The development of play-texts: From manuscript to print

It is an axiom of historical linguistics, and indeed historical studies generally, that our present-day assumptions are not a reliable basis for the analysis and interpretation of language data from earlier periods. Assumptions, not just about language but any kind of human experience, help people make sense of the world in a cognitively efficient way. But those very assumptions interact with the phenomena to which they pertain, and together they change over time. Present-day assumptions form the endpoint of diachronic change. The first task for the historian is to describe earlier states of the language and its contexts, including the likely assumptions of contemporaries, and begin to understand why it is as it is. The second task is to explain the processes of change which have led to the current situation today. This paper aims to show how present-day assumptions about early modern play-texts are inappropriate or misleading. It explores how the dialogue of earlier plays was shaped by particular manuscript practices, and compares this with the dialogue of present-day plays that are shaped by the context of printing

Libelling Oscar Wilde: The case of Regina vs. John Sholto Douglas

This paper explores the 1895 libel trial between Oscar Wilde (literary personality) and the Marquis of Queensbury (father of Wilde's close friend). Focussing on the lead defence counsel's cross-examination of Wilde (plaintiff), I demonstrate that Carson's FTAs are “aggressive” and, in some cases, “deliberately” so (cf. Bousfield, Impoliteness in interaction, John Benjamins, 2008: 72). However, as they do not breach the rules of the courtroom or involve an overt “intent to harm” (Goffman, Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour, Pantheon Books, 1967: 14), I argue that they do not constitute impoliteness. I further argue that Carson's FTAs should not be considered “incidental” in nature, given they were more planned and more anticipated than Goffman's (Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour, Pantheon Books, 1967: 14) definition seems to allow, and thus suggest that Carson's FTAs be recognized as sitting somewhere between Goffman's intentional or incidental levels – thanks, in part, to their manipulation of multiple goals (Penman, Facework and politeness: Multiple goals in courtroom discourse, Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1990) – in what I have labelled the ambiguous-as-to-speaker-intent zone (Archer under review). I also demonstrate Carson's use/manipulation of representational frames and reality paradigms so as to emphasize Wilde's moral “deviance”. In brief, a reality paradigm equates to “the systems of beliefs [and] values … by reference to which a person or a society comprehends the world” (Fowler, Linguistic criticism, Oxford University Press, 1986: 130), and representational frames, to the way(s) in which interlocutors opt to “represent the character traits, ideas and opinions of and even statements made by others” (Locher and Watts, Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008: 99, n9). I conclude by responding to two questions highlighted by my investigation: (1) Should we be talking about impoliteness in the courtroom (even when investigating the cross-examination phase)? and (2) To what extent can our understanding of facework be enhanced, in both a courtroom context and more generally, via a consideration of reality paradigms (and their strategic manipulation)

The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550-1620

This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. It approaches this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners, and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 1550-1624, and its role in discourses to do with social regulation, negative evaluation and moralizing. The other is to undertake a detailed comparison between Della Casa’s Galateo and Brown and Levinson (1987) in particular. The major finding here is the close similarity between the two. Along the way, the paper also airs some theoretical distinctions relating to notions of politeness, notably the distinction between first- and second-order politeness, and touches on some of the features of the social context of early modern England

Female Barrenness, Bodily Access and Aromatic Treatments in Seventeenth-Century England

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.Scholars examining medical practice in early modern England have often remarked upon the complexities of the relationship between male physicians and female patients. It has been noted that ideas of female modesty and concern about the potential erotic nature of contact between patients and practitioners could affect the treatment of certain disorders. This paper contributes to this on-going discussion by examining the use of pungent substances to diagnose and treat female barrenness. Diagnostic tests included in medical treatises could rely upon the woman’s ability to perceive a particular substance. These tests thus put women at the centre of the diagnosis of their disorders and allowed them to negotiate access to their reproductive bodies. Similarly medical practitioners included a range of treatments for infertility that involved the fumes of certain substances entering the womb or surrounding the body. These treatments may have allowed women, and perhaps their medical practitioners, to choose a method of remedy that did not involve the application of external lotions to the genitalia. Thus by considering the multi-sensory nature of medical treatment this paper will highlight that the diversity of remedies advocated in early modern medical texts would perhaps have allowed women to restrict access to their reproductive bodies, while still obtaining diagnosis and treatment.Peer reviewe

A discursive approach to the analysis of politeness data

This paper aims to provide an exemplification of the way that the discursive approach can work in relation to the analysis of data. As such, it argues for the validity of the discursive approach to politeness. Because the discursive approach has been seen as difficult to employ in the analysis of data, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of research returning to Brown and Levinson’s approach. Although discursive approaches to politeness have functioned successfully as a critique of Brown and Levinson’s work, they are not seen as a means of analyzing politeness and impoliteness in their own right. By tracing the development of the discursive approach to politeness, and by addressing the critiques that there have been, we argue that although the critical role of the discursive approach is paramount to the development of the field, discursive approaches are more than just a critique, and should be seen as constituting an approach to the analysis of politeness as well. As a case in point, we illustrate what a discursive approach consists of through analysing an intercultural interaction between a group of close friends of Dutch and Italian origin

A question of faith?:prosecuting religiously aggravated offences in England and Wales

Have some of the prosecutions for religiously aggravated offences going before the courts amounted to attempts to apply unjust prohibitions against freedom of speech? Is there any evidence that the provisions for religiously aggravated offences have been applied to suppress criticism of religion? This paper applies an analysis of Crown Prosecution Service records on religiously aggravated offences to address these questions

Linguistic impoliteness and religiously aggravated hate crime in England and Wales

Despite its centrality to religiously aggravated hate crime recorded in England and Wales, the nature of the language used has been neglected in research. This paper, based on a unique dataset, aims to rectify this. It takes its approach from the field of linguistic impoliteness, a field that has yet to consider hate crime. Therein lies our second aim: to consider whether impoliteness notions can be usefully extended to the language of hate crime. In our data, we examine, in particular, conventionalized impoliteness formulae, insults, threats, incitement and taboo words. Whilst we reveal some linguistic support for the way religiously aggravated hate crime is framed in the law and discussed in the legal literature, we highlight areas of neglect and potential ambiguity. Regarding impoliteness, we demonstrate its effectiveness as an approach to this data, but we also highlight areas of neglect in that literature too, notably, non-conditional threats and incitement

Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

This paper discusses a particular strand of interpersonal pragmatics that may be known as ‘discursive’ pragmatics and attempts to delineate what is entailed in such an approach. Some scholars may characterise it as placing emphasis on participant evaluations, others may foreground the analysis of contextualised and sequential texts, while still others consider it to include both of these. In general, though, discursive pragmatics often seems to involve a reaction to, and a contrast with, so-called Gricean intention-based approaches. In this paper I argue that, far from discarding the insights of Grice, Austin and others, a discursive approach to interpersonal pragmatics should embrace those aspects of non-discursive pragmatics that provide us with a ‘tool-kit’ and a vocabulary for examining talk-in-interaction. At the same time, I will argue that the shortcomings of the speaker-based, intention- focused pragmatics can be compensated for, not by privileging hearer evaluations of meaning, but by taking an ethnographic and, to some extent, ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of naturally-occurring discourse data. By providing a critique of Locher and Watts’ (2005) paradigmatic example of a discursive approach to politeness and then a sample analysis of interactional data, I demonstrate how a combination of insights from Gricean pragmatics and from ethnomethodology allows the analyst to comment on the construction and negotiation of meaning in discourse, without having recourse to notions of either intention or evaluation

Beyond sarcasm: the metalanguage and structures of mock politeness

This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from informal, naturally occurring conversations in a UK-based online forum. The paper introduces a range of metalinguistic expressions which are used to refer to mock polite behaviours in lay interactions and describes the different structures of mock polite behaviours. The analysis shows that both metalanguage and structure are more diverse than anticipated by previous research and, as a result, the paper argues against equating mock politeness with sarcasm and calls for further research into mock politeness as an important strategy of impoliteness