Pragmatics and 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

Private verbs are those that express non-observable state or activities. Biber (1988: 242) gives the following list of verbs to illustrate this category: anticipate, assume, believe, conclude, decide, demonstrate, determine, discover, doubt, estimate, fear, feel, find, forget, guess, hear, hope, imagine, imply, indicate, infer, know, learn, mean, notice, prove, realize, recognize, remember, reveal, see, show, suppose, think, and understand.

Reference: Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I have been interested in verbs of this category and written fairly extensively in Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025). The verbs discussed in this book are: fear, forget, like, remember, think, and doubt.

Also, I have worked elsewhere on the verb suppose in Benjamin Franklin’s English, the result of which will be published shortly.

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).

Pragmatic markers

I have jointly published an article on the pragmatic marker use of like in contemporary English. It explores the relationship between style and the frequency of like in spoken interactions. The data used come from the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English: