Discourse-Pragmatic Conservatism in Early Modern English Religious Prose: A Residue of Old English Narrative Style?

The language of religion is typically characterized as conservative, as evidenced by the use of archaic forms and expressions. However, studies of religious prose during the Early Modern English period (1500–1700) have revealed great variation between genres and challenged this general view. Instead of morphosyntactic and lexical features, this paper focuses on another kind of linguistic conservatism, which could be called discourse-pragmatic conservatism. During the Middle English period (1100–1500), the ways of signaling narrative structure changed, which may reflect typological shifts in construing narratives and/or changes in stylistic trends associated with developments from a predominantly oral to a more literate tradition. The most notable of these developments concerned the move from more explicit signaling of the main storyline, involving reliance on discourse markers, to a less frequent, but more varied, use of discourse connectives. By investigating the markers of narrative structure in a selection of Early Modern English religious narratives, I aim to test the hypothesis that the impression of religious prose as conservative is, at least to some extent, based on the texts’ deployment of discourse-pragmatic features.