Historical pragmatics
Some of my publications fall into the field of historical pragmatics. They are grouped into further sub-fields in the following.
Private verbs
This section will be updates soon.
Politeness markers
The verb pray is one of the verbs which I have been working on for some time. It develops into a politeness marker in the history of English, though in Middle English it still works as a usual verb taking a complementation. The discussion in the following papers are mainly from the perspective of complementation, but still includes some historical pragmatic aspects.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2009. ”The Verb pray in Different Letters of the Paston Family with Special Reference to its Pragmatic Use”, in English Philology and Corpus Studies: A Festschrift in Honour of Mitsunori Imai to Celebrate his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Shinichiro Watanabe & Yukiteru Hosoya, pp. 169-83. Tokyo: Shohakusha.
- Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Verb pray in Chaucer and Caxton”, in Approaching Language Variation through Corpora: A Festschrift in Honour of Toshio Saito, ed. Shunji Yamazaki & Robert Sigley, pp. 289-306. Bern: Peter Lang.
I have also discussed the shift from pray to please fairly extensively in my book on Benjamin Franklin’s English. See the sections on the two verbs in Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses. Both sections are found in Chapter 2 (Form-to-Function Approach 1: Historical Sociolinguistic Perspectives).
