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Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 109–127

Discord in eighteenth-century genteel correspondence

This chapter studies representations of discord in the correspondence of eighteenth-century English gentry. The study aims at charting various ways in which the upper classes negotiated conflict situations and cases where norms of society were challenged, by mapping the social meaning of relevant labels according to the three themes of discord, disgrace, and disorder. The methodological starting point is in Nevalainen and Tissari’s (2010) study of the shifting cultural keywords courtesy, civility, and politeness, which we also study here along with the lexemes discord, disgrace, embarrassment, mortification, and shame. The results show that civility, politeness, and shame all function as tools for social control and critical evaluation of self and others.

Keywords: discord, conflict, eighteenth-century gentry, socio-cultural terminology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Polite society of eighteenth-century England
    • 2.2Discord in the eighteenth century: Linguistic and socio-cultural background
  • 3.Relationships between politeness and discord: Methods
    • 3.1Socio-cultural embedding of politeness terminology (Nevalainen & Tissari 2010)
    • 3.2Discord terminology in the current study
  • 4.Case studies: Discord in eighteenth-century correspondence
    • 4.1Discord proper
    • 4.2Disgrace
    • 4.3Disorder
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.05nev
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Bluestocking Corpus
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CEECE Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Tanja Säily and Anni Sairio at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.

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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Jucker, Andreas
2020. Politeness in the History of English, DOI logo
Jucker, Andreas H.
2020. The discourse of manners and politeness in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 102 ff. DOI logo
Jucker, Andreas H.
2024. Conduct politeness versus etiquette politeness: a terminological distinction. Journal of Politeness Research 20:1 ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo

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