(Un)certainty, Suspicion, and Some “Horrifying Sickness:” On Pragmatic (or Stance) Markers in Hungarian Witchcraft Records

How could someone dispute more or less convincingly concerning the accusation of witchcraft? What kind of narratives were utilized as relevant witness depositions in the eighteenth century? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by investigating the pragmatic characteristics of Hungarian witchcraft records, namely the category of pragmatic (or stance) markers, a set of lexemes and phrases signifying pragmatic evidence, evaluation and attitude. The aim of the investigation is to explore the patterns of recalling the sources of experience about a legal case as well as evaluations of the cited claims. Data were collected from published witchcraft documents written in Hungarian, which are available from the database called “Old and Middle Hungarian Corpus of informal language use” (Novák et al., Lang Res Eval 52:1–28, 2018). A manual analysis focuses on a subsection of records written between 1700 and 1750, complemented by queries of the database. This analysis can be compared to recent studies of the given era, based on legal records from England and Salem; however, some subtypes of evidentiality need to be handled differently in Hungarian sources. Studying the negative emotive intensifiers and their contexts reveals the involved and speech-related nature of the depositions as well, indicating contrast between the Hungarian and the Salem witch-hunt recordings. The patterns of the pragmatic or stance markers proved to be exceptionally varied and mixed in the studied records, ranging from assumptions showing personal persuasion rather than actual proof (e.g., using boosters, like clearly and obviously) to vague suspicions, where the utterances were hedged even concerning harm seen as an effect of witchcraft. These results can be explained considering the legal and cultural context in which the documents are embedded. There existed a dichotomy that was not independent of the cited witnesses but rather a shared product of the witnesses and the authorities including the scribe. The questions posed to the witnesses emphasized the importance of the sources of the information and experiences, thereby suggesting reliability. However, the accusation of witchcraft itself was an underspecified notion, with potential patterns filled in with details from the earlier behavior of the accused. Therefore, expressions of suspicion were often vague. These findings may have implications for the history of pragmatic markers and could help refine the concept of the register within the Hungarian witchcraft records.