‘But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe’

Abstract

In this paper, I look at how medieval and early modern poets present and exploit the potential inherent in opening moves in (love) relationships for the purpose of plot motivation and protagonist characterisation. The depiction of the opening moves depends on three interrelated pairs of variables: 1) legalistic tradition (marriage as the reason for initiating a relationship) vs emotional tradition (focus is on the beloved person’s affection), 2) plot motivation vs protagonist characterisation, and 3) brevity vs length. Longer texts that focus on the lovers’ feelings and that pay some attention to protagonist characterisation are more likely to feature relatively complex linguistic strategies presented in a basically realistic interactional manner. In shorter texts of the emotional tradition, the complexity is reduced, and poets working in the legalistic tradition often pay hardly any attention at all to the finer points of opening moves in love interaction.

Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies

“…Most work, however, seems to have been focused on expressives, such as greetings and farewells (Arnovick 1996;1999;Grzega 2005;Jucker 2011a;b;2017), apologies ; Kohnen 2017a; b; Williams 2018; Jucker 2018b), compliments , thanking (Jacobsson 2002), and in particular swearing and insulting (Hughes 1991;Arnovick 1995;Jucker 2000;Jucker & Taavitsainen 2000) and cursing (Danet & Bogoch 1992;Arnovick 1999). 1 But there is also some historical work on less culturally salient speech acts which lack an everyday metacommunicative expression, for instance the opening moves in Middle English courtly literature (Honegger 2000), or work on speech acts that do not fit easily into a Searlian speech act classification system, for instance refusals, which by definition are not initiating but reactive speech acts (see Martínez-Insua 2010).…”