Religious Formulae in Historical Lower- Class Patient Letters

Abstract

This article examines the use and functions of religious formulae in historical lower-class letter writing. The data analysed are taken from the Corpus of Patient Documents (CoPaDocs), a new corpus of 19th-and early 20th-century texts written by patients from German psychiatric hospitals. An illustrative investigation of the occurrence and usage of religious formulae allows us to differentiate between explicit and implicit uses and to discuss instances of variation and modification. The functional analysis exhibits predominantly argumentative functions of religious formulae, but also parallelisation, expression of a shared ethos and a text-structural function. Finally, we discuss to what degree the formulae found are corpus specific, for example, resulting from the religious delusions of some patients, or whether they could also be connected to the idea of a cross-linguistic repertoire of formulaic writing.