Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker.

(2007) Speech act

verbs and speech acts in the history of English. In: Susan M.
Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Methods in Historical
Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 107-138.
Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history
of English1
Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

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 specic 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 innite number of different realisations and are much
more difcult 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

tools in our study, while Kohnen focuses on detailed analysis of corpus

data for inventories of speech act realisations and “hidden manifestations”
of speech acts (see below).
In this chapter we propose to study the history of speech acts indirectly
via an analysis of speech act verbs. Speech act verbs, as we will argue
in more detail below, do not give us any direct access to the speech acts
that they name, but they provide an interesting ethnographic view of how
a speech community perceives specic speech acts and which ones are
important enough to be labelled with a speech act verb which the speak-
ers use to talk about the speech act and – in some cases – even perform
the speech act in question. Thus we focus on the labels and classications
that are provided by the members of the speech community themselves. In
this sense, an ethnographic view provides us with an insight into cultural
practices and norms of polite behaviour that prevailed among the social
classes, age groups, or gender groups whose interactions are depicted in
written texts.
We take speech acts to be fuzzy concepts with both synchronic and dia-
chronic variation. Speech acts and their specic linguistic realisations are so-
cio-culturally negotiated; they are culture-specic and time-specic so that
every speech community creates its own inventory of speech acts and its own
set of speech act verbs with which they can talk about the speech acts them-
selves. In the course of time, both the realisation of a particular speech act as
well as the underlying speech function may change. Speech act theory and
analysis have to be developed accordingly. The starting point of this study is
the observation that the diachronic analysis of speech acts can best be car-
ried out in relation to their neighbouring speech acts and that the context has
to be taken into account at several levels. Thus we want to locate speech act
verbs within a particular semantic eld and speech acts within a particular
pragmatic space (see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000).
We shall illustrate our approach by looking at a range of verbs within
the semantic eld of verbal aggression and we shall relate their use to
the sociocultural context of changing times. As a result we hope to shed
some light on the changing perception within the speech community of
the speech acts in the pragmatic space of verbal aggression. Thus our
paper has both a descriptive aim and a theoretical aim. On the one hand,
we want to describe the distribution and use of a small range of speech
act verbs in the history of the English language, and on the other hand,
we want to develop the descriptive tools that are necessary for such an
endeavour.
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 109

2. Theoretical background

Three issues in speech act theory are of particular relevance for the purposes
of our current investigation: the identication of specic speech acts, the
classication 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 identied 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 dened 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 specic
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 classication 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

tives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. This classication presents

problems. Various types of speech acts seem to behave in different ways. The
main focus in the earlier studies was on performative and directive verbs;
expressives have received less attention perhaps because they form a hetero-
geneous and more elusive category (Searle 1979). The speech act verbs in
the eld of verbal aggression that we shall analyse in the second part of this
paper fall within this category. The relevance of the class of expressives has
been discussed, and a redenition has been suggested as the class of speech
acts whose function is to express an emotion that the utterer expects an inter-
preter to attach particular importance to (Verschueren 1999: 132–133). If we
take emotional utterances and affective language as a starting point, verbal
aggression becomes one of the central semantic elds of expressive speech
acts.
The third problem, nally, concerns the relationship between a specic
speech act verb and the speech act that it describes. Many speech acts, per-
haps most, are not realised with an explicit speech act verb; Searle accounted
for this fact by postulating the notion of indirect speech acts. Even if there is
an explicit speech act verb, there is no guarantee that it describes the speech
act that is performed. Yet some others rely on perlocutionary effects only,
a case in point being insults (Jucker 2000; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000).
The verb insult cannot be used performatively in the prototypical formula “I
insult you”, and unintentional insults are frequent in real life.
An example of an indirect way to express verbal aggression is found in
sentences like “you were cowardly”. Such utterances may contain various
illocutions as they may be said to verify a situation, to reprimand or to insult
the addressee. The illocution may be made explicit in the rst case by saying
“I reprimand you”, but “I insult you” is not possible (Austin 1962, 30–31).
However, the situation is different if we talk about descriptions of speech
acts rather than performative uses of speech acts. Here we can expect a closer
t between the speech act label and the speech act that is performed, be-
cause the speaker who uses it conceptualises the speech act in precisely these
terms (see below). Thus we can assume that the results of a survey like ours
cast light on the cultural repertoire of speech acts. According to our model,
speech acts are analysed in a multidimensional pragmatic space, including
several dimensions. Such a grid, whose details have to be identied for every
instance of an individual speech act in the material, allows the diachronic
study of speech acts both in the changing cultural grounding in which they
occur and the changing ways in which they are realised. Thus speech acts are
analysed in actual use, in their linguistic and sociocultural context.
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 111

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 reections 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 classication 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 specic speech acts. In addition he
points out the difculty 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.

3. Uses of speech act verbs: Analytical classication

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

tional setting in a performative function and the focus is on the intentions of

the speaker, i.e. on the illocutions.

(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 inuence 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 dened 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])

4. Constraints on realisation: Genre conventions

In any corpus-based study, genre is an important parameter to be taken into

account, especially in the interpretation of the results. The eld of verbal
aggression is particularly likely to be central in ction, drama, and trial re-
cords. In these genres, plots are prototypically based on conict and ensuing
action, either with reconciliation of the conict, or an unhappy ending. Trial
proceedings are a non-literary genre with a function of recording the events
and actions that led to court and there is always a conict at the heart of a
trial. Most often these events involve verbal exchanges and speech act verbs
of verbal aggression can be assumed to occur frequently.
Our earlier study (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000) showed that genre con-
ventions have a direct bearing on the realisation of specic speech acts. For
example, insults in the accounts of saints’ lives provide functional turning-
points in the plot and the wordings have acquired a highly typicalised and
conventionalised form. Fiction imitates real life, but may condense, exag-
gerate and select. Some genres may have recurring patterns with conven-
tionalised speech act formulations. They vary so that some genres have more
constraints than others (see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000). Other genres,
e.g. letters, may record instances of verbal aggression, but narratives of such
events are not particularly central. The basic function of letters is to allow
communication between participants who are removed from one another
in physical space. The default is that more intimate correspondence would
relate insults and instances of verbal aggression more than letters between
distant participants.
When the communicative function of genres is taken into account, the
matter becomes even more complicated as individual units in texts may have
multiple functions. In letters, for example, several levels of communication
can be discerned. Greetings work at the primary level: the writer salutes the
addressee, wishes him or her good health, and the realisation of the speech
act consists of the conventional address form, determined by the politeness
code and social hierarchy of society. Other speech acts on the primary level
are, for instance, well-wishing and reporting. At the same time a speech act
of reporting at the primary level may represent some other speech act type
on the embedded level. Thus on the primary level a writer performs a repre-
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 115

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

Figure 1. Embedding of speech acts in letters

Two socio-cultural contexts therefore have to be taken into account in the

analysis of embedded speech acts: the context of the primary communica-
tive situation, i.e. the letter in which it occurs, and the communicative situ-
ation in which the speech act originally occurred in its performative form.
The embedded levels are, of course, not restricted to written communication,
but may be accounts of spoken interaction in the extant records. There may
even be cases of original communicative situations in which speech is only
incidental. Thus the double social embedding of a reported speech act in its
original activity type and the genre in which it gets reported have to be taken
into account.
In an earlier study (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000), we analysed the in-
cident reported in the letter from Margaret Paston to John Paston I, written
in 1448, from the point of view of how the situation of verbal aggression
developed. It started with non-verbal disrespectful behaviour, a violation of
the polite code. This served as a provocation to verbal assaults, name-calling
with derogative terms and accusations, accompanied by the violent action
of throwing stones. The aggression was extended to other people associated
with the target, the narrator and her mother. All this was reported in a letter
which gives us rst-hand evidence of the activity type of provocation leading
to insults. The letter itself is the primary level of communication and it can
be analysed as a representative speech act, with embedded expressive speech
116 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

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 identied. 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.

5. Speech act verbs of verbal aggression in the history of English

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 denition 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 denition 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
dened 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 dened 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 dened 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 conict
(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 fufe 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 conict 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.

5.1. Helsinki Corpus

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

Period Verb Genre

OE bismerian (16) Bible (11), biography (1), history (2), religious treatise (2)
gehyspan (1) Bible (1)
hean/hene (7) Bible (1), homily (1), philosophy (1), rule (4),
ME backbite (10) Bible (6), homily (1), religious treatise (2), verse (1)
bismerian (4) biography (1), religious treatise (3)
chide (1) religious treatise (1)
defame (5) drama (2), religious treatise (2), sermon (1)
disclander (2) document (2)
heane (6) biography (6), religious treatise (1)
missay (7) biography (1), religious treatise (6)
mock (8) drama (2), ction (2), private letter (3), verse (1)
reprove (12) Bible (2), document (1), ction (1), philosophy (3), sermon (5)
sclaunder (14) Bible (2), document (1), drama (1), ction (1), homily (1),
sermon (7), religious treatise (1)
scorn (4) drama (1), ction (1), history (1), religious treatise (1)
strife (1) religious treatise (1)
wray (1) romance (1)
EModE affront (1) comedy (1)
defame (1) biography (1)
injure (1) sermon (1)
mock (1) ction (1)
reprove (8) biography (1), educational treatise (2), handbook (1), ser-
mon (3), trial proceeding (1)
revile (2) biography (1), sermon (1)
scandal (1) trial proceeding (1)
scold (3) biography (1), comedy (1), ction (1)
scorn (2) educational treatise (1), travelogue (1)
slander (1) diary (1)
thou (1) trial proceeding (1)
upbraid (3) comedy (1), history (2)
122 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

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 specication 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:

(5) we gyldað mid weorðscipe þam þe us scendað:

we him gyldað singallice, & hy us hynað dæghwamlice. Hy hergiað &
hy bærnað, rypaþ & reaað & to scipe lædað; & la, hwæt is ænig oðer
on eallum þam gelimpum butan Godes yrre ofer þas þeode, swutol &
gesæne? (O3 IR HOM WULF20 272:Heading)
‘we repay with honour to those who bring shame on us. We pay them
continually, and they humiliate us daily. They ravage and they burn,
plunder and rob, and carry away on board; and indeed, what else is there
in all these events but the wrath of God clear and visible towards this
nation?’ (trans. by Swanton 1975: 120)

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

(6) Þai sal here in helle, on ilka syde,

Ful hydus noyse and duleful dyn
Of devels and of synful men þar-yn:
Þai sal here devels þar, rare ful hydusly,
And þe synful men goule and cry;
Þai sal þar, in smellyng, fele mare stynk,
Þan hert may here ymagyn or thynk,
Of brynnand brunstan and of pyk,
And of alkyn othir thyng þat es wyk.
Þat stynk, als yhe sal understand wele,
Sal be strang payne til þam to fele;
Al-swa þai sal ilkan other wery,
And myssay and sclaundre God allemyghty,
Þai sal ay stryfe and be at debate,
And ilkan other sal despice and hate.
Omang þam sal never be pees,
Bot hatreden and stryfe þat never sal cees.
(M3 IR RELT PRICK 253:Heading)
‘They shall hear in hell everywhere
Full hideous noise and distressed clamour
Of devils and of sinful men therein.
They shall hear devils roar there very hideously
And sinful men moan and cry.
They shall there smell more stinking
Than the heart can here on earth imagine or think
Of burning brimstone and pitch,
And of all other things that are causing pain.
That stinking, as you shall well understand,
Shall be strong pain for them to feel.
Also they shall exhaust each other
And insult and slander God Almighty,
They shall always quarrel and be at debate
And each other despise and hate.
Among them shall never be peace,
But hatred and quarrel that will never cease.’

This passage provides a contrast to a commonplace in medieval literature

where the narrator halts to give a detailed description of pleasant things that
appeal to the audience’s imagination (locus amoenus); here the appeal is
124 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

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, conicts and tempta-
tions to idleness.

(7) Mankynde. Why stonde ye ydyll? Yt ys pety þat฀зe were born!

Nowadays. We xall bargen wyth yow and noþer moke nor
scorne.
…
Mankynde. Go and do yowr labur! Gode lett yow neuer the!
Or wyth my spade I xall yow dynge, by þe Holy Trinyte!
Haue зe non other man to moke, but euer me?
зe wolde haue me of yowr sett?
Hye yow forth lyuely, for hens I wyll yow dryffe.
New Gyse. Alas, my jewellys! I xall be schent of my wyff!
(M4 XX MYST MANK 166:Heading)
Mankynde. Why do you stand idle? It is a pity that you were born!
Nowadays. We shall bargain with you and not mock or scorn.
…
Mankynde. Go and do your work! God let you never prosper!
Or with my spade I shall scourge you, by the Holy Trinity.
Haven’t you got anybody else to mock but ever me?
Would you have me as one of your followers?
Hasten forth briskly, as I will drive you away from here.
New Gyse. Alas my jewels, I shall be scolded by my wife.’
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 125

As stated above, performative examples of SAVs are not frequent in our

material, and in Early Modern English we found only one explicit instance
of performative use in a trial record. The verb thou is used performatively
in a violent verbal attack with emphatic repetition of the pronoun in various
forms with contemptuous overtones and name-calling. This is metalinguistic
use, the speaker is commenting on his own language use, making speaker
meaning explicit:

(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

The following metalinguistic passage (cf. above) consists of an imaginary

dialogue with the reader in which the actual wordings are cast in indirect
speech quotations. Scorne is used here to express response, as the author
expects the reader to react in this way to his text. He sets out to defend him-
self and reverse the situation for his own benet; the tone of the passage is
somewhat condescending towards the reader. The interpersonal function of
this passage is explicit, and the communication takes place on the primary
level, between the author and the reader:

(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 articers: ...
(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.

(11) Host. Heere boyes, heere, heere: shall we wag?

Page. Haue with you: I had rather heare them scold, then ght.
Ford. Though Page be a secure foole, and stands so rmely on his
wiues frailty; yet, I cannot put-off my opinion so easily: ...
(E2 XX COME SHAKESP 45.C1:Heading)

5.2. Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler

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 qualica-
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.

(12) [\CXI. THE SAME TO THE SAME.\] }] [THOMAS MEAUTYS TO

JANE CORNWALLIS]
My ever best Lady and Cosin,
Your not vouchang, eyther by letter or message, to take
knowledge of the contents of my last to you touching my cosin
Fred., reprooves mee sufciently of being in my last an
ofcious foole; and although, Madam, I shall take it for a
warning, yett when I reect as well upon the affection and
singleness of heart whearwith I did it, as also upon the motives
which conned mee in point of time from acquainting you rst
thearwithall, I plead not guilty of having deserved at your
La=pp’s= hands to have my well meaning hearein to be soe passed
by as not worthy of a lyne or a message.
(COR 1627 T2MEAUTYS 173:Heading)
128 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

There are some accounts of verbal aggression on an embedded level. The

following passage is from a letter by Robert Blakiston. He lived in the North
of England and was presumably a member of the gentry. He wrote this letter
to his niece. The letter is written in 1629 and the author refers to the future
reexamination of an event from the previous year. The offensive communi-
cation with name-calling and the author’s thoughts take place on a secondary
level. At the end of the passage the author switches back to the primary level
of communication:

(13) For the other hard

esteeme of me in difference between Mr. Braidley his Curate and
me, I must neads saie I could and yet can prove sufciently, if
it were to re-examined by your selfe with free libertye and
without offence taken against the witnesses, who will saie that
on the 9=th= of May 1628, he did revile me approbriously,
calling me base scurvye rascall, and strooke at me very eagerly,
when I did much forbeare him, partly for that I thought he was
not himselfe through his distemperature, not tting a man of
his function, but especially for my brother his sake, thinking
he would have given him an open rebuke for his open miscarriage
against a naturall brother, for he denied before
him with execrable imprecations that he did not misdemeane
himselfe either by word or deed as I have related, which I
conceived was then too much beleeved, and which, if I cannot
sufciently disprove as aforesaid, I will submitt my selfe to
your hardest censure.
(COS 1629 RBLAKISTON I,160:Heading–I,161:Heading)

5.3. ARCHER

Table 5. Speech act verbs of verbal aggression in ARCHER

Period Verb Genre

1650– affront (3) drama (1), ction (1), journal (1)
1800 backbite (1) drama (1)
defame (2) drama (1), ction (1)
injure (7) drama (3), ction (3), sermon (1)
mock (3) drama (1), sermon (2)
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 129

Period Verb Genre

reprove (3) ction (1), journal (2)
revile (1) letter (1)
scold (3) drama (2), letter (1)
slander (1) drama (1)
upbraid (6) drama (1), ction (1), journal (1), letter (1), sermon (2)
1800– injure (2) news (2)
1990 mock (4) drama (3), sermon (1)
outrage (2) drama (2)
revile (2) journal (1), sermon (1)
scandalize (1) ction (1)
scold (8) ction (7), letter (1)
slander (2) ction (1), sermon (1)
triumph (1) ction (1)
upbraid (1) sermon (1)

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)

Sometimes the actual wordings may be given and accompanying physical

action is mentioned, as in the second example from drama below:

(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)

5.4. Chadwyck-Healey drama and ction corpora

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 afrmative, 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 reect the varying
value judgements and politeness norms.

6. Negotiating illocutions and perlocutions

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 conict 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:

Name-calling, impolite action:

(17) “Now see ... I am wearied to death with solitude and sickness. Come,
amuse yourself, if you will, with insulting me ... calling me what you
like; I do not mind, so long as you remain.”
“I have no desire whatever, Captain Coppinger, insult you and call
you names.”
“You insult me by standing there holding the latch ... standing on one
foot, as if afraid to sully the soles by treading my tainted oor. Is it not
an insult that you refuse to come in? Is it not so much as saying to me,
‘You are false, cruel, not to be trusted; you are not worthy that I should
be under the same roof with you, and breathe the same air’?”
“Oh, Captain Coppinger, I do not mean that!”
(Baring-Gould, Sabine, In The Roar Of The Sea [1892], vol. I, pp.
129–130)
132 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

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:

Remarks on family relations:

(18) “You ask a strange question, sir.”

“Which I will answer for you in the negative,” said Luther. “You know
neither yourself nor your parents.”
“Do you wish to insult me?” cried the other, reddening and somewhat
confused.
“I wish to insult no man. But enough! you shall know more in time.”
(Bennett, Emerson, Kate Clarendon; or, Necromancy in the Wilderness.
A Tale of the Little Miami [1848], p. 46)

Social standing, money:

(19) “Your father, I say, became possessed, by will, of his brother-in-law’s

property; and a vast possession it was, which he still holds; but his
sister, after spending the little bequeathed to herself, removed with her
children to this city, and here died of starvation and a broken heart.”
“Sir!” cried Arabella, turning pale; “Mr. Malcolm! do you say this to
insult me?”
“No, Miss Goldnch; I pride myself on being a gentleman, and no
gentleman will insult a lady; nevertheless I must tell you the truth.”
(Bennett, Emerson, Oliver Goldnch; or,
The Hypocrite [1850], p. 72)

(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)

Example (19) is an explication of speaker meaning with an application of

a common formula; pride is a performative verb here, insult is used as a
description of the perlocutionary effect. The monologue passage (20) has a
very emotive tone with two direct questions and short emphatic answers as
exclamations of one word, the rst focusing on the cause of the insult direct-
ly, the second on the alternative in exactly identical form. There is repetition
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 133

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 ofce.
“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

This example contains a negotiation of both illocutions and perlocutions, and

the verb insult is repeated several times.

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)

The above passage relies on national stereotypes and typied reactions,

found e.g. in jokes and comical descriptions.
Genre conventions came out very clearly in the corpora compiled for
historical linguistics, and constraints of genres prevail in earlier periods. It
proved important to pay attention e.g. to the embedded levels of discourse.
The examples show the use of the SAVs as labels of actions often with-
out specication of the actual wordings, especially in the earlier periods.
These historical corpora served to yield clues how to continue, which genres
to focus on and investigate in more detail. Fiction and drama proved to be
by far the best genres for examples in multigenre, multipurpose corpora,
though the text samples are small and occurrences of SAVs were limited.
Genre conventions of ction and drama apply here, too, and the uses may
be condensed, stylised, or stereotypical, yet they are in imitation of normal,
everyday communication and thus closer to spontaneous speech than other
genres. The literary collections of Chadwyck-Healey are comprehensive and
provide abundant examples. A whole new dimension of the use of SAVs
of verbal aggression opened up with this material. The examples illuminate
how the verbs were used in actual communication to negotiate interpersonal
relations.
 Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English 135

7. Conclusions

In this paper we have tried to demonstrate how a diachronic corpus analy-

sis of speech act verbs may shed some light on the development of the as-
sociated speech acts. Speech act verbs provide labels for speakers to talk
about the speech acts themselves. Thus speech act verbs may allow an eth-
nographic view on how speakers describe, classify and evaluate speech acts.
As an example we have analysed a small range of speech act verbs that
describe speech acts of verbal aggression. The examples show clearly how
these speech acts are culturally and historically conditioned.
Speech acts in the eld of verbal aggression belong to Searle’s class of
expressives. In contrast to the directive speech acts, which Kohnen (2000a,
2000b) found to occur frequently in explicit performative formats in the Old
English period, these expressives almost exclusively appeared in descrip-
tive formats. In the Old and Middle English periods such descriptions were
particularly frequent in religious contexts, where the verbs described various
aspects of God’s anger. But gradually the emphasis shifted to descriptions
of interactions between conversationalists. The range of insulting topics be-
came broader. The Chadwyck-Healey corpora of ction and drama turned
out to be a particularly rich source of examples of speech act verbs of verbal
aggression. In this corpus there were many examples of speech act verbs of
verbal aggression that were used to negotiate the illocutions and perlocutions
of these speech acts, for instance in the form of such formulaic challenges
as Do you mock me? or Do not mock me! With such forms speakers negoti-
ate the intentions of their interlocutors, and the accounts of such interactions
that we found in our data offer a fascinating ethnographic view of what was
considered polite and suitable or insulting in a particular context and at a
particular time in the history of the English language.
The genre differences, not surprisingly, were important for the different
instantiations of these speech act verbs, and it might be expected that a more
detailed analysis within a more restricted set of genres would reveal addi-
tional interesting patterns. On the basis of the Chadwyck-Healey data, for in-
stance, it appears that accounts of verbal aggression are particularly frequent
in romantic prose. It is possible that a more detailed division within the broad
categories of the genres would reveal constraints and tendencies of develop-
ment in more detail (see Jucker and Taavitsainen forthcoming).
136 Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker

Notes

1. Some of the ideas we develop in this paper go back to a presentation that we

gave at a seminar on historical pragmatics convened by Leslie Arnovick at the
International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Vancouver (1999) and to
a presentation at the Conference on Lexical Change and the Genesis of the
English Vocabulary (LECH) organised by Dieter Kastovsky in Tulln, Austria
(2001). We thank the audiences at both conferences for valuable feedback and
suggestions. This paper is also a continuation of work that was published as
Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000).
2. In the OED on CD-ROM the search was carried out with the following statement
in the query language: ent df=(insult) & ps=(v) into (result.ent), which searches
for all those entries (ent) that contain the string “insult” in their denition eld
(df) and whose part of speech (ps) is marked as a verb (v). The results are saved
into a le called result.ent. The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary,
unfortunately, did not allow this type of combination of search criteria at the time
we carried out this research. The electronic Middle English Dictionary, on the
other hand, provides a very user-friendly interface and allows complex combina-
tions of search criteria. For more information, see also the Middle English Com-
pendium (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med/index.html).
3. OED, s.v. contumely, v.: “trans. To treat with contumely; to reproach insolently,
insult.” 1483 CAXTON Gold. Leg. 424/1 She ... said many Iniuryes & vylonyes
to fyacre contumeleyng & blasphemyng hym.
4. Our thanks go to the compilers of the Thesaurus for making this section avail-
able to us.
5. The methodological issue of meaning change should be raised here; did mock
and scorne mean the same as they do now? The context seems to indicate that
they did. It is advisable to consult the relevant dictionaries MED and OED for
examples and possible meaning developments.

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