Pragmatics through a historical synchronic perspective: "ben" in Vietnamese from the xv to xvii centuries

Abstract

     The current paper examines the word ben (then) in some Vietnamese ancient documents from a historical synchronic perspective. The meanings and usages of the word ben has involved many processes, such as the temporal denotation; the causa! shading; the speakers' evaluation on the anomaly and contrary which bypass the conditional and logical prerequisites; and the loss of factors on epistemic state and the causal interaction in the epistemic development causing ben becomes a word emphasizing on the exactness. The paper suggests that prospective studies on historical grammar can provide profound and systematic insights into the grammatical system in the past and pave the way to studies on grammaticalization and cultural-linguistic textual analysis.