Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Speech Act Verbs and Speech Acts in The
Speech Act Verbs and Speech Acts in The
1. Introduction
The seminal early work on speech acts by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969,
1979) was based entirely on abstract and invented utterances. It took some
time for analyses of speech acts also to be carried out empirically. In particu-
lar the cross-cultural speech act realisation project by Blum-Kulka, House,
and Kasper (1989) was based on native-speaker reactions that were collected
with written questionnaires (discourse completion tasks). Other empirical
methods include role-play situations in which informants are asked to act out
small scenes where particular speech acts are likely to occur (e.g. Trosborg
1994). Corpus studies on authentic texts, however, are still rare. It is dif-
cult to search for specic speech acts in large corpora, unless they are very
formulaic in nature. Greetings, for instance, are usually realised in a limited
number of different formulations and can be searched for relatively easily.
Less formulaic speech acts, such as requests, compliments or insults, how-
ever, can occur in an innite number of different realisations and are much
more difcult to search for, if they do not defy automatic search techniques
altogether.
There are fairly few studies on the history of speech acts but the num-
ber is increasing (see Davidson 1998; Arnovick 1999; Jucker 2000; Jucker
and Taavitsainen 2000; Kohnen 2000a, 2000b, 2002, and in this volume).
Historical investigations cannot use any of the standard techniques of
speech act analysis, such as the researcher’s own intuition or the various
methods of tapping native-speaker intuitions mentioned above. They rely
entirely on printed data and require painstaking philological analysis, pos-
sibly supported by corpus linguistic techniques. The problem of identify-
ing speech acts is central in historical assessments, and researchers have
solved it in different ways. In corpus-based studies two main methods are
possible: we have relied on searches with speech act verb (SAV) lists that
we compiled with the help of dictionaries and other available research
108 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
2. Theoretical background
Three issues in speech act theory are of particular relevance for the purposes
of our current investigation: the identication of specic speech acts, the
classication of speech acts, and, in particular, the relation between speech
act verbs and the speech acts they name (see also Bertuccelli Papi [2000] for
a discussion of some problems in diachronic speech act theory).
Early work on speech acts dealt extensively with the problem of how
speech acts could be identied and how their illocutionary force could be es-
tablished. The theoretical concept used for the purpose was the illocutionary
force indicating device, or IFID for short. IFIDs can be dened as formal ele-
ments which conventionally signal a particular force. An interrogative form,
for instance, is taken to typically signal the illocutionary force of a ques-
tion. Another type of IFID is the performative uses of so-called performative
verbs, that is to say if they are used in the rst person indicative present tense
to signal the illocutionary force of an act, e.g. “I command”. There are cases
in which the speech act verb in itself can be used to perform the appropriate
speech act, for instance “I apologise” said in the right context and with the
right intention is in itself an instantiation of the speech act of apology (see
also Searle 2002).
However, more recent work has shown that most of these devices are
very problematic and can at best be suggestive but not indicative of a specic
speech act (e.g. Sbisà 1995: 50–51; Verschueren 1999: 25). Speech act reali-
sations may be very different in various contexts; even in public and formal
language use and on legal occasions there is variation. Moreover, indubitable
cases of performative speech acts with the verb in the second or third person
(singular or plural) or in the passive voice can be found in sentences like “You
are hereby authorised to pay…”, “Passengers are warned …” or “Notice is
(hereby) given”. The test of inserting “hereby” shows that we are dealing
with the act of authorising, warning, or informing, and “hereby” is a useful
criterion of performative utterances (see Traugott and Dasher 2002: chapter
5). Further links to variability and alternative ways of saying the same can
be found in cases with imperative forms. They give the advice directly in a
truncated form, without the mitigating effects of indirectness. “Go!” may be
explicated as ‘I (hereby) command/advise/suggest that you go’.
The second problem mentioned above concerns the classication of
speech acts. There seems to be no generally accepted speech act classi-
cation, but Searle’s well-known distinction between speech acts provides a
starting point. He distinguishes ve different groups: representatives, direc-
110 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
Verschueren (1989: 7) has described the analysis of speech act verbs (or
linguistic action verbials, in his terminology) as
an attempt to come to grips with the varying ways in which linguistic behavior
is conceptualized by those engaged in it, by way of scrutinizing empirically
observable linguistic reections of those conceptualizations (such as linguis-
tic action verbials – LAVs for short – i.e. the verbs and verb-like expressions
used, in natural language, to talk about the conceptualized behavior).
Verschueren’s aims are contrastive and not quantitative, and therefore he re-
stricts his attention to basic linguistic action verbials, i.e. elements which
are monolexemic, monomorphemic, formally, semantically and pragmati-
cally unmarked and psychologically salient; they are not based on frequency
counts. He presents data on 81 languages. English has ten basic linguistic
action verbials (‘say’, ‘speak’, ‘talk’, ‘tell’, ‘ask’, ‘name’, ‘count’, ‘greet’,
‘thank’ and ‘answer’), while German, for instance, has twelve (sagen ‘say’,
sprechen ‘speak’, reden ‘talk’, erzählen ‘tell’, fragen ‘ask [question]’, bit-
ten ‘ask [request]’, nennen ‘name’, zählen ‘count’, grüßen ‘greet’, danken
‘thank’, antworten ‘answer’ and schweigen ‘be silent’) (Verschueren 1989:
68, 72; see also Verschueren 1985, 1994).
Traugott (1991) provides a historical perspective on speech act verbs. She
investigates the semantics of 275 speech act verbs that can be used perfor-
matively, and she notes that with very few exceptions all of them have their
etymological origins in one of four semantic areas. These are
1. verbs of uttering (like ‘shout’ or ‘call’),
2. mental and psychological states (like ‘know’, ‘wish’, ‘praise’),
3. terms of vision (like ‘shine’, ‘look at’) and
4. spatial expressions (like ‘put under’).
On the basis of Searle’s classication of speech acts, she distinguishes be-
tween representative speech acts and non-representative speech acts, where
the latter category comprises Searle’s directives and commissives. She
equates representative speech act verbs with epistemic modality and non-
representative speech act verbs with deontic modality and hypothesises that
any possible shift from one speech act category (that is to say a speech act
verb that changes its meaning) would be from non-representative (deontic)
to representative (epistemic).
In a diachronic perspective, direct speech acts with speech act verbs have
been claimed, on the basis of extensive reading but not of systematic sta-
112 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
tistics, to be rather the rule than the exception in medieval texts (Bergner
1992: 169). Kohnen (2000a: 307–308, 315, 317–318) provides the support-
ing evidence for this claim. In a corpus linguistic study, he found directive
performatives with explicit speech act verbs to be more common in Old Eng-
lish texts than in Modern English; high frequencies were found in particu-
lar in prefaces, documents and laws in the Helsinki Corpus, whereas lower
occurrences were noticed in other genres. In these genres the speech acts
are directly aimed at the addressee (vs. secondary uses that are ctional or
reported). The underlying text function of instruction and strict social hierar-
chy with asymmetric communication situations may show in these gures.
In his (2002) paper, Kohnen extends his investigation to indirect direc-
tives, where he distinguishes between speaker-based directives such as I de-
sire that you would be pleased to … and hearer-based directives such as
Will you follow, Gentlemen (Kohnen 2002: 167). According to his evidence
indirect speaker-based directives develop earlier than the hearer-based di-
rectives and they are more frequent presumably because the statement of
speaker volition has a long tradition in orders and commands while interrog-
ative speaker-based forms seem to be a new development in Early Modern
English. In this volume, Kohnen corroborates these ndings with data from
one particular genre in the history of English, i.e. homilies and sermons. He
advocates that genres are the proper place for investigating the diachronic
developments of speech acts because differences across genres may blur
the overall quantitative development of specic speech acts. In addition he
points out the difculty of isolating speech acts that may be realized in a
multitude of different forms. He calls this the problem of the “hidden mani-
festations” of speech acts.
For the purpose of our paper it is necessary to distinguish two different uses
of speech act verbs: performative uses and descriptive uses.
1) PERFORMATIVE USE is found in sentences like I (hereby) declare
…, I (hereby) bet …, I promise …. In these instances they provide direct evi-
dence of the speech acts in their prototypical form in institutional language
use. Examples occur more rarely in everyday communication. In historical
data the range of speech act verbs in the performative function may be highly
restricted, but a performative occurs, for instance, in the following sentence.
The verb challenge is in the rst person singular as a legal verb in an institu-
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 113
(1) I, Henry of Lancastr’, chalenge yis rewme of Yngland and the Corone
... (RParl 3.423a)
2) DESCRIPTIVE USE is far more common than the performative use and
applies to all cases that are not performative. A speech act verb is used in
order to talk about the performance of a speech act on another occasion and
not in order to perform the speech act on the occasion of the present utter-
ance. In some cases, these descriptions are accompanied by the actual word-
ing of the reported speech act, while in other cases the actual wording may
be omitted.
Descriptively used speech act verbs that are accompanied by the actual
wording give us rst-hand evidence of the performance, though the verb
itself is not used in the performative function. There may be narratives re-
porting on how somebody performed a particular speech act. These accounts
may be more or less accurate recordings or constitute ctional scenes and
various constraints may inuence the formulation (see below). The range of
speech act verbs may be broader in this category. The focus may be either
on illocutions or on perlocutions. In the following example, the verb chal-
lenge is used descriptively followed by a statement about what constitutes
the speech act in a direct quotation:
(2) If eny man wolde challenge a frere of Seint Frauncessis ordre and seue
... Frere, thou louest money as myche as othere men ... (c. 1449 Pecock
Repr.)
Descriptive uses of speech act verbs without any indication of the actual
wording of the performance are often given in lists of adjoining, overlap-
ping, or contrastive acts so that they are dened in relation to one another. In
these instances the semantic implication was clear to the contemporary audi-
ence but it may be lost to the modern audience. The frequency of occurrence
may show the importance of the speech act in question. Collocations indicate
relevant groupings and help us to construe inventories of speech act verbs in
various semantic elds, e.g. in the eld of verbal aggression, in a particular
period in the history of English.
(3) Þe zenne ... of bedeles, of sergons þet accuseþ and calengeþ þet poure
uolc. (1340 Don Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt [Arun 57])
114 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
(4) To loue them ... that reprouyth, chalengeth and rebuketh vs. (c1525 Rule
& T.St.Francis [2])
sentative speech act, and by doing so he/she may describe a speech act that
is either representative or not (see Jucker 2000).
Narration
S/R S/R
Letter Greet
Insult
…
Greet
Query
S Inform
Narrate R
Report
…
…
Bid farewell
acts in the account of the event. The passage contains several speech act
verbs of reporting: say, answer, call. They are used to introduce both direct
and indirect speech quotations in narrative speech acts. At this level we have
the actual wordings, e.g. Gloys seid he lyed which could be paraphrased as
“accused him of lying”. This speech act verb is, however, semantically dif-
ferent as it encodes speaker attitude (and perhaps the way of saying, too).
The author chose to use the more neutral representative verb. The expressive
speech act contains name-calling and direct commands without politeness.
Thus in the above example there are no expressive speech act verbs as such,
but the speech act can still be readily identied. Unfortunately the writer
censored the word-for-word account of the outburst of verbal aggression, the
“large langage”, because she considered it taboo in written language.
Our starting point for identifying the speech act verbs belonging to the se-
mantic eld of verbal aggression throughout the history of the English lan-
guage was the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM (OED) and the Mid-
dle English Dictionary Online (MED). As a rst approximation, all entries
were searched for that were categorised as verbs and included the expression
“insult” in their denition eld.2 Some of the results were then excluded by
hand because they describe a possible reaction to insults rather than forms of
aggressive behaviour themselves, for instance “retaliate”. This provided us
with a list of 42 verbs.
Table 1. List of verbs including “insult” in the denition eld of the OED and the
MED with the years of supporting OED quotations given in brackets
Verb Date
affront (1315, 1393, 1577, 1665, 1757/1783, 1824)
a’scorn (1553–1587)
backbite (1175, 1300, 1393, 1496, 1520, 1609, 1791, 1811, 1851)
’bismer (c1000, c1160, 1340)
cag (1504, 1801, 1886)
contumely (1483)3
defame (1303, 1489, 1526, 1615, 1684, 1725, 1850)
despise (1377, 1385, 1483, 1557)
disclander (1290, 1380, 14.., 1530)
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 117
Verb Date
di’sperson (1400–50, 1489, 1579–1580)
g (1597)
out (1551, 1605, 1607, 1612–1615, 1727, 1805, 1840, 1873)
frump (1577–1587, 1606, 1625, 1655, 1753, 1841)
gothele (1340)
hean, hene (950, 1175, 1205, 1230, 1410)
hinder (1375, 1430, 1555, 1573)
honish (1362, 1400–1450)
injure (1583, 1603, 1653)
in’saut (1425, 1425)
jape (1440, 1450, 1730, 1822)
lip (1898, 1902, 1941, 1972)
malign (1647, 1718, 1758, 1831, 1882)
mis-say (1225, 13.., 1470, 1541, 1568, 1631, 1872, 1888)
mock (1450, 1484, 1530, 1610, 1642, 1781, 1812, 1869)
outrage (1590, 1622, 1663, 1726, 1849, 1884)
ou’tray (1400, 1475, 1530)
reprove (1340, 1400, 1450, 1568, 1667, 1727, 1855, 1871)
revile (1330, 1390, 1432, 1530, 1591, 1648, 1687, 1729, 1780, 1833, 1875)
scandalize (1566, 1606, 1631, 1705, 1790, 1819, 1840, 1865)
scold (1715, 1763, 1771, 1781, 1832, 1848, 1865, 1889)
scream (1970, 1974)
shout
skander (1300, 1424)
slag (1971, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1981)
slander (1340, 1397, 1450, 1468, 1569, 1599, 1621, 1653, 1735, 1864, 1888)
thou (1440, 14.., 1450, 1530, 1564–1578, 1603, 1664, 1682, 1805, 1888)
top (1700, 1785)
triumph (1535, 1565, 1572, 1591, 1594, 1617, 1746, 1825)
tweak (1601, 1602, 1663, 1748, 1795, 1816, 1826, 1858, 1913)
upbraid (1678)
’villain (1412–1420, 1475, 1532)
wray (1320, 1399, 14..)
This list includes verbs that are only attested in Middle English (e.g. ’bismer
dened by the OED as ‘to treat with scorn, mock, deride, insult’ and attested
c1000, c1160 and 1340), verbs that are attested throughout the centuries (e.g.
backbite dened as ‘to detract from the character of, to slander, traduce, speak
118 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
ill of’ with quotations from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries), and verbs
that only occur in Modern English (e.g. slag dened as ‘to abuse or denigrate
(a person); to criticize, insult’ with six supporting quotations between 1971
and 1981). Only fourteen words in this list are still used in Modern English
and current enough to be included in a medium-sized dictionary. These are:
affront, backbite, contumely, defame, injure, malign, mock, outrage, reprove,
revile, scandalize, scold, slander and upbraid.
As a next step, this list was checked against the very substantial sec-
tion of “Contempt and Disrepute” in The Historical Thesaurus of English,
under construction at the University of Glasgow.4 This thesaurus will in-
clude almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English
to the modern period. Words are arranged in chronological order, in a
hierarchical scale according to semantic elds. Thus it gives us access to
a complete range of words ever used for a particular object or idea, and
it shows us the range of words at the disposal for a language user at any
given period. The Thesaurus is based on material taken from the OED and
its supplements, and Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, especially for the earlier
stages of the language.
The section “Contempt and Disrepute” lists approximately 3,000 words
whose meaning falls into this semantic eld. The whole eld is subdivided
into 79 different groups according to parts of speech and shades of meaning.
Many of these groups are further subdivided into even ner sense distinc-
tions. Fifteen of these contain transitive verbs. They are labelled: “deride/rid-
icule/mock”, “banter”, “ridicule caustically/ironically”, “leer/ scoff/taunt”,
“insult”, “disapprove of”, “criticize”, “dispraise/discommend”, “blame”,
“reproach”, “rebuke/reprove”, “denounce”, “abuse”, “slander/ calumniate”,
and “disparage/depreciate”. The subgroup “insult” contains 24 words. They
are given in Table 2.
The examples of speech act verbs were retrieved from electronic corpora
with lexical searches taking the various spelling forms into account. We re-
lied on computer-readable corpora of written material, including both liter-
ary and non-literary texts and covering Old English, Middle English, Early
Modern, and Modern English up to the nineteenth/twentieth century. The
advantage of the corpora is that they provide the broad cultural context of
genres as well as the close linguistic context. The assumption is that verbs of
verbal aggression would be more likely to occur in more speech-like genres
that depict interaction and communication, and on genres based on conict
(see above).
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 119
Table 2. Transitive verbs denoting “insult” in the section “Contempt and Disrepu-
te” of The Historical Thesaurus of English
vt gehornian OE
vt hospan OE
vt gehyspan OE
vt hean/hene<(ge)hienan OE - c 1410
vt say/speak shame by/of/on a 1225 - 1470 85
vt s ay/speak (one) shame a 1250 - c 1385
vt affront c 1315 —
vt disperson a 1400 50 - 1579 80 sc&no
vt insaut c 1425 + c 1425
vt set language against 1467 sc
vt say language against 1470 85
vt contumely 1483
vt cag 1504 + 1801 + 1886 dl di
vt put (a person) to villainy 1513 - 1565
vt ascorn 1553 87
vt do (one) scorn 1568
vt affrent 1578
vt injure 1583 - 1653
vt insult 1620 —
vt put a scorn (up)on 1633 - 1653
vt fufe 1635
vt upbraid 1678
vt top a 1700 - 1785 di ca&vu
vt rank 1971 us bl —
We used four different corpora: the Helsinki Corpus, the ARCHER Corpus,
the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler, and the Chadwyck-
Healey drama and ction corpora. The Helsinki Corpus is a multigenre corpus
that provides a good starting point for an overall view of occurrences across
different types of writing as it aims at covering all extant non-literary genres as
well as samples of ction and poetry from Old English to 1710. The size of the
corpus is 1.5 million words, and the size of the text samples c. 2,000 words.
The ARCHER Corpus (= A Representative Corpus of Historical English
Registers) can be used to complement the Helsinki Corpus as its chrono-
logical coverage of British texts begins in 1650 and ends in 1990. The cor-
pus contains different types of texts and both written and spoken language.
120 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
The written registers include journals and diaries, letters, ction, news, legal
opinion, and medicine. Each of the ten periods contains 20,000 words per
register, and each individual text has at least 2,000 words.
The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) con-
tains the non-copyright materials of the Corpus of Early English Correspon-
dence and covers the period 1418–1680, with 23 letter collections and 194
informants. The size of the corpus is 450,000 words. Most of the letters in
the Sampler deal with business transactions, but it also contains some more
personal and intimate letters.
Chadwyck-Healey drama and early ction corpora were used on-line
to complement the material. These corpora were of special interest as the
materials are comprehensive and texts recorded in full, which guarantees
appropriate contexts for our purposes. The English ction part begins with
texts from the sixteenth century and comes up to the twentieth century. The
following individual collections were included: Early English Prose Fiction
1500–1700, with over 200 complete works in ctional prose; Eighteenth-
century Fiction 1700–1780 with 96 complete works from the period and
Nineteenth-century Fiction with 250 novels from the period 1782–1903. In
addition to ction, we consulted the drama corpus, English Drama 1280–
1915, which is a full database of 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors. The cover-
age of these collections is impressive, and provides an excellent resource to
test our hypothesis of conict being one of the central areas which ction
and drama build upon. Thus we could expect frequent examples of SAVs of
verbal aggression. The results proved our assumption right, but lead us even
further as the examples displayed an interesting ethnographic view of social
and cultural norms.
All verbs relevant to the period in Tables 1 and 2 were searched for. Some of
the verbs did not occur in the present material, e.g. OE gehornian mentioned
in our Historical Thesaurus list is so rare that it does not occur in the Helsinki
Corpus, and only one instance is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.
The verb hospan did not occur as such, but phrasal constructions with hosp
and a more neutral speech act verb were found in phrases like hosp gecwyð
(three times in O3 IR HOM AELFR15 532), hosp sprecað (OX/3 XX XX
CHRI7) and hospwordum spraec (OX/3 XX JULOE118). Phrasal expres-
sions were also found in Middle and Early Modern English: shame seyde
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 121
(M2 NI ROM HAVEL 53) and had large langage (M4 XX CORP JPASTON
440), and have cagments (E1 XX CORP APLUMPT 186–187). Some verbs
seem to express mental attitude only, e.g. despise occurs, but the context
does not make the verbal aggression explicit in any example. A similar dif-
culty was encountered with scorn, and e.g. phrases like answerd … in scorne
(M4 NI FICT REYNARD 9) describe the way of answering.
Table 3. Speech act verbs of verbal aggression in the Helsinki Corpus, occurrences
according to the genre
We could not identify any performative uses of speech act verbs of verbal ag-
gression in the Old English or Middle English parts of the Helsinki Corpus.
The verbs were used descriptively, in most cases without any specication of
how the speech act was performed. The generic distribution is fairly broad
in Old English, but most of the examples were found in the Bible and texts
connected with religion. A representative example is found in Wulfstan’s
homilies:
In this passage, several verbs are given to describe various aspects of God’s
anger. They include both verbal aggression and physical action. This is a
typical description of this particular speech act, with other verbs of the same
semantic eld.
The speech act verbs of verbal aggression in our list were more frequent
in the Middle English materials, but the same trend was evident: descriptions
without the actual wordings of the speech acts were by far the most com-
mon. The large majority of occurrences are found in religious genres: the
Bible, homilies and sermons, religious treatises, religious verse and drama.
The following example comes from The Prick of Conscience, an instructive
religious treatise in rhyming verse. This poem is the most popular piece of
Middle English literature with 117 extant copies from all over the country
(Lewis and McIntosh 1982). In this passage, speech act verbs of verbal ag-
gression occur in a passage with sensory verbs, nouns, adjectives and ad-
verbs with negative meanings in a vivid description of the conditions of Hell.
The passage below appeals to visual, auditory, and sensory perception with
a rich array of verbs and other dynamic expressions marked with italics.
According to the medieval conventions, the heart is mentioned as the centre
of emotions. The style of the passage can be described as highly affective,
emphasising the negative end of the scale of emotions.
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 123
direct: mare … Þan hert may … ymagyn or think. Chaucer uses the device
in the Parliament of Birds and in the Book of the Duchess, for instance. The
above description is in total contrast to these scenes of calmness and bliss,
the approximation of paradise in the worldly life.
Late medieval drama was also connected with religion and moral educa-
tion. The following scene is an outburst of anger caused by idleness, ensuing
negotiation and derogatory remarks in low style, understood by Mankynde
as mockery. Several emotional features like exclamations and oaths are
found in this passage. The verb mock occurs twice in the example below,
rst collocated with scorne and then in a direct question, without an answer,
so that it could be understood as a rhetorical question.5 Mankynde’s speech
contains rude, bald-on-record commands and threats, a religious oath and
a religious curse, which all contribute to the violent aggression in words.
Appropriate gestures were certainly used to enforce the effect on stage. The
last line gives a reaction with an interjection encoding emotional attitude of
alarm and misery. The passage provides a scene modelled on stereotypes of
everyday life, perhaps in parody of a quarrelling wife, conicts and tempta-
tions to idleness.
(8) Raleigh. I do not hear yet, that you have spoken one word against me;
here is no Treason of mine done: If my Lord Cabham be a Traitor,
what is that to me?
Attorney. All that he did was by thy Instigation, thou Viper; for I thou
thee, thou Traitor.
Raleigh. It becometh not a Man of Quality and Virtue, to call me so: But
I take comfort in it, it is all you can do.
Attorney. Have I anger’d you?
Raleigh. I am in no case to be angry.
C. J. Popham. Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Attorney speaketh out of the Zeal
of his Duty, for the Service of the King, and you for your Life; be
valiant on both sides.
(E2 XX TRI RALEIGH I,208.C2:Heading–I,209.C1:Heading)
The range of genres in the Early Modern period is broader, including new
secular genres like biography, diary, travelogue, and educational treatises.
The scope of drama broadened to secular comedy, and some examples of
speech act verbs of verbal aggression can be found in it. The examples have
more varied forms, e.g. the cause of the speech act is given, but the actual
wording is omitted, as in the following extract:
(9) take the most notable Wines of Fraunce for olde Wines, before they bee
fullye one yeare olde. And this doth he holde \enarrationum medicina-
lium, lib. sexto, enarratione septima\. In the same place he reproueth
Aloisius Mundella for saying that wine sixe yeares olde was newe
wine after Galen, who although fayled in exceeding one yeare beyond
Galens numbring of the yeares of new wine, yet he went a great deale
...
(E1 IS HANDO TURNER B2V:Heading)
126 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
(10) in that crafte, wherin he deliteth, moste excellent, in vacant tymes from
other more serious lernynge, he shulde be, in the moste pure wise, en-
structed in painting or keruinge. And nowe, perchance, some enuious
reder wyll hereof apprehende occasion to scorne me, sayenge that I
haue well hyed me, to make of a noble man a mason or peynter. And
yet, if either ambition or voluptuouse idelnes wolde haue suffered that
reder to haue sene histories, he shuld haue founden excellent princis,
as well in payntyng as in keruynge, equall to noble articers: ...
(E1 IS/EX EDUC ELYOT 28:Heading)
The speech act verbs of verbal aggression are mostly given in descriptive
examples with adjacent verbs, e.g. in the collocations heaneð us & hearmið,
momeleþe & moccheþ ant marreþ, sclaundire or backbyte or falsely defames.
Alliteration is frequently present in the early examples, but the pattern var-
ies and, for example, in the following passage in Shakespeare’s The Merry
Wives of Windsor verbal aggression is contrasted to physical violence.
The occurrences of the speech act verbs of verbal aggression given in Tables
1 and 2 were not frequent in the one-genre corpus of letters. The same in-
stance as in the Helsinki Corpus with have cagments occurs in this corpus. In
addition, the noun langage with the verbs report, say, and have has qualica-
tions like sarten, thys, and such, which seem to imply foul language or verbal
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 127
aggression. There were several examples of verbs in which the activity was
mental only, e.g. despise occurred four times to express mental attitude.
Table 4. Speech act verbs of verbal aggression in the Corpus of Early English Cor-
respondence Sampler
CEECS1 (15th and 16th centuries, with one collection going on to the 17th century)
deface (2)
malign (1)
slander (3)
CEECS2 (17th century, with 3 letters from the 16th century)
affront (1)
deface (1)
reprove (2)
revile (1)
scold (1)
Writing conventions of the genre come out clearly in the examples that em-
ploy speech act verbs of verbal aggression on the primary level, in com-
munication between the author and the addressee of the letter. In the follow-
ing, silence reproves. The language is eloquent and formulaic, in accordance
with the code of politeness. Thomas Meautys (d. 1649) was a member of the
gentry and a clerk at the Court. He was a Londoner by birth and knighted in
1649. This letter is to his rst cousin Jane Lady Cornwallis.
5.3. ARCHER
There is a very clear bias towards drama and ction in this material, and
mostly the uses were descriptive in the same way as in the previous ex-
amples. Speech act verbs of verbal aggression are found in passages with
other verbs. In the following, the contrastive phrases of the rst sentence are
accompanied by a cumulative list of verbs:
(14) Some people have ourished by imputed wit; I have suffered by im-
puted dullness. I have been abused, reviled, and calumniated for sat-
ires I never saw; I have been censured for absurdities of which I could
not possibly be guilty ... (h:\unletter\1759smlt.x3)
(15) {=f PEGGY.} Here’s Mrs. Arabella does nothing but jeer and abuse
me; she says eating between meals will spoil my Shape, and I snatch’d
a Book out of her hand, and she said a Primmer was tter for me.
{=f LADY. Beauc.} I’ll never endure this, how dare she affront my
Daughter?
{=m CHEATALL} So, I’m like to have a ne life, nothing but scold-
ing and noise ...
(h:\undrama\1697pix.d)
130 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
There were no performative uses in the rst person singular, but the verb
mock is found in questions in the second person, asking the previous speaker
to specify what she intended, i.e. to explicate her illocutions.
(16) {=f WIDDOW.} Gentlemen you’re welcome, I have been troubled
with an over-talking Sister, that quite wound me into melancholly.
{=m BONAVENT.} I wish you mirth, Madam, with all my heart, but
I don’t come as one of Fools to make you any, tho’.
{=f WIDDOW.} Be not so brief, let me speak with you, tho’.
{=m BONAVENT.} Do you mock me?
{=f WIDDOW.} Mistake me not, sweet Sir.
{=m WELL-BORNE.} Fie Mr. Bonavent, you are too blunt a Suitor
for our City Ladies, they have been us’d to a soft way of Wooing, and
cannot brook this harshness.
(h:\undrama\1693powe.d1)
Our next step was to investigate the SAVs of verbal aggression in the Chad-
wyck-Healey corpora. This resource opened up a wealth of examples as the
instances of speech act verbs of verbal aggression were numerous here. For
example, the verb mock occurs frequently both in drama and in ction; the
number of hits in drama 1700–1992 was 707, and in prose 1700–1903 the to-
tal was 288. The respective hits for the verb scorn were 390 (drama) and 271
(prose). The verb insult occurs even more frequently; insult (verb and noun)
1700–1900 was found 1,932 times in drama and 2,790 in prose ction. It is
interesting that the development of the verb came out very clearly from the
examples. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the rst occurrence
of the verb insult (v.) in the modern meaning describing a speech act is from
1592: “To manifest arrogant or scornful delight by speech or behaviour; to
exult proudly or contemptuously; to boast, brag, vaunt, glory, triumph, esp.
in an insolent or scornful way” (OED, s.v. insult v. 1). The rst transitive
use of “insult” dates from 1620: “To assail with offensively dishonouring
or contemptuous speech or action; to treat with scornful abuse or offensive
disrespect; to offer indignity to; to affront, outrage” (OED, s.v. insult v. 2).
Our study revealed that the Chadwyck-Healey corpora serve to outline as-
pects of semantic development in an excellent way, but our main question
was whether pragmatic aspects could also be studied with their help. The
answer is afrmative, and the results of our study opened up a whole new
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 131
dimension. The examples show that we are dealing with different value sets
and customs of a historical period different from our own; in this respect
historical pragmatics can be compared with cross-cultural pragmatics. The
context in which the SAVs occur and the acts they label reect the varying
value judgements and politeness norms.
The above example (16) from the ARCHER corpus reveals an important func-
tion of speech act verbs of verbal aggression in drama and ction: negotiating
illocutions and perlocutions. The pragmatic side of the use of SAVs of verbal
aggression rests on these negotiations. E.g. the verb mock was commonly used
in the Chadwyck-Healey corpora in the question form, in exclamations, or
commands, e.g. Do you mock me? You mock me! Do not mock me ... you mean
to mock me … . Such stock phrases highlight tensions between characters and
help to build up the plot. Passages with negotiations about emotions are, of
course, central in the genres that build on conict in human interaction.
Another verb that illuminates the use of speech act verbs of verbal ag-
gression is insult. The examples in the Chadwyck-Healey corpora reveal a
pattern, and an ethnographic view of what was considered insulting emerges.
The following repertoire of topics could cause the perlocutionary effect of
insults and the instances illustrate the use of this speech act verb in various
shades, including speaker intentions:
In this example insult is repeated several times, and various ways of per-
forming insults both verbally and by actions is negotiated. Both illocutions,
the wish to insult, and perlocutions, you insult me i.e. ‘I perceive it as an
insult’, are discussed. The same pattern is found below:
(20) What should I have given them? Money! what right had I to insult
them by offering them money? Advice! words, words, words; friends,
there is a time for everything; ...
(Borrow, George Henry, Lavengro [1851], vol. III, p. 6)
contributing to the affective tone, and direct address. The rhetorical structure
of the passage is elaborate.
Personal skills:
(21) “Then, indeed, very excellent and worthy father Cristobal,” resumed
the stranger, courteously, “though I do not pretend to understand you
...”
The padre raised his head; his meekness vanished; he eyed the travel-
ler with a sharp and indignant frown:
“Gachupin!” he cried; “you are a man with two souls: you are wise
and you are foolish, and you speak bad Spanish! ... Why do you insult
me?”
The stranger stared at his new acquaintance with fresh amazement.
“Insult you, father!” he exclaimed. “I declare to you, I have, this mo-
ment, woke out of a revery; and I scarcely know what you have said or
what I have answered, or what you are saying and what I am answer-
ing. If I have offended you, I ask your pardon.”
(Bird, Robert Montgomery, Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest.
A Romance of Mexico [1834], vol. I, p. x)
The negotiation of perlocutions takes the form of a violent reaction in the last
turn of speech. It starts with an exclamation and a direct address, the verb
declare is used in a performative function and the sentence goes on with the
pronouns I and you intertwined in a negotiation of mutual agreement. The
nal sentence contains a performative use of ask pardon, i.e. “apologise”.
This verb belongs to the category of expressives, but its uses are very differ-
ent from speech act verbs of verbal aggression.
Breaking commitments:
(22) The next morning I waited on him again; he was not quite as polite as
he had been, and when I reminded him that he had not kept his prom-
ise the day before, he looked very surly, and asked if I meant to insult
him in his own ofce.
“No, Sir,” I replied, “I certainly do not mean to insult you, and I hope
you did not mean to insult me when you appointed an hour to meet me
here, without any intention of keeping the appointment.”
(Briggs, Charles F. The Adventures of Harry Franco [1839],
vol. 2, p. 36)
134 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker
National insults:
(23) But this was not all, for as we saw the Execution, so we were curious
to Examine into the Crime too; and we ask’d a young Fellow who
stood near us, what the two Men had done, for which they suffer’d that
Punishment. The Fellow, an unhappy ill natur’d Scotch man, perceiv’d
by our Speech, that we were English-men; and by our Question, that
we were Strangers, told us with a malicious Wit, that they were two
English-men; and that they were Whip’d so for Picking-pockets; and
other petty Thieveries, and that they were afterwards to be sent away,
over the Border into England.
Now this was every Word of it False, and was only form’d by his
nimble Invention, to insult us as English-men; for when we enquir’d
farther, they were both Scotch-men, and were thus Scourg’d for the
usual Offences, for which we give the like Punishment in England;
(Defoe, Daniel, Colonel Jack [1723], pp. 127–128)
7. Conclusions
Notes
References
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