Wilt Thou Be Lord of all the World? Modals and Persuasion in Shakespeare

Abstract

Persuasion is defined as human communication designed to influence the judgements and actions of others (Simons & Jones 2011). The purpose of this research is to analyse the discourse of persuasion in Shakespeare from the perspective of historical pragmatics (Jucker & Taavitsainen 2010), with particular attention to modals employed as part of the strategies. The modals under investigation are proximal and distal central modals, SHALL/SHOULD, WILL/WOULD, CAN/COULD, MAY/MIGHT, MUST, and the contracted form ’LL. The data for the present study 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 and unsuccessful.

Keywords

• persuasion
• modal
• shakespeare
• speech act
• historical pragmatics