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The present study aims to discuss some politeness strategies in 13–16th century Catalan, based on a corpus pragmatic analysis of requests from the Computerized Corpus of Old Catalan (Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic [CICA]), found by searching for occurrences of the speech act verbs pregar ‘ask, pray’ and suplicar ‘supplicate, beg, beseech’. Results of the present study provide evidence that politeness in 13–16th century Catalan was realized by different linguistic means than in contemporary Catalan. It focuses on some conventionally indirect strategies that consisted in using the verb voler ‘want’ to transfer the imperative force from the performance of the requested act to the hearer’s willingness. At the intersection of speech act research, politeness studies, historical pragmatics and corpus pragmatics, this study also discusses some methodological challenges of these areas.

Jelen tanulmany celja, hogy feltarja a kozepkori katalan plaure ’tetszik’ ige felszolito ertelmű alakjaival alkotott egyes szerkezetek hasznalatat, amely ellentmond Searle (1975) altalanositasanak az indirekt direktivak lehetseges vegrehajtasi modjairol. A vizsgalt szerkezetek a kozepkori katalanban engedelykerő direktivak, kesőbb pedig indirekt direktivak vegrehajtasara voltak hasznalatosak. Az előfordulasok egy csoportjaban Isten, vagy valamely mas isteni szemely tetszeset keri a beszelő: ez a hasznalat az interakcio bizonyos pontjain volt hajlamos megjelenni, es kituntetett szerepe volt annak felepiteseben es az ervelesben. A ’(ne) tessek Istennek’ ertelmű szofordulat a kozepkori katalanban szubjektifikacion is keresztulment. A tanulmany tovabbi celkitűzese, hogy bemutassa es ertekelje a diakron beszedaktus-kutatas modszertananak egyes eljarasait, a kvalitativ kontextualis elemzes jelentőseget hangsulyozva. Az irott formaban fennmaradt megnyilatkozasok illokucios ertekenek megallapitasahoz a beszedaktusigek vizsgalatan kivul figyelembe kell venni a tarsas kontextust, enciklopedikus informaciokat, a keres tartalmat es sulyat, az adott kor kulturalis kozeget, valamint az interakcio felepiteset es benne a kerdeses megnyilatkozas helyet es szerepet. Amennyiben teljes kepet akarunk kapni a vizsgalt szerkezet hasznalatarol, a teljes jelentesmezőt, funkcionalis mezőt erdemes felterkepezni, azaz az egyazon tipusu illokucios aktus vegrehajtasara alkalmas, hasonlo funkcioju szerkezeteket egyutt erdemes vizsgalni. The primary aim of this paper is to reveal uses of medieval Catalan constructions with subjunctive forms of the verb plaure ‘please’. Relying on a large corpus of historical texts from the 13th to 16th centuries, I argue that they are highly conventionalized forms of formulating directives requesting permission, and later, indirect directives. This finding contradicts Searle’s (1975) generalization about possible ways of performing indirect directives. In a group of occurrences the speech act was addressed to God, to win his approval. I show that this construction ((no) placia/plagues a Deu ‘may it (not) please God’) became a conventionalized phrase with a special role in interpersonal interactions, followed a peculiar path of semantic change and underwent subjectification. Another aim of the paper is to discuss some methodological issues of diachronic speech act analysis and to argue for the importance of qualitative methods and a highly comparative approach. Speech act verbs in themselves do not entirely reveal the illocutionary force and function of utterances. In order to analyze historical utterances, we should take into account a lot of additional information, e.g. several contextual factors, such as social roles of speakers and addressees, the content and “weight” of the request, encyclopedic information, the structure of the interaction and the place and role of the construction in it. Moreover, I argue that all forms appropriate to perform speech acts of the same illocutionary type in a given language stage should be examined together, comparing neighboring speech acts in a pragmatic space.

A tanulmany celja, hogy feltarja, milyen fogalmakat takarnak a metafora, metonimia, illetve pragmatikai kovetkeztetes terminusok a grammatikalizacios jelentesvaltozas irodalmaban, es megmutassa, hogy ezek ertelmezese nemcsak az egyes elmeleti megkozelitesekben lehet mas es mas, hanem a szinkron ertelmezestől is kulonbozik. Az elmeleti fejtegetest az angol „be going to + főnevi igenev” mozgasiges szerkezetből kialakulo kozeljovő grammatikalizaciojanak kulonboző elemzesei illusztraljak. A vizsgalat, amely alapjan a metaforanak es metonimianak egy szinkron es egy diakron megkozelitese bontakozik ki, azt latszik alatamasztani, hogy metonimia es metafora a grammatikalizacios jelentesvaltozasban egymast kiegeszitő pragmatikai folyamatokkent osszeegyeztethetőek. A kognitiv metaforak hattereben allo, a vilag tapasztalati megismereseből adodo tudason alapulo kovetkeztetesi semaink a grammatikalizacios jelentesvaltozas iranyat is megszabjak. This paper aims to reveal the notions covered by the terms metaphor, metonymy and pragmatic inference in the research on semantic change in grammaticalization. It highlights that these are not only conceived of in different ways in the grammaticalization literature, but also cover notions that are different from their synchronic interpretation. Theoretical considerations are illustrated by presenting different approaches to the development of the English immediate future be going to from a motion verb construction. The study argues that approaches based on the concepts of metaphor and metonymy are complementary in describing semantic change in grammaticalization. However, the diachronic notions of metaphor and metonymy are distinguished from their synchronic concepts. The paper concludes that universal similarities of inferential mechanisms, based on our knowledge that comes from the way we experience the world, shape similar pathways of semantic change in grammaticalization.

We aim to explore the nature of data analysis in the investigation of talk-in-interaction, concentrating on methodological fuzziness. On the basis of a case study on the phenomenon of repair, we argue that even in a traditionally corpus-based field like conversation analysis, the source of corpus data is of an inherently integrated nature. The actual research practice shows that the methodology of conversation analysis cannot be clearly delimited but has fuzzy boundaries. In order to be able to use occurrences found in corpora as data, corpus as data source should be complemented with further pieces of information from other data sources, for instance, the researcher’s intuition, the results of earlier investigation, the theoretical framework we work in and inferences.

Jelen írás a történeti pragmatika, ezen belül a grammatikalizációs jelentésváltozással foglalkozó kutatások kontextusfogalmának feltárását tűzi ki célul. E kutatási terület két kontextustipológiájának (Heine 2002 és Diewald 2002) feltételezett kontextustípusai közül a kritikus kontextus (Diewald 2002) jellegzetességeinek alapos feltárása alapján az a konklúzió vonható le, hogy a kontextus kifejezés a vizsgált kutatási terület szakirodalmában nem mindig az értelmezés kontextusaként értendő. Egyrészt, a kontextus fogalma a grammatikalizációs jelentésváltozás szakirodalmában szűkebb fogalom az értelmezés kontextusánál, abban csupán a folyamatot előmozdító kontextuális tényezők kapnak szerepet. Másrészt, a történeti kutató értelmezési kontextusában több kontextuális tényező és másképp játszik/játszhat szerepet, mint a mindennapi nyelvhasználatban a megnyilatkozások értelmezése során. Harmadrészt, a kontextusnak a történeti kutatásban használatos fogalma a nyelvi megértésben szerepet játszó kontextus és a módszertani értelemben vett kontextus vonásainak keveredését mutatja. The present paper aims to discuss the notion of context as it appears in historical pragmatics, and, especially, in research concerning semantic change in grammaticalization. It presents the context types provided in Heine (2002) and Diewald (2002), which are supposed to be important in semantic change in grammaticalization. After discussing the characteristics of critical context, proposed in Diewald’s (2002) typology, the paper highlights why the expression context as used in grammaticalization literature cannot be understood as the context of online utterance interpretation. First, this notion of context is narrower than the context of online language processing in the sense that it contains only those contextual features which are important in semantic change. Second, the context in which linguists today interpret historical utterances differs from that one which plausibly could have played a role in utterance interpretation of contemporary language users. Third, the concept of context in the relevant literature reveals a mixture of features of context in utterance interpretation and context as a methodological phenomenon.

This paper aims to identify the role of pragmatics in grammaticalisation and to highlight the particular steps in the process of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures on the basis of a historical pragmatic study concerning the grammaticalisation of the Catalan anar ‘to go’ + infinitive construction. It also provides some comparative considerations with similar constructions in other Romance languages. The corpus contains occurrences taken from medieval Catalan chronicles. In order to reconstruct the history of anar + infinitive, the paper also considers morphological facts and other Catalan medieval periphrases. The paper concludes that implicatures play a double role in semantic change. On the one hand, they can become part of the semantic meaning attached to a certain construction as a new semantic component. On the other hand, they can promote the salience of a certain semantic component within the semantic structure of a lexical item.