and request. This paper examines the set of different performative expressions used as polite request markers in the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) in order to provide an account of their productivity and functions in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Téléchargements

Les données relatives au téléchargement ne sont pas encore disponibles.

Références

AKIMOTO, M. (2000). “The Grammaticalization of the Verb ‘Pray’” in Grammaticalization in English. Pathways of Change. (Eds. O. Fischer, A. Rosenbach and D. Stein). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 67-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.53.05aki

AUSTIN, J. L. 1975 (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198245537.001.0001

BLUM-KULKA, S. (1987). “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(87)90192-5

BLUM-KULKA, S. et al. (Eds.) (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: N. J. Ablex.

CULPEPER, J. and ARCHER, D. (2008). “Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760” in Speech Acts in the History of English. (Eds. A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 45-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.176.05cul

CULPEPER, J. and DEMMEN, J. (2011). “Nineteenth-century English politeness: Negative politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 49-81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.12.1-2.03cul

DEFOE, B. N. (1735). A new English dictionary. Westminster. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group.

DEL LUNGO CAMICIOTTI, G. (2008). “Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community” in Speech Acts in the History of English. (Eds. A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 115-131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.176.07del

DENISON, D. (Dir.) and VAN BERGEN, L. (Ed.). (2003). Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose. University of Manchester Faculty of Arts and John Rylands University Library of Manchester.

DYCHE, T. (1740). A New General English Dictionary. 3rd edition. London. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group.

FAYA CERQUEIRO, F. (2007). “The courtesy markers pray and please in the late 18th century: Evidence from the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose” in Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference. (Eds. M. Losada Friend, P. Ron Vaz, S. Hernández Santano and J. Casanova). Huelva: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva.

FRASER, B. (1996). “Pragmatic markers”. Pragmatics 6: 167-190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.6.2.03fra

GHEZZI, C. (2014). “The development of discourse and pragmatic markers” in Discourse and Pragmatic Markers from Latin to the Romance Languages. (Eds. C. Ghezzi and P. Molinelli). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 10-26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199681600.003.0002

HUANG, Y. (2007). Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. JOHNSON, S. (1755-56). A Dictionary of the English Language. 2nd edition. London. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group.

KLEIN, L. (2002). “Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century”. The Historical Journal 45 (4): 869-898. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X02002716

LANDONE, E. (2009). Los marcadores del discurso y cortesía verbal en español. Bern, etc.: Peter Lang. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0351-0103-4

LOCHER, M. (2004). Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110926552

MARTIN, B. (1749). Lingua Britannica Reformata: Or, a New English Dictionary. London. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group.

OED = Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edition (in progress) OED Online, March 2000-. (Ed. J. A. Simpson). . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SCOTT, M. (2012). WordSmith Tools version 6. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.

SHERIDAN, T. (1780). A General Dictionary of the English Language. London, 2 vols. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group.

SÖNMEZ, M. J-M. (2005). “A study of request markers in English family letters from 1623 to 1660”. European Journal of English Studies 9 (1): 9-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825570500067937

THOMPSON, S. A. and MULAC, A. (1991). “A quantitative perspective on the grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English”, in Approaches to grammaticalization, vol. 2. (Eds. E. C. Traugott and B. Heine). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 313-329. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.19.2.16tho

TRAUGOTT, E. C. (2000). “Promise and pray-parentheticals”. Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL XI), Santiago de Compostela, September 2000. In Elizabeth C. Traugott. Papers Available On-line. <http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/ect-papersonline.html>.

TRAUGOTT, E. C. and DASHER, R. B. (2002). Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486500

VAN BERGEN, L. and DENISON. D. (2007). “A Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose” in Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vol. 2, Diachronic Corpora. (Eds. J. C. Beal, K. P. Corrigan and H. Moisl). Basingtroke: Palgrave Macmillan: 228-246. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230223202_10

WŁODARCZYK, M. (2013). “1820 settler petitions in the Cape Colony: Genre dynamics and materiality”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 14 (1): 45-69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.14.1.02wlo