Promoting negative politeness in nineteenth-century England

Abstract

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.

Review

“…Jucker (p. 1) wonders whether the stereotypical obsession of the British with nonimposition is, indeed, characteristic of that variety of English and, if so, how far back its roots go. Studies conducted by Culpeper & Archer (2008), Demmen (2011), andShvanyukova (2019) point to the rise of non-imposition politeness in the 19th century and a probable increase therein after 1900(p. 164, after Culpeper & Demmen 2011. Culpeper & Demmen (2011: 51) regard that shift towards tentativeness and deference as stemming from the emergence of individualism, an ideology which prioritised the self and the worth of an individual.…”