Historical pragmatics is a mode of analysis that is not only descriptive but also explanatory. Hitherto, most – very valuable – work in historical pragmatics has focused on corpus-analysis, especially of grammatical or lexical features; a ‘typical’ piece of research from this orientation deploys quantitative analysis to map (e.g.) the linguistic expression of ‘polite’ discourse (see e.g. the essays in Bax and Kádár 2011). More recently, however, as flagged earlier by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, and developed further by such scholars as Claudia Claridge, Merja Kytö, Matti Peikola, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö, the domain has become more capacious and qualitative in orientation, including as additional objects of enquiry features that have traditionally been seen as non-linguistic.