The Diachrony of Communicative Actions Project (DiCAP)

Comment on the picture:

Politeness conventions in feudal times differed from those in later
periods: while in feudalism deference was the communicative norm,
society shifted to face orientation in subsequent periods. This transformation
affected forms of address as well as the performance of various speech acts, 
such as greeting, and favored the rise of speech acts such as the compliment.

About the project

Did you know that thanking, a speech act we perform several times a day as a phatic routine, was rarely performed in Anglo-Saxon times and primarily used in religious or devotional contexts, addressing God rather than fellow humans? And did you know that more or less the same is true for apologizing? These changes reflect broader shifts in societal values, religious practices, and social norms, shaping how we express politeness and social cohesion today. As individuals became more interconnected and society more individualistic, expressions of gratitude and apology transitioned from religious rituals to everyday social routines, becoming integral parts of polite communication among people.

 

The DiCAP project is devoted to the study of the development of language-related behavioral habits and communicative norms in British society over the past centuries, with a particular focus on the long-term development of particular speech acts and communicative actions.

 

Our premise is that the ways in which individuals communicate with each other are not simply a given - practical, functional, efficient in and of themselves - but derive from the specific ways in which relationships between individuals and social groups are organized in a particular society. More specifically, we assume that communicative norms are continuously co-constructed, reflecting the social circumstances in which individuals manage their everyday communicative business.

 

Combining a historical socio-cultural and a pragma-linguistic approach, this project investigates an array of concrete manifestations of language behavior at different periods in English history and how these have changed over time. The project covers forms of language behavior that represent actions performed with words (e.g. speech acts such as threatening or thanking) but also communicative conventions and behavioral norms in a more general sense (e.g. directness vs. indirectness; aggressive vs. pacified language behavior), showing how social transformation processes have profoundly changed language behavior throughout the long history of English in Britain.

 

Comprehensive diachronic studies of the changes of communicative conventions in English society are scarce and only a relatively small number of speech acts have been studied from a long-term perspective. Publications in the field to date tend to characterize speech act realization in specific periods rather than considering the long diachrony (e.g. Busse 2002; Jacobsson 2002; Moessner 2010; the contributions in Jucker & Taavitsainen 2008; for more comprehensive studies with a broader scope see e.g. Jucker & Taavitsainen 2000; Culpeper & Demmen 2011; Jucker 2019).

 

The minute changes that have so far been observed in the domains of both speech act realization and politeness conventions throughout the history of English seem to accumulate to what can be considered a directional, though unintentional and non-teleological transformation process that involved the following:

 

a. shifts in cultural conventions, e.g. from deference culture to politeness culture (cf. Kohnen 2008a, 2008b; Jucker 2020), or from a devoutly religious to an increasingly secularized and enlightened society (cf. for apologies: Jucker 2019; for thanking: Haselow 2024),

 

b. changes in speech act realization, e.g. from directness to indirectness (cf. Kohnen 2008a for requests; Culpeper & Demmen 2011),

 

c. changes in the inventory of speech acts/communicative actions, e.g. the establishment and spread of routinized compliments with the rise of a new politeness culture (cf. Jucker 2020); the falling out of use of speech acts such as charm incantations; refunctionalisation of existing speech acts, as with curses (cf. Arnovick 1999).

 

Such trends are based on rather patchy evidence, so more systematic research is required to paint a coherent picture of what the bit-by-bit transformations of specific forms of language behavior occurring in British society during the past several hundred years have in common.

 

Our ongoing research within the project has already revealed a profound remodeling of behavioral norms coinciding with the gradual transformation of British society from a hierarchically organized, collective, religious, and belligerent, feudal society to an increasingly individualized, secularized, peaceable, capitalist society based on competition, growing interdependence between individuals, increasing monopolization of physical violence and the centralization of political and military power through the establishment of function-specific institutions. This pragma-linguistic remodeling appears to have included gradual shifts on the following continua:

 

a. from self- to other-orientation,

b. from directness to indirectness,

c. from lower to higher degrees of restrained/self-controled behavior, (e.g. containment of egocentric or aggressive language behavior in public, such as self-boasting or cursing),

d. from status-oriented to face-oriented communicative conventions.

 

We document the transformation processes of language-based communicative conventions, behavioral norms and conversational principles along these lines through fine-grained analyses of their long-term development in three domains that can be assumed to have formed part of people’s communicative repertoire at all times:

 

1. Expressive speech acts (e.g. expressions of gratitude),

2. Commissive speech acts (especially threats),

3. Directive-Expressive hybrid actions (especially invocations of harm).

Goals of the project

The goals of the project can be summarized as follows:

 

1. Documenting socio–pragmatic changes in the English language (speech acts, utterance forms, routines, appropriateness, …),

 

2. Linking these observable changes to developments in social history,

 

3. Providing an integrated view of the rise of a new communicative habitus that emerged throughout the history of English.

Method: How we proceed

We make use of a discursive approach to enrich the analysis of speech acts, communicative actions and conventions in historical sources by consistently linking linguistic observations to

 

• information about the way in which specific forms of discourse unfold,

• the communicative setting,

• the relation between the interlocutors.

 

We identify and sample speech acts and communicative actions in focus in historical texts, primarily in those that allow us to get an insight into language use in conversation-like contexts (as much as this is possible). This holds for drama texts or plays, i.e. written dialogues to be spoken and performed in public, and (usually prose) texts that include either direct speech or reported speech, which can be used for reconstructions of earlier communicative conventions. We code each occurrence of a target speech act or action according to various aspects, based on a predefined catalogue of formal, functional, and discursive criteria.

 

This procedure allows us to combine quantitative analysis for the documentation of shifts along various parameters (e.g. use of intensification or mitigation, changes in the type of addressee) and qualitative analysis that identifies the communicative conventions in specific social circles at different times as they were represented in the data.

Team members

Prof. Dr. Alexander Haselow

Alexander Haselow is full professor of English Linguistics at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests lie in the areas of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, Pragmatics and Historical Pragmatics. His research in the field of historical linguistics includes a comprehensive study of the development of English nominal derivation (Typological Changes in the Lexicon – Analytic Tendencies in English Noun Formation, 2011, De Gruyter), various studies of the effects of dialogicity on language change (e.g. “Dialogicity and Language change” – special issue of Language Sciences, 2016, co-edited with Sylvie Hancil), and studies of the development of discourse practices and interaction-structuring elements such as pragmatic markers in the history of English (e.g. final then, 2012, anyway, 2015). Recently, he has published studies on the development of particular communicative actions in the history of English, such as expressions of gratitude (2024, Journal of Historical Pragmatics).

 

Julian Häde, MEd

Julian Häde holds a MEd degree in English, French, and Educational Sciences. He currently pursues a PhD in Historical Pragmatics, surveying the long diachrony of verbal aggressive behaviors in the English dramatic corpus with special reference to invocations of harm. His research interests center around Historical Linguistics, in particular Old English philology, historical grapholinguistics and runology.

Johannes Lässig, MEd

Johannes Lässig holds a MEd degree in English, Latin, and Educational Sciences. In his PhD project, he focuses on the Middle and Early Modern English periods, in which he examines the diachronic development of addressee-dispreferred, conditioned commissive speech acts: means to threaten and blackmail an interlocutor. Further research interests of his include contact-induced language change, historical morphology and grammaticalization theory, as well as reconstructive phonology. He is a research assistant at the chair of English Linguistics at the University of Wuppertal, where he teaches classes in English linguistics, historical linguistics and computer-aided research.

Publications and talks

2026

Haselow, Alexander & Johannes Lässig. Studying social interaction from a historical perspective: Commissives in the history of English. In: Alexander Haselow & Gunther Kaltenböck (Eds.), Language in Social Interaction. Studies in Interaction Management, Social Behavior, and Grammar in Interaction. Berlin: De Gruyter.

 

2025

Haselow, Alexander, Julian Häde & Johannes Lässig. Speech acts, communicative setting and discursive context: Problems of data and methodology in historical speech act analysis. Talk given at ICAME 46 in Vilnius, 17 June.

 

2024

Haselow, Alexander. Politeness, speech acts and socio-cultural change: The expression of gratitude in the history of English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 26.1, 419–449.

References and further reading

Arnovick, Leslie. 1999. Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Baumeister, Roy F. 1987. How the self became a problem: A psychological review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52.1, 163–176.

Bloch, Marc. 1964. Feudal Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Busse, Ulrich. 2002. Changing politeness strategies in English requests: A diachronic investigation. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 17–35.

Burke, Peter. 1996. Civilization, discipline, disorder: Three case studies in history and social theory. Theoria 87, 21–35.

Culpeper, Jonathan and Demmen, Jane. 2011. Nineteenth­century English politeness: Negative politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12, 49–81.

Culpeper, Jonathan. 2017. The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18.2, 195–213.

Elias, Norbert. 2017 [1939]. Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Goffman, Erving. 1955. On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry 18, 213–231.

Haselow, Alexander. Politeness, speech acts and socio-cultural change: The expression of gratitude in the history of English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 26.1, 419–449.

House, Juliane. 1996. Contrastive discourse analysis and misunderstanding: the case of German and English. In: Marlies Hellinger & Ulrich Ammon (eds.), Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 345–361.

Hughes, Geoffrey. 1991. Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jacobsson, Mattias. 2002. Thank you and thanks in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 26, 63–80.

Jucker, Andreas. 2012. Changes in politeness cultures. In: Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press, 422-433.

Jucker, Andreas. 2019. Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies. Glossa 4.1, 1–25.

Jucker, Andreas. 2020. Politeness in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jucker, Andreas & Irma Taavitsainen. 2000. Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1.1, 67–95.

Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen. 2008a. Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret. In: Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 229–246.

Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2008b. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jucker, Andreas & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2020. Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kohnen, Thomas. 2008a. Directives in Old English. Beyond politeness? In: Andreas Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 27–44.

Kohnen, Thomas. 2008b. Linguistic politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A Study of Old English address terms. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9, 140–158.

Moessner, Lilo. 2010. Directive speech acts: A cross-generic diachronic study. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 11.2, 219–249.

Pollack, Detlef. 2015. Varieties of secularization theories and their indispensable core. The Germanic Review 90, 60–79.

Southall, Humphrey. 1991. Mobility, the artisan community and popular politics in early nineteenth-century England. In: Gerry Kearns and Charles W.J. Withers (eds.). Urbanising Britain: Essays on Class and Community in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103-130.

Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas Jucker. 2008. “Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 195–228.

Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas Jucker. 2010. Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 159-181.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Williams, Graham. 2018. Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.