Wilt thou be lord of all the world? Modals and persuasion in Shakespeare

摘要

Persuasion is defined as human communication designed to influence the judgements and actionsof others (Simons & Jones 2011). The purpose of this research is to analyse the discourse ofpersuasion in Shakespeare from the perspective of historical pragmatics (Jucker & Taavitsainen2010), with particular attention to modals employed as part of the strategies. The modals underinvestigation are proximal and distal central modals, SHALL/SHOULD, WILL/WOULD,CAN/COULD, MAY/MIGHT, MUST, and the contracted form ’LL. The data for the presentstudy is drawn from The Riverside Shakespeare (Evans 1997) and the concordance by Spevack(1968-1980). The corpus includes both cases where the persuasion attempt is successful andunsuccessful.After defining persuasion in comparison to speech acts, quantitative analysis reveals howfrequently the persuader and the persuadee employ a modal regarding each type of modality andspeech act. Further analysis shows in what manner the persuader and the persuadee interact witheach other in discourse resorting to the following strategies: modality, proximal and distal meaningsof the modal, speech act of each utterance including a modal, and use of the same modal orswitching modals in interaction.This research thus clarifies how effectively speakers attempted to persuade others in interactions,shedding light on communication mechanisms in the past.