Speech Acts in the History of English -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Preface -- Speech acts now and then -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Previous research on the history of speech acts -- 3. Key issues in historical linguistics and historical pragmatics -- 3.1 Language universals -- 3.2 Context -- 4. Pragmatic space -- 5. Speech acts and politeness -- 6. Research methods and research questions -- 7. The papers in this volume -- References -- Directives and commissives -- Directives in Old English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Methodology and data -- 3. Old English directives: Four case studies -- 3.1 Directive performatives -- 3.2 Constructions with þu scealt / ge sculon -- Table 1. þu scealt-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- Table 2. ge sculon-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- 3.3 Constructions with uton -- Table 3. uton-constructions in directives in the Old English section of the Helsinki Corpus. -- 3.4 Constructions with neodþearf -- 4. Conclusions -- References -- Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640-1760 -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Requests -- 2.1 Towards a definition of the speech act of request -- 2.2 The structure of requests: A starting point -- 2.2.1 Distinguishing the structural categories of a request -- 2.2.2 Features of the head act -- 3. (In)directness and requests -- 3.1 (In)directness: Some theoretical background -- 3.2 Classifying requests for (in)directness: A starting point -- 4. Historical methodology: Problems, solutions and implications -- 5. Our data and its sociopragmatic annotation -- 6. Requests and directness: Patterns of distribution in the Sociopragmatic Corpus (trials and plays, -- 6.1 Overall distribution.

Table 1. Frequencies of requests in the SPC -- 6.2 The distribution of broad categories of directness -- Table 2. Frequencies of types of request in the SPC -- Figure 1 and 2. The distribution of conventional indirectness in the CCSARP project (Figure 1, from -- 7. Specific strategies for conventional indirect requests and their distribution -- 8. Impositive strategies and their context -- Table 3. Impositive strategies -- Table 4. The frequencies of support moves in impositive requests -- Table 5. The frequencies of types of support move in drama and trials -- 9. Summary and discussion of major findings -- 10. Concluding remarks -- References -- An inventory of directives in Shakespeare's King Lear -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Forms and functions -- 2.1 The Early Modern inventory of imperatives and related speech forms to express directives -- 2.2 Directive speech acts - a working definition -- 2.3 Directive speech acts and their illocutionary force -- 2.4 The communicative functions and the manipulative strength of imperative clauses -- 2.5 Indirect speech acts -- 3. Shakespearean directives - methodological problems -- 4. Corpus study: King Lear's directive speech acts -- 4.1 Analysis of King Lear Act I -- 4.1.1 Scene 1 "The state division scene" (1.1.34-266) -- 4.1.2 Act I, Scene 4 "Lear and his fool" (105-117 -- 163-181) -- 4.1.3 Act I, scene 4: "Lear and Goneril" (236-278) -- 4.1.4 Summary -- 4.2. Analysis of Act II -- 4.2.1 Scene 4 "Lear and Regan" (88-119 -- 133-182 -- 188-271) -- 4.2.2 Summary -- 4.3 Analysis of Act III -- 4.3.1 Scene 2 "Storm on the Heath" (1-78) -- 4.3.2 Act III, Scene 4 "Storm still" (1-28 -- 170-180) -- 4.3.3 Summary -- 4.4 Analysis of Act IV -- 4.4.1 Scene 6 "Lear [still mad] and Gloucester" (130-180) -- 4.4.2 Act IV, Scene 7 "Lear and Cordelia" (25-83) -- 4.4.3 Summary -- 4.5 Analysis of Act V.

4.5.1 Scene 3 "Lear and Cordelia" (8-11 -- 306-12) -- 5. Summary and conclusion -- Sources -- References -- Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Data and methodology -- 3. Analysis and discussion of findings: Form and function of requesting and undertaking commitments -- 4. Concluding observations -- References -- No botmeles bihestes -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Method and material -- 3. Speech acts and their linguistic realisations in history -- 4. Promises as speech acts -- 5. The "binding promise" in the medieval period -- 6. The "magic words" - different ways of making a commitment -- 7. The texts studied -- 8. The magic words in use -- 9. Summary of ways of promising and eliciting promises -- References -- Expressives and assertives -- Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi -- 1. Introductory remarks -- 2. The chronological development of greeting terms -- 3. Iconemes and etymologies: Where do greetings come from? -- 3.1 Expressive phrases, attention-getters -- 3.2 Phrases with a performative verb -- 3.3 Wish for a good time of the day -- 3.4 Wish for God's protection -- 3.5 Wish for peace -- 3.6 Wish for well-being -- 3.7 Inquiry about well-being -- 3.8 Sign of subversiveness -- 3.9 Happy about seeing each other -- 3.10 Loan expressions -- 4. Formal and functional developments: Where do greetings go? -- 4.1 Functional changes -- 4.2 Discursive changes -- 4.3 Morphonetic changes -- 4.4 Morphosyntactic changes and anomalies -- 4.5 Morphosyntactic conservation -- 4.6 Stylistic changes and conservations -- 4.7 The need for innovation -- 5. Conclusions -- "Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever" -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Face-threatening and face-enhancing acts -- 3. Present-day compliments -- 4. Compliments in the past -- 5. Methodologies of compliment research -- 6. Locating compliments in historical materials.

7. Two examples in their sociohistorical context -- 8. Fiction as data -- 9. Gender differences in early fiction corpora -- 9.1 Female authors' compliments -- 9.2 Male authors' compliments -- 10. Discussion and conclusion -- Corpora -- References -- Apologies in the history of English -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Apology as a speech act: Criteria for comparison -- 3. Contrastive versus historical speech act analysis -- 4. Apology as a speech act in Present-day and Renaissance English -- 5. Data -- 6. Negotiations of interpersonal relations: Typical manifestations of apologies in our data -- 7. Forms of apologies in Renaissance prose fiction and prose drama -- 8. Functions of apologies: Types of offences -- 9. Addressee- and speaker-oriented apologies -- 10. Conclusion -- Methods of speech act retrieval -- Showing a little promise -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Aim and method -- 3. Corpus-based studies of speech acts -- 4. The corpus data -- 5. Identifying prototypical promises -- 6. Results and analysis -- Figure 1. Performative verb frequencies in the testing data -- Table 1. Performative verb frequencies in the training data -- Table 2. Performative verb frequencies in the testing data -- Figure 2. Performative verb frequencies by author -- Figure 3. Pattern frequencies in the testing data -- Figure 4. Pattern frequencies by performative verb -- 7. Retrieval software performance -- Table 3. Precision and recall rates for performative verbs -- Table 4. Precision and recall rates for query patterns -- 8. Conclusions -- References -- Appendix A: Penn Treebank part-of-speech tagset -- Fishing for compliments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Methodological challenges -- 3. Points of departure -- 3.1 Definitions of compliments -- 3.2 Method: Combining quantitative and qualitative assessment -- 3.3 Inter-annotator agreement -- 4. Assessment of the patterns.

4.1 Pattern 1 -- 4.2 Pattern 2 -- 4.3 Pattern 3 -- 4.4 Pattern 4 -- 4.5 Pattern 5 -- 4.6 Pattern 6 -- 4.7 Pattern 7 -- 4.8 Pattern 8 -- 4.9 Pattern 9 -- 5. Discussion -- 5.1 Query problems -- Table 1. Compliment pattern frequencies in Manes and Wolfson's data and in the BNC -- Figure 1. Compliment pattern frequencies in the BNC graphically compared to Manes and Wolfson's (M&W -- 5.2 Precision and recall revisited -- Table 2. Frequencies of compliment patterns in BNC, manual assessment -- 6. Conclusions -- References -- Tracing directives through text and time -- 1. Introduction -- 2. A genre-based bottom-up methodology: The basic steps -- 3. A study of directives -- 3.1 The data -- 3.2 Manifestations of directives -- 3.3 Results: Variability and retrievability -- Figure 1. Distribution of manifestations of directives in the data (in per cent) -- 3.4 Results: Distribution across genres -- Figure 2. Frequency of directives in sermons, letters and prayers (freq. per 1,000 words) -- Figure 3. Distribution of manifestations of directives in sermons (in per cent) -- Figure 4. Distribution of manifestations of directives in letters (in per cent) -- Figure 5. Distribution of manifestations of directives in prayers (in per cent) -- 3.5 Extending the analysis -- Table 1. Directives with let us / let's in the Early Modern part of the Helsinki Corpus (frequency p -- Figure 6. Frequency of directive performatives in sermons, letters and prayers (freq. per 10,000 wor -- 4. Conclusions -- Sources -- References -- Name index -- Subject index -- The Pragmatics & Beyond New Series.