This paper presents a case study which brings together the fields of contrastive pragmatics and historical pragmatics. Specifically, we contrastively investigate the ways in which the speech act set of “farewell” – representing the closing phase of an interaction – was realised in nineteenth-century historical letters in different linguacultures, including the English, German and Chinese ones. We argue that contrastive pragmatics provides a fruitful contribution to historical research for two inter-related reasons. First, contrastive pragmatics allows us to identify similar pragmatic patterns between typologicially “close” linguacultures, such as the English and the German ones. Second, it prompts researchers to attest the validity of such patterns by comparing such typologically close linguacultures with more distant ones such as the Chinese. Our study is based on a corpus of family letters written to elderly relatives.

中文翻译：

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从对比语用的角度看欧洲的历史语言使用

本文介绍了一个案例研究，它汇集了对比语用学和历史语用学的领域。具体来说，我们对比研究了 19 世纪历史信件在不同语言文化（包括英语、德语和汉语）中实现“告别”言语行为集（代表互动的结束阶段）的方式。我们认为，由于两个相互关联的原因，对比语用学为历史研究做出了富有成效的贡献。首先，对比语用学使我们能够识别类型学上“接近”的语言文化之间的相似语用模式，例如英语和德语。其次，它促使研究人员通过将这种类型学上接近的语言文化与较远的语言文化（如汉语）进行比较，来证明这种模式的有效性。