21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse

Abstract

This chapter suggests that OE pragmatics and discourse should be approached from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, rather than seeing Old English as a prestage for the later periods of English. It is its cultural and linguistic "otherness" which makes Old English, in spite of the lack of good data, a particularly interesting area for pragmatic study. The different culture(s) of the Anglo-Saxon world required forms for the negotiation of meaning different from those we are familiar with today. Thus the conspicuous lack of structures attesting to politeness as face work, the existence of distinct speech events such as flyting or the prominent role of silence allow cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison which both corroborates and challenges issues like the uniformitarian principle. Similarly, the different typological character of the morpho-syntax of Old English allows a degree of word order flexibility that is exploited by discourse strategies.1 Old English discourse: data, texts and discourse communities Pragmatics focuses on how meaning is negotiated, i.e., how speakers and hearers in certain contexts -to echo the title of Austin's (1975Austin's ( [1962) groundbreaking lecture -"do things with words". It thus concerns the analysis of mental processes in speakers and hearers, but also issues of linguistic and social interaction in specific socio-historical and cultural settings. While it is generally, also for speakers and hearers of Present-day languages, hard to isolate the crucial cognitive processes operating in the human minds, the study of OE pragmatics is complicated by at least two further factors: not only, as for all early periods of a language, the lack of good data (see Taavitsainen, Volume 2, Chapter 93), but also the length of the period and consequently and more importantly for the present subject, the changing linguistic and socio-historical conditions during and after the Anglo-Saxon period, which fundamentally affected the bases for and principles of social as well as linguistic interaction. 21 Old English: Pragmatics and discourse 325 Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 325-340 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/25/16 3:39 PMThe OE period -traditionally considered to last from the middle of the 5th century to about 1100/1150 -is the longest among the conventional periods of English and covers more than 600 years (see von Mengden, Chapter 2), from the time when Germanic tribes, as pagan pirates and mercenaries, invaded Britain to the late Anglo-Saxon England of the 10th and 11th centuries, when the Anglo-Saxon society was one of the most sophisticated societies of the medieval West, renowned for its ecclesiastical, literary, and cultural achievements. Fortuitously, a wide variety of vernacular OE textsmany more than from any of the other early medieval Germanic societies -are extant from the Anglo-Saxon period. The online database Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (Healey [ed.] 2005), which consists of at least...