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Reviewed by:
  • Historical dialogue analysis ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz, Franz Lebsanft
  • Robert McColl Millar
Historical dialogue analysis. Ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz, and Franz Lebsanft. (Pragmatics & beyond new series 66.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. 478.

This collection of essays brings together disparate strands of theoretical and practical work in fields derived from discourse analysis and historical sociolinguistics as well as from the often discrete worlds of German language, French language, and English language scholarship on these matters. The problems—and opportunities—inherent in this combination are discussed with some vigor in the introductory essay by Jucker, Fritz, and Lebsanft. Fifteen essays of varying length dealing with a wide range of topics follow this. All but two of the essays are in English. This variety is productive since it demonstrates the very range of interests and approaches to which the editors refer. This eclecticism also means that there are few occasions where readers (no matter their specialization) will not find something of interest somewhere in the collection.

Very briefly, the essays can be described thus. Marcel M. H. Bax discusses the balance between eristic and contractual motive in Dutch medieval romance and early modern drama. What often appear to be ritualistic interactions between knights may well have their roots in actual routines of battle. On the other hand, the ritual procedures employed in drama by the sinnekens, grotesque characters in morality plays, are not such truthful depictions of speech events. Thomas Gloning writes on the language use of religious controversies in the German-speaking world around 1600, demonstrating that there were debate-based patterns which these ‘arguments’ were obliged to follow. Many of these same concerns are also discussed by Johannes Schwitalla in his exposition of the use of dialogue in a particular controversy, again demonstrating the rules and conventions of this type of dialogue. This concept of the ritualized dialogue is continued in Manfred Beetz’s essay on the polite answer in pre-modern German conversation culture. Many of these ideas are also to be found in Hannes Kästner’s essay (in German) on courtly conversation in the early German lyrics, which demonstrates that the Minnesang may be employed to reconstruct what courtly speech between men and women was like and may also have been used as a model for how real-life conversations of this type might be constructed.

Thomas Honegger’s essay on the dawn song as a ‘linguistic routine’ of parting has particular resonance—to the eyes of an English speaker—for a reading of Romeo and Juliet. Honegger demonstrates the antiquity of the pattern of exchange and constructs a typology for the interaction. On a more prosaic level, Richard J. Watts discusses the textbooks and phrasebooks produced by and for immigrants—often refugees—to England in the early Modern period. As might be expected, most of the teaching element in these books is contained in dialogues. Contrasting French-English and Spanish-English textbooks. Watts demonstrates that the latter were designed for people who would have to stay indefinitely in England while the former were predicated upon the idea of a relatively speedy return to the homeland. Irma Taavitsainen writes on dialogues in late medieval and early Modern English medical writing, demonstrating that elements of real speech and even satires on the medical profession are included along with the expected influence of earlier scholarly and pedagogic dialogue frameworks.

An approach focused on relatively small amounts of text is demonstrated in Franz Lebsanft’s essay on a late medieval French bargain dialogue in Pathelin II. He shows that whilst bargain dialogues at any time period will share many similarities, the passages which he selects illustrate their development in a number of directions. Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö, on the other hand, employ large amounts of material in their discussion of hedges in early Modern English dialogues, demonstrating that English (in particular in its written form) was becoming more oral in style over time. Producing similar conclusions, Anne Herlyn, in her essay on multiple dialogue introducers from a...

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