Socio-pragmatics on the page. Discursive strategies and packaging of Christian books (16th-19th century) in Tamil

Abstract

Following Genette (1997), this article offers an insight into the paratexts found in fifty-five missionary documents (the corpus) in and about the Tamil language composed between the 16th and 19th centuries by missionaries belonging to different orders, mainly the Jesuits and the Protestants. Paratexts have been differentiated into discursive and visual ones, and have been analysed within a socio-pragmatic framework (Jucker 1995) highlighting the discursive and non- discursive strategies adopted by writers in speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) highlighting how the relationship between the writer/utterer and the reader/hearer was negotiated throughout the centuries and how it changed in the passage from the manuscript to the printed book. The distribution of paratexts and their frequency of occurrence within the corpus have also been examined. The aim is to understand, throughout the analysis of paratexts, whether it is possible to enhance, within the Western descriptors who were engaged in the same mutual activity such as the description of a new language like Tamil and the codification of Christianity through its linguistic structures, a community of practice, or rather a discourse community (Carroll at al. 2003) regardless of the religious order to which missionaries belonged to.