Methodological problems in corpus-based historical pragmatics. The case of English directives

This paper gives a summary of some methodological problems a corpus-based diachronic analysis of speech acts has to face, with particular emphasis on the case of English directives. Among the issues discussed are the difficulties with a complete inventory of the different manifestations of directives in the history of English, the scarcity of historical data, problems of interpretation and the relationship between the number of the particular manifestations of directives found in a corpus and the 'underlying' total number of directives. In a second part the paper presents some illustrative results of corpus-based investigations tracing the history of English directives.