Diachronic speech act analysis On some constructions with the verb plaure ‘please’ in medieval Catalan

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to reveal uses of medieval Catalan constructions with subjunctive forms of the verb plaure ‘please’. Relying on a large corpus of historical texts from the 13^th to 16^th centuries, I argue that they are highly conventionalized forms of formulating directives requesting permission, and later, indirect directives. This finding contradicts Searle’s (1975) generalization about possible ways of performing indirect directives. In a group of occurrences the speech act was addressed to God, to win his approval. I show that this construction ((no) plàcia/plagués a Déu ‘may it (not) please God’) became a conventionalized phrase with a special role in interpersonal interactions, followed a peculiar path of semantic change and underwent subjectification. Another aim of the paper is to discuss some methodological issues of diachronic speech act analysis and to argue for the importance of qualitative methods and a highly comparative approach. Speech act verbs in themselves do not entirely reveal the illocutionary force and function of utterances. In order to analyze historical utterances, we should take into account a lot of additional information, e.g. several contextual factors, such as social roles of speakers and addressees, the content and “weight” of the request, encyclopedic information, the structure of the interaction and the place and role of the construction in it. Moreover, I argue that all forms appropriate to perform speech acts of the same illocutionary type in a given language stage should be examined together, comparing neighboring speech acts in a pragmatic space.