1820 Settler petitions in the Cape Colony

Abstract

The received view has it that the language of petitions aims at elevating the addressee and demeaning the author. Recent studies into historical (im)politeness interpret it as epistolary facework, i.e. "politic" rather than "polite" behaviour (Bax 2010). Drawing on evidence of the genre dynamics present in nineteenthcentury petitions, this paper proposes that for a number of petitioners the conventionalised expression of deference could not have been their main motivation. Through close study of the structural models and their distribution in two collections of petitions related to British settlement in the Cape Colony (1819-1825), the study proposes an account for changes in users' preferences in this respect. The discussion employs Luckmann's (2009) theory of "communicative genres" and "projects", which allows one to reach beyond the textual evidence to the dimension of verbal interaction. The paper also focuses on the materiality of historical genres (cf. Barton and Hall 2000).

Letter-writing as a communicative practice - polyphony in Finnish emigrant letters in the 19th century

“…For example, these writers would not be fully conscious of features that are typical of official and public genres (Nordlund 2012). A term "genre literacy" has been used to describe a variety of skills that are needed to practice different forms of written genres (see Włodarczyk 2013). The genre literacy of the emigrant writers analysed in this paper as well as 19th-century lower-class writers in general was often not very high, in particular concerning more official genres.…”

“…As described by Kalle Saha above, the writing skills of Finnish emigrants were often modest, and a skilful reader and writer also often acted as a scribe for others. In general, the ability to both read and write gradually spread throughout Finland during the nineteenth century, but it became more common only in the 1920s after the first compulsory education law was passed (on reading and writing skills in early modern Finland, see Nordlund 2007, and Laitinen and Nordlund 2012, 2013). …”

Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

“…Culpeper and Demmen 2011;Włodarczyk 2013). In this respect, Sönmez (2005) analyses several requestive verbs such as beg, beseech, desire, entreat, please, pray, and request in her study on this speech act in seventeenth-century family letters, and finds revealing results concerning the selection of request markers depending on variables such as age.…”