Kyle’s Reviews > English Historical Pragmatics > Status Update

To celebrate the end of this fascinating study, Little Red takes the lead, as if she were following Umberto Eco's advice of walking in the woods, and there it is in the first printed version of the story: that uneasiness as she undresses and gets into bed with her supposedly sick grandmother. How true of the authors that narrative offers a way in for everyone regardless of age or levels of dysdisneyified prudishness.

Newspaper, and the various forms that news traversed the spheres of private and public, and how the outlook for future file sharing will blur the spaces in between. Surprised to find that censorship laws for the first couple centuries of printed news did not allow local (or even national) news. Compare this to Huffington Ppst's recent inaccuracies reported as actual news, with a tiniest retraction printed at its end.

Medicine and science are the pragmatically focus here, while also being the key players on academia's STEM stage. It looks like I am on the right track by searching for traces of quantum physics in literature from the late modern period. Of course, it would be great to go back as far as to include some of Shakespeare like Twelfth Night or Antony and Cleopatra but better save something for my thesis!

While Dearest Yuko is at the January sales with her friend, I sit at a Starbucks shopping for "an eclectic methodology for historical studies" into genre in general. Interested in the loosening of language in electronic text, compared to the handwritten letters home of previous centuries. Also got to find out how recipes have remained essentially unchanged, wonder if orange chocolate mocha will be made in the future.

Terms like grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation may be enough to scare off the casual English speakers, but the example of how markers such as "well", "as long as" and "Jesus" developed from one discursive function to a variety of other, typically more foul language. Finding out these expressions have a history, without having to learn many technical terms, makes this -icalisation process a lot less threatening.

Not trying to be rude, but there is a whole history of politeness that seems to be missing from this brief chapter, that late early modern period better known as Austen's age, where even the tiniest glance and misunderstood word could spell disaster for a young lady of middling fortune. Instead, the focus rests upon the usual authors, with a detailed plotting of Romeo and Juliet as if never yet read closely.

Was my advance to candidacy for moving my advisor's piano a promise, directive, compliment or insult?

One of the first impediments to a teenager picking up a Shakespearean play is the perceived problem of pronouns: some stop at the sight of their first thou and refuse to accept it as English. This chapter give a thrilling account of all the ways one person could directly address another, while keeping in mind that most reported speech is from fiction and may not have actually been spoken to a real-life anyone at all.

Ay me! The pragmatic study of the English language starts off wih words that are barely words, but discourse markers and interjections. Well, they may seem simple, but alas, there are as many negotiated meanings as the most overwrought noun or irregular verb. Umm, my future professor gets mentioned again, don't you know, as having written a classic on pragmatic markers, so I better get used to marking, mhm, my words.

More details, the nuts and bolts of how corpora will help researchers find the right method, yet as it is more of an introductory text there is a wide range between the quantitative and qualititative approaches, meaning anything goes until further chapters dealing with specifics. Nice to see the professor who assigned this textbook is prominently featured in this chapter, a good preview of impressive studies to come.