Abstract

In a broad, sociologically based view of pragmatics, historical pragmatics is a field of study that wants to understand the patterns of intentional human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments. It is based on an empirical study of historical data in all the diversity in which it has survived. Written texts are seen as communicative acts in their own right and they are taken to comprise a broad range of varieties of language that can be located on several different variability scales, such as the scale from the language of immediacy to the language of distance. The field of historical pragmatics can be split into subfields on the basis of the linguistic unit under investigation; from expressions to utterances, discourses, and discourse domains. Future work in historical pragmatics is expected to rely even more heavily on corpus-linguistic methodologies and to increase the sophistication of such analyses, particularly in terms of pattern searches for functional elements and the inclusion of contextual features.