Historical Sociopragmatics in Hungary: Main Vectors of Development

The article is devoted to current Hungarian research in historical sociopragmatics, developing in line with the tradition worked out on Western European, primarily English-language material. The article terminologically distinguishes between the concepts of «pragmatics», «sociopragmatics» and «historical (socio)pragmatics», and also traces how in recent decades Hungarian science has moved from a traditional approach to a functional-pragmatic one, paying more attention to context. The specificity of Hungarian studies is determined by the material: thus, on the basis of medical prescriptions, medical manuals, and manuals of letter writing, the historical syntax and grammaticalization of discursive markers are studied, and on the basis of private letters of nobles and protocols of witch trials illustrating the speech of different strata of the population, sociopragmatic aspects are studied, in particular, the category of politeness and forms of address. That is, it is shown how the choice of one or another form is influenced by personal, social and cultural context, as well as which forms of address are considered polite in a particular era. In general, the tradition of studying historical sociopragmatics in Hungary is relatively young, but promising given the publication of a large corpus of historical texts and the parallel growth in the number of studies in other European countries.