Mrs Malaprop Goes to Hastings: History, Parody, and Language in 1066 and All That (1930)

This essay discusses the manifold ways in which malapropisms, among other strategies, contribute to the comic effects achieved in 1066 and All That, a book meant to satirize early twentieth-century history manuals. After an overview of the book’s structure and contents, I will highlight examples in which linguistic choices cause semantic shifts resulting in humorous remarks. These typically sound like misremembered facts or mispronounced names, in a flurry of statements evoking the idiosyncratic usage of Mrs Malaprop, Richard Sheridan’s famous character. Throughout the text it is however difficult to draw a line between mere spoof and thinly-veiled ideological criticism: in carnivalesque uses, the maxims that underpin the Cooperative Principle can hardly apply, and reading between the lines, or indeed among semantic clusters, is indispensable

Late Modern English Glossaries as Tools of Definition and Codification

Esta contribución tiene como objetivo discutir los casos de glosarios adjuntos a las obras literarias y no literarias de los siglos xviii y xix, con el fin de investigar su función como fuentes más o menos neutras de información sobre el significado de los lemas. Mientras que en apariencia tales glosarios parecen ser listas relativamente inocentes, que pretenden traducir las palabras que ocurren en una variedad diferente, tal como lo vemos en los textos literarios escoceses de Allan Ramsay o Robert Burns, de hecho refuerzan la idea de que dicha variedad sea oscura, pasada de moda, y por lo tanto inadecuada para el uso diario. En otros textos, en cambio, los glosarios sentaron las bases para el desarrollo de los diccionarios de discurso especializado. En ambos casos los glosarios parecen haber sido útiles para la codificación del lenguaje, ofreciendo orientación (en ocasiones de forma indirecta) a los usuarios de la lengua, al tiempo que ofrecen una aclaración sobre el valor semántico de cada palabra en particular.This contribution aims to discuss instances of glossaries appended to literary and nonliterary works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to investigate their function as more or less neutral sources of information on the meaning of lemmas. While on the surface such glossaries appear to be relatively innocent lists illustrating, or indeed translating, lexical items occurring in a different variety, such as we see in Scottish literary texts by Allan Ramsay or Robert Burns, in fact they reinforce the idea of the same variety being obscure, old-fashioned, and therefore inappropriate for daily usage. In other contexts, instead, glossaries laid the basis for the development of dictionaries of specialized discourse. In both cases glossaries appear to have been valuable tools for language codification, providing (often indirect) guidance to language users, while offering clarification on the semantic value of individual items

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures

Vocative and diminutive forms in Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction: A corpus-based study

This paper takes a corpus-based approach to the study of vocative and diminutive forms in the prose fiction and drama of the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. In such texts, the coexistence, and indeed the coalescence, of Scots and (Scottish Standard) English is one of the most important traits in their author’s distinctive style. The aim is to assess whether the use of diminutive forms together with vocative ones may constitute a syntactic unit in which semantic and pragmatic values are mutually reinforced. In addition to a specially-compiled corpus of Stevenson’s texts, the investigation will consider occurrences of the same structure in the imaginative prose section of the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, which will be used as a control corpus.El presente trabajo adopta un enfoque basado en corpus con el objetivo de estudiar las formas vocativas y diminutivas en el teatro y en la ficción en prosa del autor escocés Robert Louis Stevenson. En estos textos, la convivencia y, de hecho, la fusión de escocés e inglés (estándar hablado en Escocia) es uno de los rasgos caracterizadores del estilo del autor. Así pues, el presente trabajo pretende evaluar si el uso de los diminutivos, junto con los vocativos, logra constituir una unidad sintáctica en la que los valores semánticos y pragmáticos se refuerzan mutuamente. Además de un corpus compilado especialmente con textos de Stevenson, la investigación tendrá en cuenta la presencia de la misma estructura en la sección de prosa imaginativa del Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, que será utilizado como corpus de control

Mrs Malaprop Goes to Hastings: History, Parody, and Language in 1066 and All That (1930)

This essay discusses the manifold ways in which malapropisms, among other strategies, contribute to the comic effects achieved in 1066 and All That, a book meant to satirize early twentieth-century history manuals. After an overview of the book’s structure and contents, I will highlight examples in which linguistic choices cause semantic shifts resulting in humorous remarks. These typically sound like misremembered facts or mispronounced names, in a flurry of statements evoking the idiosyncratic usage of Mrs Malaprop, Richard Sheridan’s famous character. Throughout the text it is however difficult to draw a line between mere spoof and thinly-veiled ideological criticism: in carnivalesque uses, the maxims that underpin the Cooperative Principle can hardly apply, and reading between the lines, or indeed among semantic clusters, is indispensable

Colliers, farmers, strikers. The Discussion of Work-related Themes in Late Modern Scottish Letters and Diaries

In business discourse, the discussion of work relations is a very interesting branch of study, especially when it refers to contexts that are relatively distant in time and/or space. In this respect, emigrants’ letters and diaries are as invaluable sources of information today as they were when they were written. In this paper I intend to concentrate on nineteenth-century documents and focus on three main issues: the state of the job market, cases of conflict and negotiations, and the narration of accidents or other extraordinary events. The aim is to highlight the main linguistic strategies employed to convey meaning, in order to assess what topics were given prominence, and how they were narrated and evaluated. Data will be drawn from a corpus currently in preparation at the University of Bergamo; while its size does not allow quantitative findings to be offered yet, it is believed that qualitative observations on these unique materials may help shed useful light on the phenomena under discussion