Pragmatics on the Page

Abstract

Early texts are characterised by diversity: pages containing largely the same text will vary in linguistic features, specific content, and, crucially for the present study, visual appearance. Within their separate arenas, both book historians and historical pragmaticians have embraced this diversity and variation in their research, but neither field has availed itself of the tool kit of the other. The present study therefore draws upon book history and materialist philology on the one hand and historical pragmatics and historical discourse linguistics on the other. The authors call their approach ‘pragmatics on the page’. In this article they propose a four-stage methodology and illustrate it by means of a case study based on the Polychronicon, a text composed in late medieval England and surviving in numerous manuscript copies and early printed editions.

Keywords:

• materialist philology
• Polychronicon
• book history
• John Trevisa
• William Caxton
• Middle English
• historical pragmatics
• stance
• interaction
• pragmatics
• utterance

Acknowledgements

Carroll, Peikola and Skaffari gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Academy of Finland, funding decisions 130476, 136404 and 257059, and Varila the support of Langnet (The Finnish Graduate School in Language Studies).

Notes

For historical pragmatics, utterances are concrete instances of writing or print (Carroll et al., 2003: 4), generated by producers of texts (from authors to printers) in specific communicative settings, to serve the needs of specific consumers (patrons, readers, etc.). Although in general pragmatics the term utterance is contrasted with sentence, we use the term to denote any contextualised language production, regardless of length.

Although we use the word ‘copies’, we analyse them as ‘different ways of saying the same thing’, to use the words of Aijmer's (2007: 37) pragmatic study of formulaic language elements.

Pragmaphilology is the study of historical data from a pragmatic perspective, that is, supplementing traditional historical linguistic research with the study of context (Jacobs and Jucker, 1995: 11). Emic is the opposite of etic and refers to variation which is meaningful within a given context.

We have retained Waldron's (2004) sigla, adding V for Treveris' 1527 edition. Our usage distinguishes K₁, a specific printed copy, from the ‘ideal copy’ (K) and from other copies (such as K₂). We do the same for V.

In quoting primary sources, abbreviations have been expanded silently; the paraph and punctus have been reproduced as <¶> and <.> respectively.

Erman (2001: 1339) refers to the second functional domain as ‘interpersonal’, a term which Wichmann, Dehé and Barth-Weingarten (2009: 7) use with reference to the third level of meaning. Erman's term for the third level is ‘metalinguistic’; a term which many other linguists use to denote any use of language which comments upon language.

In A the two sentences are separated with a punctus elevatus, creating less visual foregrounding.

For the distinction between auctor and auctoritas, see Minnis (1988: 10). Given the scope of our paper, we conflate the two and refer always to auctoritates.

A colour image is available online: <http://crrs.utoronto.ca/library/vaults/leaves/caxtonrecto.htm>

The dates for the manuscripts are those given by Mooney, Horobin and Stubbs (2012).