Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. From a new vantage point -- 2. The metacommunicative lexicon as a (meta) pragmatic research paradigm -- 3. The significance of the metacommunicative lexicon for historical pragmatics -- 4. Previewing the papers of this volume -- References -- Part I. Metacommunicative profiles of communicative genres -- 1.1 Cross-sectional studies -- Sociability -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Talking on paper: Conversation and friendship -- 3. Performing epistolary friendship -- 4. Lexical interlude: Contemporary meanings of friend -- 5. Embodying friendship: An intimate correspondence -- 6. Friendship, conversation and epistolary metacommunicative language -- References -- "I write you these few lines" -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 The corpus under investigation -- 2. Metacommunicative vocabulary in emigrants' letters -- 2.1 Reifying the letter: Focus on intratextual reality -- 2.2 The emigrant letter as message: Focus on extratextual reality -- 3. Concluding remarks -- References -- 1.2 Longitudinal studies -- Inscribed orality and the end of a discourse archive -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Metapragmatic and metadiscursive expressions -- 3. Foucault's notion of the "archive" -- 4. Inscribed orality -- 5. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the archive it instantiated -- 6. Inscribed orality and the breakdown of the archive -- 7. The disappearance of the ASC: The end of a discourse archive -- References -- Managing disputes with civility -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The civility of scientific discourse -- 3. Linguistic clarity -- 4. Accuracy in reporting facts and expressing opinions -- 5. Objectivity -- 6. The explicitness of the argumentative structure -- 7. Conclusion -- References.

The metapragmatics of civilized belligerence -- 1. Pretext -- 2. Antecedents -- 2.1 The metapragmatic lexicon and me -- 2.2 An ecology of the public sphere -- 3. From the Indian Mutiny to Laws and Customs of War -- 4. Laws and customs of war -- 4.1 Performative positioning -- 4.2 Ideological framing -- 4.3 Language-ideological framing -- 4.4 Variable legal framing -- 4.5 Performative reflexivity -- 4.6 Directive and commissive terms of agreement -- 4.7 Intratextual and intertextual reflexivity -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- The metapragmatics of hoaxing -- 1. Introduction: Genre theory vs. metapragmatics -- 2. What is a hoax? A genre theorist's attempt at definition -- 3. Origins: Etymology and conditions of emergence -- 4. Variation and change in the metapragmatics of hoaxing -- 4.1 "Authored" hoaxes from the 18th and 19th centuries -- 4.2 "Unauthored" anonymous hoaxes from the 20th century -- 4.3 Digital hoaxes from the turn of the 20th to the 21th century -- 5. A recent metapragmatic twist: Attributions of "hoaxing" in political debates -- 5.1 Global warming/climate change -- 5.2 Evolution/creationism/intelligent design -- 6. Conclusion -- References -- From speaker and hearer to chatter, blogger and user -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Interactivity and mediation -- Mediated communication -- 3. Participation and the duality principle -- 4. Participation and meaning negotiation -- 5. Forms of communication and degrees of interactivity -- 5.1 One-way (unilateral) forms of communication -- 5.2 Two-way (bi- or multilateral) forms of communication -- 6. The concept of participation in Web 2.0 based forms of communication -- 7. Metacommunicative metaphors of participation -- 8. Estrangement -- 9. Conclusion -- References -- Part 2. Metacommunicative lexical sets -- Now as a text deictic feature in Late Medievaland Early Modern English medical writing.

1. Conventions of guiding readers in a long diachronic perspective -- 2. Research questions -- 3. Communicative goals and textual organization -- 4. Material of the study: A new database -- 5. Method of study: A corpus-based approach to now and metacomments -- 6. Now and metadisourse in scientific and medical texts -- 6.1 Helsinki Corpus -- 6.2 Middle English Medical Texts (1375-1500) -- 6.3 Early modern English medical texts (1500-1700) -- 7. Now + metatext as a discourse structuring device -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Performative and non-performative usesof speech-act verbs in the history of English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background and data -- 3. Performative vs. non-performative use of directive speech-act verbs -- 3.1 Frequency -- 3.2 Specificity -- 3.3 Speech-act conventions -- 3.4 Genre requirements -- 4. Conclusions -- References -- Verbs of answering revisited -- 1. Aims of this study -- 2. Corpora and methodology -- 2.1 Corpora used for this study -- 2.2 Search methodology -- 3. Frequencies of the verbs -- 4. answer -- 5. reply -- 6. respond -- 7. rejoin and retort -- 8. Concluding remarks -- Acknowledgements -- References -- A lexical approach to paralinguisticcommunication of the past -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Voice figures, interjections, and metacommunicative lexemes -- 3. A historical survey of paralinguistic lexemes8 -- 3.1 Selectional procedure -- 3.2 Findings -- 4. Some assessments -- 5. Résumé -- References -- Appendix -- Part 3. (Meta-)communicative ethics and ideologies -- Historical evidence of communicative maxims -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Maxim-driven language change? -- 3. Evidence of communicative maxims in historical texts -- 4. Metacommunicative comments on maxims in EME -- 5. Metacommunicative lexemes in EME -- 5.1 Single-word lexemes -- 5.2 Phrasal lexemes reflecting pragmatic maxims -- 6. Conclusions.

References -- Name index -- Subject index.