Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials

The major concern of the historical pragmaticist is the extent to which old language data can be considered faithful records of the language of the past. This paper investigates whether the notion of speech act, an analytical tool employed by synchronic pragmatics, can be of use to diachronic pragmatics. Assuming the validity of Labov's Uniformitarian Principle, my hypothesis is that there are parallels between the mechanisms governing the language used nowadays and the language spoken in the past. It is shown here that the courtroom discourse of 17th century England is amenable to an analysis in terms of Speech Act Theory as conceived of for Modern English usage. Court trial records are particularly suitable for such an analysis due to their linguistic characteristics (an abundance of illocutions and perlocutions as well as question-and-answer exchanges, interpretable as indirect speech acts). A central notion developed here is speech act network, which is particularly suitable for the analysis of complex courtroom discourse consisting of interrelated illocutions and their corresponding perlocutions. My study demonstrates that diachronic speech act theory is a useful framework for a historical pragmaticist, and that it can reveal the interdependence between the identifiability of speech acts and the socio-historical conditions of the times when the speech acts were used.