Historical Pragmatics

Abstract

This entry gives an overview of historical pragmatics, which is a field focusing on the study of historical language use. While to many this area may occur as a highly specialized one, in actual fact it is relevant to many other fields, as “history” does not necessarily mean ancient texts: a news article published a few days ago may as well be historical in a technical sense, and its linguistic analysis may profit from a historical pragmatic approach. The entry explores historical pragmatics from this angle, by first providing an overview of the field and then delivering a case study of how historical pragmatics can be adopted to the analysis of modern texts that seem to have no relationship to history. It is argued that, as there is a sense of “historicity” in language use, practically any interaction that does not take place in front of us and is recorded—that is, any interaction that is mediated—is potentially historical. While there are many approaches that may enable us to study such data, historical pragmatics is key, due to its well‐developed conceptual and methodological analytic repertoire.