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

What it is about

The paper proposes a framework for long-run change in speech acts. A speech act has three parts that can change separately: its functional profile (illocutionary potential), the expressions used to perform it (IFIDs), and the metacommunicative words used to talk about it. Change is described as attenuation: the force weakens over time. Apologies are traced in five stages, from Old English penitential prayers addressed to God, through apologies addressed to a fellow Christian, explicit secular apologies in late Middle and Renaissance texts, conventionalised apologies, to minimal tokens such as "oops", "soz" and "my bad". The data are a mix of earlier scholarship and corpus counts. In the COHA fiction section (1810–2009), the apology expression "sorry" rises from 26 to 157 occurrences per million words, and the total apology count roughly doubles, from about 100 to more than 200 per million. The shift is from addressee-oriented requests for forgiveness to speaker-oriented expressions of regret. In spoken BNC data, "sorry" accounts for about 60% of apologies.

Ideas

For Mova

Chapters: 31. Speech acts, 32. Politeness and hedging, 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech, 33. Implicature and presupposition. Code: prag (speech acts, prag/src/infer.rs). Measure: agreement of the three-feature score with a hand-labelled set of apology turns, and the change in pragmatic answers when the stage label is used. The paper gives no code, so every measure is ours to design.

Topics: Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.878

@article{jucker2019speech,
  title = {{Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies}},
  author = {Jucker, Andreas H.},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.878},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.878}
}

References

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  50. How to cite this article: Jucker, Andreas H. 2019. Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 45. 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.878 ↗ our card
  51. Submitted: 21 December 2018 find
  52. Accepted: 25 February 2019 find
  53. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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