In: The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London ; New York, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 2017, pp. 79-90 (Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics) . ISBN 978-1-317-36257-9

Preview

PDF, English - main document Download (311kB) | Terms of use

Abstract

Languages, such as English, Russian, Japanese or Tzeltal, are not homogeneous entities. They are always subject to internal variation. The field of variational pragmatics, which looks at synchronic variation in different varieties of the same language, started officially in 2008 with the volume Variational Pragmatics. Research into diachronic variability on the level of language use is conducted in the field of historical pragmatics. Historical pragmatics is predominantly based on the wider conceptualisation of pragmatics which includes the social and cultural context of language use. This chapter reviews some of the relevant work in historical pragmatics. Historical pragmatics has to rely on data and on methodologies that differ somewhat from those used in other branches of pragmatics. Diachronic pragmatics deals with the changes of pragmatic features over time. Diachronic change can either be studied by comparing two different points in time, or by tracing the development of pragmatic features over a certain period.