Letter Writing

Editors
ORCID logo | University of Helsinki
ORCID logo | University of Turku
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027222312 | EUR 80.00 | USD 120.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027293008 | EUR 80.00 | USD 120.00
 
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The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective.
The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.
[Benjamins Current Topics, 1] 2007.  viii, 160 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 July 2008
Table of Contents
“The book is a rich collection of contributions from well-known scholars. The data, deriving from a range of specific corpora, provide extensive opportunities for in-depth analyses of pragmatic and socio-linguistic phenomena. The findings are illustrated with numerous examples from an array of sources that highlight the representativeness of the material investigated and the validity of the methodological approach. It is a welcome addition to state-of-the-art studies on the history of English in use, and will not fail to encourage further research.”
“This is a remarkable and innovative collection of articles, not only because there are so few collections which focus on the genre of letters, but also because the papers presented here do not approach letters as finished products of the past. Rather, they trace and reconstruct the highly varied contexts where language users got involved in the activity of letter writing, with the outcome often being determined by power, convention and social interaction. The diversity of the approaches offered by the articles is impressive, including, among others, text typology, critical discourse analysis, politeness theory and the study of language contact. The texts examined range from late medieval Hanseatic letters to 18th century scientific correspondence. The analyses combine solid corpus-based investigations with the wider perspective of society at large. A highly welcome contribution to the study of the history of the genre and a valuable addition to the field of historical pragmatics.”
Cited by (18)

Cited by 18 other publications

Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E.
2024. “I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters. Corpus Pragmatics 8:1  pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu & Wenrui Shi
2023. Historical language use in Europe from a contrastive pragmatic perspective. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1  pp. 143 ff. DOI logo
Herat, Manel
2021. Compiling the Corpus. In Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity,  pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, DOI logo
Calvo Cortés, Nuria
2020. Variations from letter-writing manuals. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312],  pp. 184 ff. DOI logo
Girininkaitė, Veronika
2020. Code-Switching in the Letters of Vilnius University Professors at the End of the 18th century. Taikomoji kalbotyra :14  pp. 148 ff. DOI logo
Unuabonah, Foluke Olayinka & Eniola Boluwaduro
2020. Conflict-motivated acts in the open letters of two former Nigerian presidents. English Text Construction 13:2  pp. 158 ff. DOI logo
Hernández-Campoy, Juan M., J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre & Tamara García-Vidal
2019. Tracing Patterns of Intra-Speaker Variation in Early English Correspondence: A Change from Above in thePaston Letters. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 54:s1  pp. 287 ff. DOI logo
Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel
2019. Chapter 6. Virtual sociolinguistics. In Language Variation - European Perspectives VII [Studies in Language Variation, 22],  pp. 104 ff. DOI logo
Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel
2022. Mel Evans: Royal voices: Language and power in Tudor England. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:1  pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
Hernández-Campoy, Juan M. & Tamara García-Vidal
2018. Style-shifting and accommodative competence in Late Middle English written correspondence: Putting Audience Design to the test of time. Folia Linguistica 52:s39-s2  pp. 383 ff. DOI logo
Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo
2016. Historical sociolinguistics. In Handbook of Pragmatics, DOI logo
Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo
2022. Historical sociolinguistics. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ],  pp. 756 ff. DOI logo
Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo & Javier Calle-Martín
2015. Zero that-clauses in the history of English. A historical sociolinguistic approach (1424–1681). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1:1  pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Kádár, Dániel Z.
2013. Historical politeness. In Handbook of Pragmatics,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Kádár, Dániel Z.
2022. Historical politeness. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ],  pp. 719 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English,  pp. 363 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2007004709 | Marc record