Functions of epistolary formulae in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Rutten, Gijsbert; Wal, M.J. van der

doi:10.1075/jhp.13.2.01rut

Cited by 37 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Figure 1 in section 5 showed that the UMC proportion is in line with the overall proportion, w-forms making up 45% of all relative (pronominal) adverbs in the UMC part of subcorpus 1. 14 It may not come as a surprise that epistolary formulae such as the COMMAND constructions appear to behave slightly more conservatively than relative clauses in general, since formulae were probably memorized as a whole, and inserted into discourse as prefabricated strings of words (Rutten and van der Wal 2012). Numbers are fairly small here, but still COMMAND constructions seem to be conservative vis-à-vis the change in progress.…”

Section: Constructional Diffusionmentioning

confidence: 96%

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

Rutten¹,

Wal²

2014

Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar

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In this paper, we discuss a significant change in the morphosyntax of Dutch, arguing that bringing together evidence from (historical) sociolinguistic and constructional analyses advances our understanding of language variation and change. In so doing, we link up with recent developments in cognitive linguistics, where a "social turn" has been argued for (Croft 2000(Croft , 2009 Kristiansen and Dirven 2008; Geeraerts, Kristiansen, and Peirsman 2010;Harder 2010;Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011). The change under discussion concerns the rise of w-relativizers such as waar 'where' at the expense of d-relativizers such as daar 'lit. there, where'. The change will be introduced in more detail in section 2. In section 3, we discuss previous research, and formulate two hypotheses following suggestions in the literature. First, we hypothesize that the change is a so-called change from above in the social sense, that is a change that spreads from the upper ranks of society to the lower ranks. Second, we hypothesize that the change spreads from construction to construction. We assume, therefore, that the change exhibits diffusion in at least two ways: social and constructional. We will use a socially stratified corpus of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century private letters to investigate this. The corpus will be introduced in section 4. In sections 5 and 6, we argue that both social and constructional diffusion can indeed be found in the change from dto w-relativization. Section 5 shows that w-relativizers are more in use in letters from the upper ranks of society than in letters from the lower ranks. The private letters in our corpora are characterized by a great number of epistolary formulae. In section 6, we will argue that these formulae can be considered as constructions in the sense of construction grammar, after which we will show that w-relativizers appear to spread from formula to formula, that is from construction to construction. In section 7, we discuss the results, and moreover argue that a constructional approach may gain from sociolinguistic analyses.Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 7/28/15 5:12 AM 1 http://www.datingwebsites.nl/reviews/second-love/ 2 http://forums.marokko.nl/archive/index.php/t-1459274%2520%253C/t-1703877-p-3.html 182 Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke van der Wal Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 7/28/15 5:12 AM 6 http://www.dutchdivas.net/sopranen/raymonde_serverius.html 7 http://www.allaboutworldview.org/dutch/bestaat-de-hel.htm 8 A recent syntactic atlas of Dutch dialects shows that the locative relative in De bank waar ze op zaten was pas geverfd 'The bench that they were sitting on had just been painted' is mostly realized as a w-form (267 locations), d-forms (33 locations) being largely restricted to the Dutch provinces of North Brabant and Friesland (SAND 2005, map 88b). As noted in the commentary to the maps (p. 77), it is striking that there are hardly any dialects with solely d-forms. In other words, in dialects wh...

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Section: Constructional Diffusionmentioning

confidence: 96%

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

Rutten¹,

Wal²

2014

Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar

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“…In particular, discourse-based, (socio)pragmatic and historical pragmatic approaches have started breaking new ground in the fields of extraterritorial varieties and migrant languages, offering a new perspective on their variation and development (e.g. Dossena 2012b; Laitinen and Nordlund 2012;Rutten and van der Wal 2012;van der Wal and Rutten 2013). One of the reasons for this development is that, recently, epistolary data for a range of languages have been studied for the first time, e.g.…”

Section: Historical Correspondence: Recent Developmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820-1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories

Włodarczyk

2013

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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In 1820, the Cape of Good Hope, a British colony since 1795, became the new home to c. 4,500 English-speaking settlers. Correspondence surviving from this period in reference to this settlement enables insights into early nineteenth century letters, a still understudied area. Moreover, it provides a good setting to disambiguate the term letter from an internal, bottom-up perspective. Such a perspective may offer "a key for disclosing historical forms of communication" (Hübler and Busse 2012: 1) as first-order phenomena. This is achieved in an analysis of categorial labels (keywords) and metacommunicative clues found in the internal correspondence of the Colonial Office, a British government department, in the years 1820-1821. The results of the analysis provide a partial answer to what the label letter meant for this professional community. Adding a researcher's perspective to such a description allows proposing a twofold approach to "the letter" as an analytic category in the study of historical correspondence.

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“…Het gebruik van de gezondheidsformules hebben we onderzocht in corpora die uitsluitend uit autografen bestaan (Rutten & Van der Wal 2012). Daarbij blijkt dat ze in een groot aantal zeventiende-eeuwse brieven voorkomen (86%), zowel in brieven van mannen als in die van vrouwen.…”

Section: Formulair Taalgebruikunclassified

“…Vrouwen gebruiken dus uitvoeriger gezondheidsformules dan mannen. Die onderscheidingen zijn ook toepasbaar op formulair taalgebruik in zeventiende-en achttiende-eeuwse Nederlandse brieven (Rutten & Van der Wal 2012). De hoofdformule fris en gezond kwam bij de lage en lage middenklasse in 46% van de brieven voor en bij de hoge middenklasse en hoge klasse in minder dan 10% van de brieven.…”

Section: Formulair Taalgebruikunclassified

Variatie, conventies en verandering - Zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse buitgemaakte brieven onder de loep

Wal

Rutten

2013

Internationale Neerlandistiek

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Variatie, conventies en veranderingZeventiende-en achttiende-eeuwse buitgemaakte brieven onder de loep Marijke van der Wal (Universiteit Leiden) Gijsbert Rutten (Universiteit Leiden & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) This contribution focuses on the historical sociolinguistic research conducted within the Brieven als Buit/Letters as Loot programme at Leiden University (www.brievenalsbuit.nl). At the core of this research are seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Dutch private letters, confiscated by the English during times of warfare. The socio-historical linguistic value of these letters, kept in the National Archives (Kew, UK), will be shown when discussing the autograph status of texts, and examining the specific cases of formulaic language and of forms of address. These three issues are illustrated by presenting two seventeenth-century letters sent from New Netherlands shortly after the historic event of the English taking over. Furthermore, the importance of a reliable electronic corpus, built according to LIP (the Leiden Identification Procedure), will come to the fore. Exploring such a corpus results in unprecedented insights into variation, conventions and in particular, changes of both formulae and forms of address.

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Functions of epistolary formulae in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Cited by 37 publications

References 22 publications

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820-1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories

Variatie, conventies en verandering - Zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse buitgemaakte brieven onder de loep

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