Stylistic patterns in 16th and 17th c. medical recipes
Historical stylistic analysis from a cognitive linguistic perspective
Keywords:
historical stylistics, scientific vs. everyday stylistic patterns, genre, script, dis-course community, discourse pattern, discourse domain, norm compliance, medical recipeAbstract
The stylistic analysis of historical records of everyday language use is yet to gain ground in Hungarian linguistics. This paper aims to redress the situation by an exploration of stylistic patterns in 16th and 17th century medical recipes. A key premise of my research is the view that genres evoke frames (or scripts) referencing individual and socio-cultural aspects of the text’s production as well as features of linguistic construal.
The goals of the paper are threefold. Firstly, it addresses some general issues of the cognitive pragmatic approach to historical stylistics. Secondly, it aims to establish the genre as a basis for the study of stylistic variability. Finally and most importantly, it presents stylistic patterns as sets of co-occurring choices in construal, as they are found in 16th and 17th c. medical recipes. At the centre of this investigation will be the interpersonal relation between speaker and addressee(s), and the socio-cultural context of their discourse.
