Speech Acts and Speech Act Sequences: Greetings and Farewells in the History of American English

ABSTRACT

Greetings and farewells mark the boundaries of conversations; they are often formulaic and are generally claimed to be devoid of propositional content. However, they are often embedded in longer exchanges, and within such exchanges individual expressions may or may not have propositional content. This contribution discusses some of the inherent problems of retrieving speech acts, such as greetings and farewells, from a corpus. This is illustrated with a diachronic analysis of greetings and farewells in two hundred years of American English as documented in the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). In the nineteenth century, the most frequent greetings were “good morning” and “how are you?” and the most frequent leave-taking expression was farewell while in Present-day American English the expressions hi and hello dominate as greetings and goodbye and “bye bye” as leave-taking expressions. The two phrases “how do you do?” and “how are you?” serve as examples that show how formulaic and literal uses have coexisted over the entire period covered by COHA, with a shift from a predominance of literal uses to a predominance of formulaic uses, particularly in the case of “how do you do?”. However, both phrases remain ambiguous in their uses. The interactants discursively assign a more literal or more formulaic force to them.

KEYWORDS:

• salutations
• diachronic pragmatics
• corpus pragmatics
• Corpus of Historical American English COHA
• discursive speech act value

Notes

¹ The re-calculations obviously took into account the different corpus size of the different decades of COHA.

² This extract has been checked against the original text as found on books.google.ch. It turns out that the extract is part of the prologue of the play and was originally formatted in lines of verse. A typographical error has been corrected in the version represented here. COHA’s version “in you full crammed box” should be “in yon full crammed box”. Italics have been added in accordance with the original text.