Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Preface vii
4. Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of English 1
5. Part I. Directives and commissives
6. Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? 27
7. Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760 45
8. An inventory of directives in Shakespeare's King Lear 85
9. Two polite speech acts from a diachronic perspective: Aspects of the realisation of requesting and undertaking commitments in the nineteenth-century commercial community 115
10. "No botmeles bihestes": Various ways of making binding promises in Middle English 133
11. Part II: Expressives and assertives
12. Hāl, Hail, Hello, Hi : Greetings in English language history 165
13. "Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever": Compliments and gender in the history of English 195
14. Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret 229
15. Part III: Methods of speech act retrieval
16. Showing a little promise: Identifying and retrieving explicit illocutionary acts from a corpus of written prose 247
17. Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research 273
18. Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis 295
19. Index 311