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Accusations are a very frequent type of speech act both in everyday life and in formal controversies, and answering accusations is a sophisticated type of linguistic practice well worth analysing from a pragmatic point of view. In my paper I shall first describe some basic properties of accusations and characteristic types of reactions to accusations, i. e. denying the alleged fact, making excuses, and giving justifications. I then go on to describe some fundamental functions of accusations in controversies. Using the basic patterns of accusations and reactions to accusations as an object of comparison, I then analyse some relevant exchanges from historical controversies (l6th to 18th century), among them famous polemical interactions like the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy, but also less well-known debates from the fields of medicine and theology. The present paper is both a contribution to the theory of controversy and to the pragmatic history of controversies. Keywords: historical pragmatics, theory of controversy, ad hominem moves, dynamics of controversy
This article is a contribution to historical dialogue analysis, a field of research which has gained momentum in recent years (Fritz 1995, 1997, Gloning 1999, and other articles in Jucker/Fritz/Lebsanft 1999). In the present paper, I report some results of ongoing research from a project on the history of controversies from 1600 to 1800, which Marcelo Dascal and I are conducting at the Universities of Tel Aviv, Israel and Gießen, Germany.
The first printed newspapers in the modern sense of the word appeared in the seventeenth century. They were weekly publications which contained regular reports by correspondents from all over Europe, mainlyon political matters. Although the new medium as such was innovative in its general organization, the individual news items were produced by following text patterns which already had a history of their own. The article reports recent research on the emerging constellation of text types in the first two German newspapers, the Aviso and the Relation of the year 1609. lt is focussed on delineating a prototype-based typology of the relevant text types and on tracing back these forms of presentation of news items to earlier genres and media like chronicles, handwritten newsletters, printed pamphlets and biannual news collections. The general interest of this line of research as a contribution to historical pragmatics lies in the attempt to see historical text types in an evolutionary perspective, taking into account the context of text production and, as far as possible, the reactions of the reading public.
Coherence in hypertext
(1999)
At first sight hypertext does not look !ike a good subject for research on coherence. Hypertext is non-linear text, and coherence is typically defined for linear text. So coherence does not seem to be involved in hypertext at all. But on closer inspection it emerges that some of the basic structural problems with hypertexts are classical problems of coherence.
Coreference in dialogue
(1997)
Since the early days of discourse analysis coreference has always been considered a major factor in the formation of texts and dialogues. The repetition of nominal elements and the anaphoric use of pronouns in successive sentences is a fundamental cohesive pattern which ties sentences together and contributes to the coherence of sequences. "La coherence transphrastique trouve dans la pronominalisation un des procedes les plus efficaces" (Stati 1990, 160). The basic structural pattern on which linguists focused their interest in the early 1970s is captured by the following examples: (1) A man entered the house. After closing the door, the man sat down. He was tired. (2) Peter The man entered the house. He was tired. He ...
Speakers of various Southern german dialects may be heard to use two syntactic variants of subordinate clauses which are represented by the following Swabian examples: (1) daß er den net will komme lasse (2) daß er den net komme lasse will Of these two variants of the three-element verbal complex, only the non-dialect counterpart of (2) is accepted as standard modern written German: (3) daß er ihn nicht kommen lassen will In earlier periods of the German language, however, both variants were used by authors of written texts.
The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics.