Accessing politeness axes: forms of address and terms of reference in early English correspondence

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This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

There are certain areas of study where present-day pragmatics can learn from history. This article focuses on the socio-pragmatic aspects of forms of address and terms of reference in late 16th-century English correspondence. The aim of the study is to explore the extent to which the use of forms of address and reference, and the factors which influence their choice, can be seen to have any general trends. A further goal is to relate these trends in historical data to such contemporary views as Brown and Levinson's [Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987] politeness theory, Comrie's [Linguistic politeness axes: speaker-addressee, speaker-referent, speaker-bystander. Pragmatics Microfiche 1.7: A3, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, 1976] politeness axes, and Bell's [Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13, 145-204] audience design. The material itself, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), gives a unique opportunity to explore the influence of factors like relative power and social distance on the use of forms of address and reference in the highly stratified society of the Renaissance period. The study shows that referential terms are often derived from the range of direct address formulae. In direct address, when the social status of either the addressee or the referent is very high, it seems to override the influence of social distance. In reference, the reasons for the choice of an appropriate term are more complex, and the parameters set for, e.g., positive and negative politeness can no longer be seen as equally valid.

Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study)

Description
This is an introduction to pragmatics, the study of how people make sense of each other linguistically. The author explains, and illustrates, basic concepts such as the co-operative principle, deixis, and speech acts, providing a clear, concise foundation for further study.

This book is all you could ask for in terms of an easy introduction to pragmatics. It is concise, simple, well-planned, clear, and full of useful examples.

Slightly over a hundred pages, this is an ideal read if you're looking for basic knowledge on pragmatics in general. I know no better book for that.

Highly recommended. In addition, this was the reference book in one my classes on pragmatics, so if university teachers consider it good enough for their classes, you can consider it good enough for yourself. And good enough, it sure is.

Pragmatics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics)

Description
Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. Yet until now much of the work in this field has not been easily accessible to the student, and was often written at an intimidating level of technicality. In this textbook, however, Dr Levinson has provided a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure.

A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The complexity of these issues is not disguised, but the exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines, as well as students of linguistics, will find this a valuable textbook.