Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T01:24:55.504Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Synchronic and Diachronic Pragmatic Variability

from Part I - Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
Anne Barron
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
Get access

Summary

Pragmatic variability may be conceptualised on a vertical and horizontal axis, the former signifying diachronic pragmatic variation across time, the latter synchronic pragmatic variation at a particular point in time due to micro-social factors (e.g. social distance, social dominance, degree of imposition) and macro-social factors (e.g. region, gender, age, social class, ethnic identity). Both synchronic and diachronic variability share many theoretical concepts and methodological concerns. The present chapter sketches the concept of pragmatic variability and highlights the role played by situational context, stylistic constraints and macro-social parameters in pragmatic analyses. Following this, the research landscape on pragmatic variability is examined and research approaches to intralingual synchronic and diachronic pragmatic variation discussed, with particular reference made to variational pragmatics and historical pragmatics. The need for comparable data and the challenges this poses in pragmatic analyses, irrespective of research framework, is then taken up in the context of a case study on present day synchronic variation in offer realisations situated in variational pragmatics. There, data types and the possible applicability of the concept of the pragmatic variable for pragmatic work is discussed, as are the opportunities to be gained from combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The paper concludes with a critical summary identifying current trends and suggestions for future research on pragmatic variability.

Keywords

pragmatic variationsocial variablesdiachronicsynchronicvariational pragmatics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 182 - 205
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Archer, D. (2017). Context and historical (socio)pragmatics twenty years on. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 18(2), 315–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archer, D. and Culpeper, J. (2009). Identifying key sociophilological usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640–1760): An empirical approach via corpus annotation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 10(2), 286–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Askehave, I. and Swales, J. M. (2001). Genre identification and communicative purpose: A problem and a possible solution. Applied Linguistics, 22(2), 195–212.Google Scholar
Barron, A. (2005a). Variational pragmatics in the foreign language classroom. System, 33(3), 519–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. (2005b). Offering in Ireland and England. In Barron, A. and Schneider, K. P., eds., The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 141–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. (2012). Public Information Messages: A Contrastive Genre Analysis of State-citizen Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Barron, A. (2014). Variational pragmatics. In Chapelle, C. A., ed., The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (EAL): Electronic Version. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–7.Google Scholar
Barron, A. (2015). Explorations in regional variation: A variational pragmatic perspective. Multilingua, 34(4), 449–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. (2017a). The speech act of ‘offers’ in Irish English. World Englishes, 36(2), 224–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. (2017b). Variational pragmatics. In Barron, A., Gu, Y. and Steen, G., eds., The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 91–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. (in press a). Contrastivity and the pragmatic variables. Pragmatic variation across pluricentric varieties. Sociolinguistica.Google Scholar
Barron, A. (in press b). ‘Sorry Miss, I completely forgot about it’: Apologies and vocatives in Ireland and England. In Lucek, S. and Amador Moreno, C. P., eds., Expanding the Landscapes of Irish English: Research in Honour of Jeffrey Kallen. Abingdon, UK: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Barron, A. and Schneider, K. P. (2009). Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 425–42.Google Scholar
Beeching, K. and Woodfield, H. (2015). Introduction. In Beeching, K. and Woodfield, H., eds., Researching Sociopragmatic Variability: Perspectives from Variational, Interlanguage and Contrastive Pragmatics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J. and Kasper, G. (eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
British National Corpus. www.english-corpora.org/bnc/.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Goody, E. N., ed., Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–289.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burmeister, M. (2013). Variability in death notices from Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland: A comparative perspective. In Bieswanger, M. and Koll-Stobbe, A., eds., New Approaches to the Study of Variability. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, pp. 65–88.Google Scholar
Cameron, R. and Schwenter, S. (2013). Pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics. In Bayley, R., Cameron, R. and Lucas, C., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 464–83.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2), 155–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copestake, A. and Terkourafi, M. (2010). Conventionalized speech act formulae: From corpus findings to formalization. In Kühnlein, P., Benz, A. and Sidner, C. L., eds., Constraints in Discourse 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 125–40.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2009). Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 10(2), 179–86.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Demmen, J. (2011). Nineteenth-century English politeness: Negative politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 12(1–2), 49–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Saint-Georges, I. (2013). Context in the analysis of discourse and interaction. In Chapelle, C. A., ed., The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New York: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 920–26.Google Scholar
D’Arcy, A. (2013). Variation and change. In Bayley, R., Cameron, R. and Lucas, C., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 484–502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deutschmann, M. (2003). Apologising in British English. Skrifter från moderna språk 10. Umeå University.Google Scholar
Dines, E. (1980). Variation in discourse – ‘and stuff like that’. Language in Society, 9(1), 13–31.Google Scholar
Dinkin, A. J. (2018). It’s no problem to be polite: Apparent-time change in responses to thanks. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(2), 190–215.Google Scholar
Eckkrammer, E. M. (2002). Textsorten im interlingualen und -medialen Vergleich: Ausschnitte und Ausblicke. In Drescher, M., ed., Textsorten im romanischen Sprachvergleich. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, pp. 15–39.Google Scholar
Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2015). The Language of Service Encounters: A Pragmatic-Discursive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fetzer, A. (2010). Contexts in context: Micro meets macro. In Tanskanen, S.-K., Helasvuo, M.-L., Johansson, M. and Raitaniemi, M., eds., Discourses in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 13–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, M. H. and Goodwin, C. (1987). Children’s arguing. In Philips, S., Steele, S. and Tanz, C., eds., Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, E. L. (2018). Greetings! The high five and the fist bump are twentieth century, but the first handshake dates to fifth century B.C. Greece, as way to prove you were weapon free. www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/12/handshake/.Google Scholar
Harting, A. (2005). Pragmatic idioms in Australian English – A survey of gender and age-related usage of greetings, leave-takings, thanks, and apologies. Studies in Language and Literature 松山大学, 24(2), 53–79.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
International Corpus of English. http://ice-corpora.net/ice/.Google Scholar
Jacobs, A. and Jucker, A. H. (1995). The historical perspective in pragmatics. In Jucker, A. H., ed., Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 3–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, A. H. (ed.). (1995). Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Jucker, A. H. (2010). Historical pragmatics. In Fried, M., Östman, J. and Verschueren, J., eds., Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 110–22.Google Scholar
Jucker, A. H. (2011). Greetings and farewells in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In Pahta, P. and Jucker, A. H., eds., Communicating Early English Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–40.Google Scholar
Jucker, A. H. (2017). Speech acts and speech act sequences: Greetings and farewells in the history of American English. Studia Neophilologica, 89(S1), 39–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, A. H. and Landert, D. (2017). Variation and change: Historical pragmatics. In Barron, A., Gu, Y. and Steen, G., eds., The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 79–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, A. H. and Taavitsainen, I. (2012). Pragmatic variables. In Hernández-Campoy, J. M. and Conde-Silvestre, J. C., eds., The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 293–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, pp. 317–41.Google Scholar
Krzeszowski, T. P. (1990). Contrasting Languages: The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lavandera, B. R. (1978). Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society, 7(2), 171–82.Google Scholar
Márquez Reiter, R. (2003). Pragmatic variation in Spanish: External request modifications in Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish. In Nuñez-Cedeño, L., López, L. and Cameron, R., eds., A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 166–80.Google Scholar
McCafferty, K. and Amador Moreno, C. P. (2014). ‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries …putting will for shall with the first person’: The decline of first-person shall in Ireland, 1760–1890. English Language and Linguistics, 18(3), 407–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mela, S. and Whitworth, D. E. (2014). The fist bump: A more hygienic alternative to the handshake. American Journal of Infection Control, 42(8), 916–17.Google Scholar
Norrby, C., Wide, C., Lindström, J. and Nilsson, J. (2015). Interpersonal relationships in medical consultations: Comparing Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish address practices. Journal of Pragmatics, 84, 121–38.Google Scholar
Ogiermann, E. (2009). On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdem: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pichler, H. (2010). Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14(5), 581–608.Google Scholar
Pichler, H. (2013). The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Regan, A. (2008). Current conversation patterns in the Republic of Ireland. Journal for EuroLinguistix, 5, 101–8.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. (2010). Variational pragmatics. In Fried, M., Östman, J. and Verschueren, J., eds., Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 239–67.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. (2014). Comparability and sameness in variational pragmatics. In Mergenthal, S. and Nischik, R. M., eds., Anglistentag 2013 Konstanz: Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, pp. 361–72.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. (2017). Pragmatic competence and pragmatic variation. In Giora, R. and Haugh, M., eds., Doing Pragmatics Interculturally: Cognitive, Philosophical, and Sociopragmatic Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 315–33.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. (2020). Rethinking pragmatic variation: The case of service encounters from a modified variational pragmatics perspective. In Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. and Placencia, M. E., eds., Pragmatic Variation in Service Encounter Interactions across the Spanish-Speaking World. London: Routledge, pp. 251–64.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A. (2008). Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A., eds., Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1–32.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A. (eds.). (2008). Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sidnell, J. (2009). Sequences. In D’Hondt, S., Östman, J. and Verschueren, J., eds., The Pragmatics of Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 215–39.Google Scholar
Staley, L. (2018). Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation: Speech Acts and Address Forms in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research Genres: Exploration and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, I. (2015). Historical pragmatics. In Biber, D. and Reppen, R., eds., The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–68.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, I. (2016). Genre dynamics in the history of English. In Kytö, M. and Pahta, P., eds., The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–85.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, I. and Jucker, A. H. (2010). Trends and developments in historical pragmatics. In Jucker, A. H. and Taavitsainen, I., eds., Historical Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 3–30.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, I. and Jucker, A. H. (2015). Twenty years of historical pragmatics: Origins, developments and changing thought styles. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 16(1), 1–24.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2012). Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2002). Politeness and formulaicity: Evidence from Cypriot Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics, 3(1), 179–201.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2011). The pragmatic variable: Toward a procedural interpretation. Language in Society, 40, 343–72.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2012). Between pragmatics and sociolinguistics: Where does pragmatic variation fit in? In Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. and Dale, K., eds., Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts: Methodological Issues. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 295–318.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J. (2008). Context and structure in a theory of pragmatics. Studies in Pragmatics, 10, 13–23.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9(2/3), 145–78.Google Scholar
Włodarczyk, M. (2016). Genre and Literacies: Historical (Socio)Pragmatics of the 1820 Settler Petition. Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University Press.Google Scholar
Włodarczyk, M. (2017). Initiating contact in institutional correspondence: Historical (socio)pragmatics of late modern English literacies. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 18(29), 271–94.Google Scholar
Yajun, J. and Chenggang, Z. (2006). World Englishes and contrastive rhetoric. English Today, 2(2), 11–22.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×