230138 Speech Acts in the History of English (S) (SoSe 2025)

In this course, we will investigate speech acts (such as representatives, directives, expressives, commissives, declarations) from a historical pragmatics perspective. We will focus on various periods of English to learn about the structure, intentions and perceptions (or: locution, illocution and perlocution) of speech acts in authentic historical as well as modern language data.
In other words: How are speech acts, in terms of their structure and expressed intentions, realised differently in Shakespeare’s plays as opposed to a message on X? And what about editors’ expressive and directive speech acts in early modern newspaper metatexts?
To answer such questions, we will, first of all, address speech act theory (e.g. Austin & Searle) and learn about the role of data, corpora and methodological challenges in historical and modern pragmatics. In the second part of the course, we focus on a selection of case studies and analyse manifestations of speech acts in a variety of written, spoken, online and offline settings ourselves with a diachronic focus.
More details will be made available in the first session.