Letters and Letter Writing: Introduction

Nevala, Minna; Palander-Collin, Minna

doi:10.1080/13825570500067903

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Nevala & Palander‐Collin also note that in the eighteenth century letters and letter writing ‘became a means of public entertainment’ (2005: 3), as is evident in the development of epistolary fiction. The claim that ‘[e]pistolary fiction can be said to have originated from the familiar letter, because it consisted of similar accounts of private experiences and emotions’ (Nevala & Palander‐Collin 2005: 3) also supports the idea that the familiar letter was a popular means of communication at that time. Therefore, letters from Walpole’s lifetime are especially useful for sociohistorical linguistic analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Social network analysis and the eighteenth‐century family network: a case study of the Walpole family

Henstra

2008

Trans of the Philol Soc

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In this paper1 I demonstrate that the present‐day research model of social network analysis can successfully be used to describe and explain linguistic variation and change in a historical context. I do so by presenting a case study of the language of the Walpole family in relation to the norm as set in contemporary eighteenth‐century grammars. I select three linguistic features which were commented on by Lowth and test these against the corpus of the letters of Walpole family members, which I have created from the complete edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Social network analysis and the eighteenth‐century family network: a case study of the Walpole family

Henstra

2008

Trans of the Philol Soc

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“…A comparable example is early modern European politeness, about which Burke remarks that "[a]s in the case of clothes, so in that of language, the apparently 'superficial' deserves to be studied as a system of signs expressing what lies underneath" (2000: 48). Superficial analyses of "the apparently 'superficial' " from the angle of thin description will not come up to the mark; superficially, and certainly by current standards, early modern letter-writing -to draw attention to an acknowledged gold mine for historical politeness researchers (Fitzmaurice 2002;Nevalainen 2004) -is pervaded with politeness. In point of fact, early modern letter-writers (not exclusively the elite) went to extremes in using deferential address forms, obsequious greetings and sumptuous complimentary closes.…”

Section: Sizing Up the Superficial: Cross-historical Letter-writing Mmentioning

confidence: 97%

The historical understanding of historical (im)politeness

Bax

Kádár

2011

JHP

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If historians have an obligation to make sense of the past and to explain the origins of their world for the society in which they live, then the quest for coherence in their subject must be their primary goal.(Theodore K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 2006: xxii) Linguistic (im)politeness and the quest for cultural coherencesA central yet controversial concern for all studies of the past is the issue of periodisation, the question of the beginning and ending of historical periods. Although the temporal boundaries, and the geographical and/or cultural coordinates, of traditionally recognised eras such as Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or Modernity are contested (and some historians even feel that attempts at periodisation are futile), the trivial point stands that from time immemorial "things have changed". As to the positively non-trivial question of what, then, are the "things" that are liable to change, and why, how or in what way have they developed over time, historian Theodore Rabb argues the relevance of the study of the cultural coherences "that bind periods together" and "are essential if one wishes to define and comprehend the shape of the past" (2006: xxi). Opposing postmodern relativism, and siding with philosopher Robin Collingwood for whom "what we call history is neither invented nor found […] but the outcome of a constructive dialogue between the individual historian and the materials left to us by the past" (2006: xxi), Rabb advocates the necessity of concentrating "on the substance that underlies the changes we explore" in order "to identify a succession of fundamental shifts in historical periods" (2006: xxii). Regarding the recognition of historically distinct coherent patterns, especially the determination of the unifying features of past periods, Rabb stresses that

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“…"Elaboration" figures as one of the four processes consitutive for a standard language as in Table 33.1: "Elaboration" enables a language to serve a "maximal variation in function", while "codification" aims at "minimal variation in form" (Haugen 1966: 931; italics in the original). If we disregard the prescriptive artes dictaminis in Latin and French, which also helped, for instance, the Pastons to compose their "private" letters in the 15th century (Nevalainen 2004;Schaefer 1996), codified prescription as we know it from the 18th century onwards (see Crowley, Chapter 61), can, however, not be found in the pre-modern eras of English.…”

Section: Standardization Through Elaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

33 Middle English: Standardization

Bergs¹,

Brinton²

2012

Handbücher Zur Sprach- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.1

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Middle English is usually seen as the period of English which does not have a supraregional standard because French and Latin fulfil this function. However, at least for the 14th and 15th centuries fairly standardized varieties with dialectally bleached forms may be identified. Yet such varieties may only be regarded as "focused" because codification as the sufficient condition for a standard is still absent. By the 15th century, when English is more extensively used in writing, the norm was mainly that of discourse traditions which were taken over from the French and Latin models as external standards. These provided English with means not only to communicate over a geographically wider area, but also to produce texts in an increasing number of registers as these external standards become internalized in English. Middle English standardizations are hence 33 Middle English: Standardization 519 Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 519-533 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/25/16 4:21 PMdiscussed here as a minimization of variation for supra-local use and as maximation of variability to widen the stylistic functions of the vernacular.

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Letters and Letter Writing: Introduction

Cited by 21 publications

References 6 publications

Social network analysis and the eighteenth‐century family network: a case study of the Walpole family

Social network analysis and the eighteenth‐century family network: a case study of the Walpole family

The historical understanding of historical (im)politeness

33 Middle English: Standardization

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