The Field of Historical Pragmatics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chapter 1 introduces the field of historical pragmatics. The rise of historical pragmatics in the mid-1990s was the result of changes in both linguistics and pragmatics. In linguistics, a reawakened interest in historical linguistics, combined with an emphasis on language as performance, on the ephemeral aspects of language, on meanings as negotiated in use, with the importance of social and cultural factors in shaping language use, with the increased importance of the analysis of empirical data, made easier by the development of computer corpora, all set the groundwork for the rise of historical pragmatics. In pragmatics, it was the recognition that written discourse, and not just oral discourse, constituted communicative acts produced in a social and cultural context, and was thus a valid subject of pragmatic study. The scope of historical pragmatics spans the two branches of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and the European Continental branch, with two aligned fields – historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics – having affinity with the latter. The chapter includes an introductory case study of pragmatic markers exemplifying the approach of historical pragmatics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".