A Grammar of Authority?

Abstract

Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative–functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying “grammar of authority”.