Twenty years of historical pragmatics

Abstract

This paper provides an outline of the changes in linguistics that gave rise to historical pragmatics in the 1990s and that have shaped its development over the twenty years of its existence. These changes have affected virtually all aspects of linguistic analyses: the nature of the data, the research questions, the methods and tools that are being used for the analysis, as well as the nature of the generalizations and findings that result from these investigations. We deal with the changes in terms of shifts in thought styles and discuss seven different turns: the pragmatic turn, the socio-cultural turn, the dispersive turn, the empirical turn, the digital turn, the discursive turn and the diachronic turn. We also deal with some long-standing, recent or emerging interfaces where historical pragmatics interacts with other disciplines and we discuss some future challenges, such as the multimodality and fluidity of communication and the problem of combining big data with pragmatic micro analyses.

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