Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (II)

Abstract

The article aims at revealing the features of Romanian letter-writing during its stages of formation and consolidation. The structural and the stylistic analysis of letters is carried out with regard to the composition of the documents written in Old Romanian according to the requirements imposed by the Slavonic template and with regard to the rhetorical division of the three styles: the simple style, the middle style and the grand style. The description of the Old Romanian epistolary style is based on a taxonomy inspired by Roman Jakobson’s functional communicative model (1964). Following the six factors identified by Jakobson, letters are classified according to the socio-cultural status and the communicative competence of the addresser and of the addressee and in line with the context, the channel and the linguistic code used to write them.