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The Devil's in the Details: Details as Implicatures in Muscovite Trial Records Daniel E. Collins To Chuck Gribble, in gratitude and friendship. Introduction1 One of the difficulties besetting pragmatic research on premodern languages is the fact that the available texts provide insufficient-often, indeed, meager -information about their situational contexts (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 7). This applies even to trial records and other so-called "speech-based genres,,,2 which are considered better approximations of spoken language than other types of writing because they transcribe-or purport to transcribe-actual speech events3 Undeniably, "speech-based" texts can provide valuable details about the speech situations that they represent. However, to avoid methodological pitfalls, it is important to remember that the details in a written text are not simply conveyed but rather selected as part of the writer's construction of reality. Unlike features unintentionally captured in the background of a snapshot, they are selected intentionally, mediated by considerations of relevance (provided, of course, they are not outright errors). While this intentionality makes it necessary to proceed with caution, it also sets an agenda for research. When so much else has been omitted, why have these particular details been included? What function(s) did they have in the written text and in the social institution that it served? 1 Previous versions of this paper were presented at the International Pragmatics Association Conference in Toronto (July 2003) and at the Midwest Slavic Conference in Columbus, OH (February 2004). I would like to thank Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky for her conlrnents on an earlier draft of the article and for encouraging my continuing research into court trial discourse. 2 This is Biber and Finegan's term (1992: 689) for "varieties originating in speech that have been permanently preserved in writing." See also Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 7, 10, 11-12; Kyto 2000. 3 For recent historical-pragmatic studies of trial language, see Hiltunen 1996; Doty and Hiltunen 2002; Koch 1999, Culpeper and Semino 2000; and Archer 2002. Robert Rothstein, Ernest Scatton, and Charles E. Townsend, eds. Studia Caroliensia: Papers in Linguistics and Folkore in Honor of Charles f. CribbIe. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 67- 89. 68 D ANIEL E. COLLINS In the present study, I examine the pragmatics of details in the speech-reporting in three representative criminal trial dossiers, totaling 163 folia, which were written in Muscovy in the late 1630s and early 1640s (MDBP).4 My focus is on the authorial narrative-the frame for reported speech-rather than on the contents of the reported speech itself. While the scribes, as the court reporters of their day, were not responsible for the content of the utterances they reported, as fiction writers are, they were unquestionably in charge of how those utterances were introduced and framed in the trial narrative (Collins 2001). The reporting style in criminal trial dossiers is conventionally spare and neutral; the reporters (chancery scribes) provide only the minimum of information needed to track the speakers, and they almost always conceal their own attitude toward the proceedings. This general reticence makes their occasional flashes of detail stand out all the more sharply. In apparent violation of both the conventions of the text-kind and the scribes' own professional style, demonstrated folium after folium, we find the sporadic, seemingly unmotivated use of phase verbs focusing attention on the onset of the utterance; participles, deverbal adverbs, and other adjuncts indicating the circumstances accompanying the utterance; and emotive speech-act verbs reflecting an evaluation of the utterance. In these examples, the scribes provide more information than was usual or expected for the documents they were writing; in other words, they seem to be flouting two of the maxims of Grice's (1975/1989: 26-27) cooperative principle: the maxim of Quantity-"Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange ... . Do not make your contribution more informative than is required"; and the maxim (or supermaxim) of Relation- "Be relevant." The possibility that the scribes were being prolix and irrelevant is ruled out by the textual distribution of the examples, which occur exclusively in descriptions of outof -the-ordinary statements. The exceptional details cannot be due to a striving for vividness or elegant variation, given the purpose of the text-kind and the dry style of the rest of the immediate context. The most convincing interpretation , therefore, is that we are dealing with conversational implicatures; that is, the scribes, in departing from the stylistic norm, are hinting at...

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