Chiara Ghezzi - Böcker

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. These markers serve to indicate the organization of the discourse, the speaker's relationship with the interlocutor, and the speaker's stance with regard to the information expressed. Their relevance is in assisting interpretation, despite the fact that they have little or no propositional content. In this book, distinguished scholars from different theoretical backgrounds analyse the different classes of discourse and pragmatic markers found in Latin and the Romance languages and explore both their diachronic development and their synchronic properties. Following an introduction and overview of the development of these markers, the book is divided into two parts: the first part investigates pragmatic markers developed from verbs, such as Latin quaeso, Romanian ma rog, and Spanish o sea; the second looks at adverbs as discourse markers, such as French déjà and Italian già, Romanian atunci and Portuguese aliás. Chapters address a variety of theoretical issues such as the cyclic nature of functional developments, the nature of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, semantic change, and the emergence of new pragmatic values. The arguments presented also have consequences for any analysis of the interfaces between grammar, discourse, and interaction.

This book addresses the characterisation and representation of female authority in Shakespeare’s political plays by collecting the linguistic behavioural patterns of the queens of the first tetralogy (King Henry VI Part 1, 2, 3 and King Richard III) – Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Neville – and so by detecting the nature and evolution of their agency. The study is collocated in the field of literary and historical linguistics and draws on an interdisciplinary analytical model informed by pragmatics, (Austin 1962, Leech 1983, Brown and Levinson 1987, Culpeper 1996), stylistics (Simpson 1993, 2004, Burke 2014) and rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1973, Kienpointner 1987). The resulting analysis gathers and lists the sequence of linguistic recurrences of definite characters through a rigorous methodology, aiming to prove whether and how these queens retain the power to influence the course of the story as well as the other characters through the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of their chosen speech acts, the number and length of their turns, the (im)polite verbal behaviour they perform in face-to-face situations. The conclusion of the study points out its replicability for other sources with the purpose of finding new insights in historical/literary texts and of understanding characterisation through linguistics.

How did everyday writing forge communities in Italy from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages? This interdisciplinary volume maps multilingual practices across public and private texts produced in diverse social settings. Professional documents, private letters, and other text types reveal a rich linguistic and historical landscape. By reading non-literary documents as socially situated acts, the volume brings together historical sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, paleography, and diplomatics, and invites a rethinking of communities of practice, discourse, and text. Case studies show how “writing from below” shaped communities across multiple social contexts.