Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Paderborn (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Historical Pragmatics, language: English, abstract: This paper fills a gap in historical pragmatic research by examining the functions of the affirmative particles "yea" and "AY" in Nineteenth-century American English. The paper sheds light on usages and functions of "yea" and "AY".
During Late Modern English for instance, people have often prescribed communicative conventions that are associated with a particular educated and religious lifestyle that was desirable at that time at must be affirmed to. Therefore, tracing back the different functions but also forms of affirmative speech acts is of great importance. However, historical research on affirmative speech acts, especially on formal aspects concerning this type of speech act, is thin. Culpeper (2018) is the only scholar who researched affirmative particles in Early Modern English, particles that operate as key elements in affirmative speech acts since they convey agreement faster and more unambiguously than any other element in an affirmative speech act. To give an example, Culpeper showed among other things that during Early Modern English, yea was part of a Germanic speech pattern, being used after grammatically positively formulated questions.
