Researching understatement in the history of English

Abstract

A distinction is here introduced into restrictive, hedgy understatementR and emphatic understatementE, which are traced in historical data via the metalinguistic and the form-to-function approach. The metalinguistic approach found the modern sense of understatementE with examples from mostly more formal, written registers, while understatementR could hardly be found in works on rhetoric and etiquette. In contrast, understatementR was generally more prominent in the instances found with the corpus linguistic form-to-function approach, based on negation, a bit of a and a N or two, although understatements made up only a tiny fraction of those constructions’ uses. UnderstatementE could be attested from Middle English onwards, while understatementR appeared later, with both becoming more common after 1800, pointing to late British preference for this speech style.