‘In short tyme it wil heale the sore’. A relevance perspective of promising in medical utilitarian texts of the Early Modern English period
ISBN: 978-84-9048-857-7
Publicado: 13/02/2020
Medical recipes written before the birth of modern scientific writing, at least as we know it today, are frequently characterised by the inclusion of expressions aimed at validating the efficacy of the remedies. These expressions have been traditionally considered as promises of efficacy. This research hypothesises that a closer examination of the context in which they are embedded may render interpretations that are different from promissory speech acts in the strictest sense. The corpus of study has been excerpted from the Corpus of Early English Recipes and it comprises medical recipes written in English between 1500 and 1600. The texts have been analysed using AntConc and the results have been manually checked afterwards. The detection of potential promises of efficacy has relied on Speech Act Theory and particularly on Searle's (1969) constitutive rules for promises. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) has been used to account for the process of contextual enrichment the reader follows so as to derive the illocutionary force of efficacy statements. This work shows that not all efficacy statements are necessarily interpreted as promises in the Searlean sense. In fact, it has been observed that the occurrence of stance elements, i.e. epistemic and/or evidential devices, together with the authors' lexico-grammatical choices crucially shape their illocutionary force, normally by lowering the promissory value of the locutions. Readers can additionally infer differing degrees not only of authorial commitment but also of reliability of information.
AGUILAR, M. (2009). Metadiscourse in academic speech: A relevance-theoretic approach. Bern:
Peter Lang.
AIJMER, K. (1980). Evidence and the declarative sentence. Stockholm: Almquist-Wiksell.
AIKHENVALD, A. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (1997). Edition and study of a Middle English gynaecological treatise: Yale
Medical Library, MS 47, ff.67r–71v. University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria:
Unpublished Licentiate Dissertation.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (1998–1999). “‘Gyf hyr this medycyn’: Analysing the Middle English
medical recipe discourse” in Revista de Lengua para Fines Específicos, 5, 6, 15–46.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2000). Edition and study of a late medieval medical receptarium: G.U.L.
MS Hunter 185 (T.8.17). University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Unpublished
Doctoral Dissertation.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2002a). “Estudio comparativo de los textos receta en español
medieval y en inglés medieval” in Santana-Henríquez, G. and Santana-Sanjurjo, V.
(eds.). Studia humanitatis in honorem Antonio Cabrera Perera. Las Palmas: Servicio de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 649-676.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2002b). “Punctuation practice in a late medieval English medical
remedybook” in Folia Linguistica Historica, 21, 1–2, 207–232.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/flih.2001.22.1-2.207
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2005). “All gathered together: On the construction of scientific and
technical books in 15th century England” in International Journal of English Studies, 5, 2,
2-25.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2008a). “The Middle English medical charm: Register, genre and texttype
variables” in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 109, 1, 9-38.
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2008b). “The pragmatics of and-conjunctives in Middle English
medical recipes: A relevance theory description” in Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 9, 2,
171-199. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.9.2.02alo
ALONSO-ALMEIDA, F. (2009). “Stance marking and register in Middle English charms” in
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 45, 2, 13-29.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/v10121-009-0002-9
Cómo citar
Quintana Toledo, E. (2020). ‘In short tyme it wil heale the sore’. A relevance perspective of promising in medical utilitarian texts of the Early Modern English period. Estudios De Lingüística Aplicada, 5. https://doi.org/10.4995/ELA.2019.657701
Descargas
Los datos de descarga aún no están disponibles.