This article is concerned with the history of yours sincerely, a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of the 1950s. This study investigates patterns of usage of closing formulae in a bestselling business letter-writing manual William Anderson’s Practical Mercantile Correspondence, A Collection of Modern Letters of Business, etc., whose first edition was published by Effiingham Wilson in 1836 in London. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period during which sincerely appears to have been gaining in popularity. The analysis of the repertoire of the closing formulae in Anderson shows that sincerely was starting to compete with truly for the same slot within the matrix of the extended type of closing formulae. This competition of sincerely with truly can be read as an indicator of a larger social and cultural change, which saw the rise of sincerity, reinterpreted as genuineness of feeling, as the new cultural buzzword.

This article focuses on the concept of national belonging by drawing on the theoretical framework of affective citizenship. Our aim is to show how, on the one hand, the national remains at the forefront of the political and cultural debates in the age of super-diversity and, on the other, how affective ties can be considered as a means of triggering the process of re-definition of national belonging. Relying on a critical reading of selected works of contemporary Italian migrant literature, the article explores the plurality of meanings associated with the national, thus challenging mainstream interpretations which sees it as a cultural, ethnic and religious homogenous register.

In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.

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Se prima era il nemico da sconfiggere, una volta che è stato sconfitto è ridiventato l'amico, il padre, il nonno da proteggere" 1 -in these few lines Umberto Eco brilliantly captures the most salient trends of the linguistic and political history of the Italian dialects since the 1861 Unification. The political fragmentation of the peninsula that had lasted over fourteen centuries has contributed to the establishment of a number of Italo-Romance languages, also known as "primary dialects." These languages share the same Latin origin as standard Italian and are, in fact, autonomous linguistic systems. Once the Florentine dialect found in the works of Petrarca, Boccaccio and Dante had been codified by Pietro Bembo as the standard written Italian in the sixteenth century, the remaining primary Italian dialects gradually became subordinate to standard Italian in terms of social prestige.La questione della lingua acquired a completely new political and ideological meaning once the Peninsula had regained its (formal) unity. Alessandro Manzoni and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli's contrasting views on the role of local languages expressed this paradigmatic shift: 2 while for the former the dialects were an obstacle to the linguistic unity of the nation, the latter sustained the spread of popular bilingualism (where knowledge of one's local dialect would be combined with the national standard Italian) as a major boost for successful civic and cultural education of the new Italians.Naturally, Manzoni's theory prevailed over that of his opponents. Sdialettalizzazione, a process of decreasing usage of primary dialects in favour of local hybrid varieties of Italian, began to run its course once compulsory education was introduced in Italy. 3 Notwithstanding the diffusion of literacy, increasing internal migratory flows, and the advent of radio, the country had largely preserved its linguistic disunity until the end of 1950s, making it a true exception among European nation-states. Not even school reforms and specific linguistic politics implemented during Fascism managed to succeed in the attempt to eradicate the use of dialects in favor of national Italian language.