Historical Pragmatics

The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in pragmatics devoted to a diachronic study of language use and human interaction in context. It covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and politeness to individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

• to date there is no handbook devoted to historical pragmatics, so this is the first one of its kind
• covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and address terms
• offers surveys of historical pragmatic research in individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse
• the handbook with its twenty-two articles and a subject index outlines and defines historical pragmatics in more detail than has been done before