Indirectness in legal speech acts: An argument against the Out of Ritual hypothesis

Abstract

Some recent work in Historical Pragmatics has, in effect, rejected the Uniformitarian Hypothesis by arguing that deep cognitive archaisms persisted in the relatively recent attested stages of human language. Bax's “Out of Ritual” hypothesis argues that that pragmatic indirectness arose only in the later Middle Ages out of ritual language use: “linguistic indirectness developed through three successive stages”—from ritual performance to “autonomous forms of linguistic indirectness, that is indirect usages not restricted to the confines of ritual interaction” ( Bax, 2002:96). In the present paper, I test this hypothesis by examining various languages attested in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with a focus on legal speech acts. The language of the law is an apt test case for the “Out of Ritual” hypothesis, since legal institutions typically involve a mixture of ritualized and spontaneous communication. I also offer other arguments to prove that indirectness is far older than is claimed by the Out of Ritual hypothesis; that it need not have grown out of ritual at all; and that, even if it did, we cannot possibly know this from the linguistic evidence available to us from texts, reconstruction, or typology.