Journal of historical pragmatics

Abstract

This new biannual journal from Benjamins promises to be more than just another of the many ‘interface‘ journals that have been springing up of late as Linguistics appears to grow ever more fragmented as a discipline. Historical pragmatics is an area of potential interest to generalises, not just to a small coterie of specialists working within the intersection of the well-established traditions of historical linguistics and pragmatics. It addresses issues that are relevant to text linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive and diachronic semantics, grammaticalization theory and rhetoric, as well as to core pragmatics. In short, it deals with the development of language use within specific socio-historical contexts of communication. The journal can be said to reflect the ‘new philology’ heralded by Anttila (1992) in his defence of linguistics as an essentially hermeneutic discipline. If so, it is philology now informed by deeper theoretical insight and assisted by gready expanded electronic accessibility to corpora. Scholars with an interest in grammaticalization may well represent the majority of potential readers. The focus lies on those kinds of grammaticalization processes that most directly draw on pragmatic context and constructional metonymy, associated with the work of Elizabeth Traugott (as in Traugott forth. 2002), who is herself a member of the editorial board.