Pragmaphilology

Traditionally, historical linguists have spent most of their efforts on sound changes and on the phonology and morphology of historical texts. Syntax and semantics have always been less popular among the language historians. Pragma philology goes one step further and describes the contextual aspects of historical texts, including the addressers and addressees, their social and personal relationship, the physical and social setting of text production and text reception, and the goal(s) of the text.

Bergner (1992) describes many of the relevant aspects of medieval text production and reception. From his article it emerges that the communicative environment of medieval texts is characterized by a preference for norm and typicality, and a tendency towards the formal and impersonal. Bergner (this volume) draws attention to the openness of medieval texts. He argues that all forms of human communication are open in that they may be unclear in various degrees or may allow for different interpretation. Medieval texts, in particuar, are characterized by a very considerable degree of openness because of the lack of linguistic standards, because of the specific character of textual communication in the Middle Ages, and because of the entire social and cultural political framework of these texts. Beetz (1990) concentrates on the standards and rules of interaction in earlier periods. Albeit from a linguistically unsatisfactory perspective, he analyses the discourse of Early Modern politeness, in particular the nature and the change of rituals and compliments in the Old German speaking world.

Since research into earlier language stages depends on written records, it is central to a pragma philological study to investigate the similarities and dissimilarities of written and spoken language (see also the discussion on the non-availability of historical natural language data in this article). For example, in the (written) language of the first German newspapers in the 17th century it can be shown how specific communicative tasks require different linguistic means: references are given in passive constructions, objects or persons are introduced by relative clauses without a finite auxiliary or by attributes, or appositions are used to ensure the appropriate interpretation of pronouns (cf. Fritz 1993b). Betten (1990) demonstrates that there is a considerable closeness of written language to spoken language. She refers to Luther's translation of the Bible and Early Modern High German prose which contain well recorded features of Medieval spoken language, especially when texts were conceived to be read aloud.

Ronberg (this volume) and Lennard (this volume) both show that an adequate (i.e. pragmatic) analysis of historical texts must study these texts in their entirety including the socio-historical context, their production process and - crucially - a faithful account not only of the syntactic/lexical level but also the physical and orthographic level.

Hüllen (this volume), Bach (this volume), Watts (this volume) and Navarro-Errasti (this volume) study Middle English or Early Modern English texts as communicative acts in their own right. This includes a careful consideration of the writers of these texts, their communicative intentions and their intended audiences as well as the entire socio-historical context in which these texts were written. Hüllen analyses William Caxton's Dialogues in French and English, that is to say a foreign language teaching book first published at the end of the Middle Ages. He subjects this book to a type of analysis that has been developed by Sinclair and Coulthard for the modern classroom. What is surprising is the high level of structural similarities between this late Middle English textbook and the oral interaction in a modern classroom.

Bach (this volume) explores the pragmatics of wills and will-making on the basis of a corpus of wills written in the 16th and 17th century by people connected to the University of Cambridge. He shows that these wills can only be adequately interpreted if they are seen in their legal and religious context, and if the beliefs and motivations of the testators are taken into consideration.

Watts (this volume) uses the prefatory sections of grammar books of English written between the 16th and 18th century to study the discourse strategies that the authors employed in order to define an audience for themselves. These grammars are seen as complex communicative acts that must be studied in their socio-pragmatic context.

The pragmatic analysis of literary texts also belongs to the category of pragma philology (cf. Watts 1981; Sell 1985a, 1985b, 1991; Brönnimann-Egger 1991). Navarro-Errasti (this volume) uses relevance theory to analyse the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which she looks for communicative clues. She finds the stylistic value of words and the sound-based poetic properties to be of special significance, or to be - in the technical sense - relevant. The literary work is explicitly seen as a communicative act whose author chooses stylistic forms that yield sufficient cognitive effects to counterbalance the effort the reader needs to process them.