Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being's historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures.

了解我们所处语境下的历史，意味着能够理解自我及世界运行的规律。这类知识是自我认知与自我赋能的核心，而这两者又与我们如何运用语言进行沟通、发展社会互动、建立人际关系及塑造身份认同密切相关。因此，语言的历时演变是社会个体历史情境性的关键组成部分。对这一演变的研究——即历史语言学（Historical Linguistics）——传统上聚焦于语言作为语法系统的形式层面，探究影响或反映在拼写、语音-音系学、形态学、句法及词汇中的变化。然而，近年来学术界的关注范围已扩展至语言使用的功能层面，例如不同时期交际功能的策略与惯例，由此催生了历史语用学（Historical Pragmatics）。本特刊收录的稿件涵盖历史语用学的三大核心领域：早期语言使用（语用文献学，pragmaphilology）、语言使用的发展（历时语用学，diachronic pragmatics）以及语言变化的成因（话语导向的历史语言学，discourse-oriented historical linguistics）。具体而言，这些论文为交际实践提供了互补性见解，探讨了古典语言中的互动策略、语法与话语中的礼貌现象、话语实践的演变、词位的语用功能以及社会语用学（Sociopragmatics）教学。值得注意的是，本特刊采用跨语言视角，考察了英语、韩语、意大利语、斯拉夫语系、古希腊语及拉丁语中的语用现象，从而助力我们理解当前的话语形式在多种语言与文化中既具独特性又具可比性的本质。