Diachronic pragmatics: New perspectives on recent developments of spoken English.

Diachronic pragmatics is a subfield of historical pragmatics. It studies the developments of patterns of language use across time. In the past, such investigations were based on written data, but recently new sources have become available that provide more direct access to the spoken language of the (mostly recent) past. This Virtual Special Issue combines four articles that provide new perspectives on the study of diachronic pragmatic changes of spoken English. They explore a range of data sources that have recently become available. They include recordings of presidential press conferences and of Prime Minister's Question Time, spontaneous interactions in natural settings (London-Lund Corpus) and fictional interactions produced for the movie screen (Movie Corpus). The timelines covered by these investigations range from one to about four generations. In this introduction, we position this Virtual Special Issue in the context of diachronic pragmatics. We briefly introduce some of the newly available data sources for the diachronic investigation of spoken English. We talk about the possible time depth of diachronic pragmatics and what this means for observing language change on the level of pragmatics, and finally we give an outline of the four papers in this Virtual Special Issue. • Diachronic pragmatics provides a framework for recent change of spoken English. • New resources offer fresh insights into diachronic developments of spoken English. • Diachronic change of pragmatic entities is observable within one or two generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]