3 A ‘third-wave’ historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters

Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo

doi:10.1515/9783110488401-006

Cited by 80 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…As mentioned above, this approach engages with the recent turn to the third wave of (historical) sociolinguistics, where intra-speaker variation or meaningful individual choices to project and construct social personae have taken center stage (e.g. Conde-Silvestre, 2016;Hernández-Campoy and García-Vidal, 2018). By analyzing individual prescriptivist attitudes towards some dialectal features, our aim is to explore attitudes and self-perception in language use.…”

Section: Coriecor and The Corviz Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Perceptions of Irish English in Nineteenth-century Emigrant Letters

Amador-Moreno,

Ruano-García

2023

Int. j. Engl. stud.

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In this paper we look at the real voices of Irish English speakers in the nineteenth century. By turning to the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno, 2012), we analyse the perceptions that letter writers had of their own language use. We apply a micro-perspective analysis to the language of John Kerr, an Irish emigrant to America, in his letters to his uncle James Graham of Newpark (Co. Antrim, N. Ireland). We examine Kerr’s incisive comment on language use alongside metacommentary found in different Late Modern works, including dictionaries, essays on Irish English, as well as contemporary fictional representations of the variety of English spoken in Ireland during this period. Through this small batch of letters, we explore how the real voices of Irish English speakers echoed an enregistered Irish repertoire that may have raised awareness shaping their perceptions of their own dialect.

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Section: Coriecor and The Corviz Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Perceptions of Irish English in Nineteenth-century Emigrant Letters

Amador-Moreno,

Ruano-García

2023

Int. j. Engl. stud.

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“…In fact, private letters from historical corpora constitute the language production that is closest to labov's (1966) everyday speech, so their study may shed light onto the resources and driving forces for sociolinguistic variability in remote societies (Nevala & Palander-Collin 2005;Nevalainen & Tanskanen 2007;Palander-Collin 2010;Conde-Silvestre & Hernández-Campoy 2013). The study of historical letters has meant a crucial contribution to the detection of the social provenance and direction of long-term changes longitudinally and macroscopically (see Biber 1995: 283-300;2001: 98-99;Biber & Finegan 1989, 1997Nevala & Palander-Collin 2005;Nevalainen & Tanskanen 2007;Palander-Collin 2010;Conde-Silvestre & Hernández-Campoy 2013), as well as to the analysis and reconstruction of the sociolinguistic behaviour of individual speakers in social interaction microscopically (Palander-Collin 1999;Palander-Collin, Nevala & Nurmi 2009;Auer 2015;Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre 2015;Conde-Silvestre 2016;or Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal 2018), consolidating the historical validity of some 'sociolinguistic universals' (see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 1996;2003/2017.…”

Section: Historical Corpora Of Private Correspondencementioning

confidence: 99%

Historical sociolinguistics and authorship elucidation in medieval private written correspondence:

Espinosa

Campoy²

2021

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Corpora of historical correspondence and their social metadata offers a very useful archival source to carry out studies in Historical Sociolinguistics. However, illiteracy among female population and the subsequent use of scribes make authorship and gender constitute some of the most controversial socio-demographic issues when doing sociohistorical research. Letters might not have been autographs but rather dictated to a scribe, which can lead to the distortion of findings concerning authorship and gender-based patterns, from the perspective of sociolinguistic variation. On the other hand, Forensic Linguistics appeared as a branch of Applied Linguistics to assist the law in legal processes, where authorship elucidation is often one of the most disputed questions. In this paper we will present an overview of the main approaches to authorship attribution within Forensic Linguistics and relate them to sociohistorical data in the case of the letters by Margery Paston, putting their theorical tenets and techniques to the test of time. The data suggests that formal (spelling) features are less indicative of authorship than other morphosyntactic markers. Forensic Linguistics and Historical Sociolinguistics can mutually benefit each other, by sharing their expertise in authorship research and its application to current and historical texts in their social context

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“…This implies that languages probably varied in the same patterned ways in the past as they have been observed to do today, and that the development of linguistic systems always occurs in relation to the sociohistorical situation of speakers (Labov 1972(Labov : 275, 1994. Accordingly, the sociolinguistic behaviour of, for example, late fifteenth-century speakers may have been determined, to some 4 This piece of research is related to two long-term projects carried out at the University of Murcia (Spain), "Sociolinguistic models of stylistic variation in English historical correspondence" (HiStylVar) and "Communities of practice and stylistic variation in English historical correspondence", whose results and conclusions are chiefly published in Conde-Silvestre (2016b and Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal (2018a, 2018b. The aim of the projects is to explore the motivations and mechanisms for stylistic variation in English historical correspondence corpora and in connection with some of the present-day theoretical models developed for its study.…”

Section: Objectives: Language Change and Stylistic Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing Patterns of Intra-Speaker Variation in Early English Correspondence: A Change from Above in thePaston Letters

Campoy

Conde-Silvestre

García-Vidal

2019

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of social and context factors on the diffusion of a linguistic change from above, namely the deployment of the spelling innovation <th> in fifteenth-century English, and especially in some letters from the well-known Paston collection of correspondence. We particularly focus on the socio-stylistic route of this change from above, observing the sociolinguistic behaviour of some letter writers (members of the Paston family) in connection with the social-professional status of their recipients, the interpersonal relationship with them, as well as the contexts and styles of the letters. In this way, different dimensions of this change from above in progress in fifteenth-century English can be reconstructed.

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3 A ‘third-wave’ historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters

Cited by 80 publications

References 0 publications

Linguistic Perceptions of Irish English in Nineteenth-century Emigrant Letters

Linguistic Perceptions of Irish English in Nineteenth-century Emigrant Letters

Historical sociolinguistics and authorship elucidation in medieval private written correspondence:

Tracing Patterns of Intra-Speaker Variation in Early English Correspondence: A Change from Above in thePaston Letters

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