Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Würzburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey

Herman Parret

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Deborah Schiffrin

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

University of Trondheim

Aichi University

Paul Osamu Takahara

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

University College London

Japan Women’s University

University of California at Los Angeles

Universität Basel

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Georgetown University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

University of California at Santa Barbara

Srikant Sarangi

Teun A. van Dijk

Cardiff University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Volume 195 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English Edited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin

Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English Edited by

Päivi Pahta University of Tampere

Minna Nevala University of Helsinki

Arja Nurmi University of Helsinki

Minna Palander-Collin University of Helsinki

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social roles and language practices in late modern English / edited by Paivi Pahta...[et al.]. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 195) “Social roles and language practices in late modern English, organized as a workshop in the Third Late Modern English Conference in Leiden in August 2007.” Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language--18th century. 2. English language--19th century. 3. English language-Social aspects--England. 4. English language--Usage--England. 5. England-Languages--18th century. 6. England--Languages--19th century. I. Pahta, Päivi. PE1083.S65   2010 2010006374 420.9’09033--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 5440 5 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8823 3 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface Language practices in the construction of social roles  in Late Modern English Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century  community of practice and the periodical discourse community  Susan M. Fitzmaurice How eighteenth-century book reviewers became language guardians Carol Percy

vii 1

29 55

“if You think me obstinate I can’t help it”: Exploring the epistolary  styles and social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott Anni Sairio

87

Reporting and social role construction in eighteenth-century  personal correspondence Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala

111

Preacher, scholar, brother, friend: Social roles and code-switching  in the writings of Thomas Twining Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

135

The social space of an eighteenth-century governess: Modality  and reference in the private letters and journals of Agnes Porter Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala

163

Building trust through (self-)appraisal in nineteenth-century  business correspondence Marina Dossena

191

vi

Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Good-natured fellows and poor mothers: Defining social roles  in British nineteenth-century children’s literature Hanna Andersdotter Sveen Name index Subject index

211

229 235

Preface

The idea for this book came from the work carried out in our joint project, “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (SoReaL), funded by the University of Helsinki in 2005–2007. The project examined communication patterns in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English public and private writings, developing and testing corpus-aided methods in sociopragmatic analysis for diachronic purposes. One specific area that interested us in the interplay of language and the social was the various ways in which writers used their linguistic resources to position themselves in relation to their interlocutors in the texts. The notion of “social role” began to appear significant and useful as one of the factors in operationalizing the analysis of language practices of writers of past periods. With this concept in mind, we invited a group of scholars to a think-tank on Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English, organized as a workshop in the Third Late Modern English Conference in Leiden in August 2007. The event proved fruitful and inspiring, as witnessed by this book. Six of the eight empirical studies included here are based on papers initially presented in the Leiden workshop, and two articles were solicited afterwards to complete the volume. The articles examine language practices in a variety of communicative situations, and draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches in the interface between social sciences and language analysis, combining a social and anthropological approach with (corpus) linguistics. Together they provide a rich view of the multiplicity of the means by which language users of the late modern period could and did construct and perform their social personae in written texts. We hope that these studies also inspire other researchers to follow suit and explore the dynamics of language and society in identity work and interaction in other written materials. We would like to thank the contributors for their excellent co-operation in the different stages of the book project, and the participants of the Leiden workshop for inspiring discussions. We thank the anonymous Benjamins reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. A very special word of thanks to Jan ­Blommaert, Jonathan Culpeper, Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, who took time to read parts of the manuscript and comment on the ­introductory ­chapter. We are thankful to Anita Fetzer for accepting the volume to

viii Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

the Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, to Isja Conen and the Benjamins team for co-­operation in the editorial process, and to Mikko Hakala, Saija Peuronen and Heidi Äijälä for help in preparing the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge the support we have received during the production of this volume from the projects on “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England”, “Multilingualism as a Problematic Resource”, “We and Others: The Socio-pragmatics of Referential Terms and Expressions in Early and Late Modern English 1500–1900” and the following institutions: University of Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Jyväskylä, Academy of Finland, and University of Tampere. 

The editors



December 2009

Language practices in the construction of social roles in Late Modern English Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala  and Arja Nurmi Universities of Tampere and Helsinki

1.

Social roles and language practices

Social roles are part of the social personae that make up a person’s identity, together with their social status, position in society, relationships and institutional and other relevant community identities one may attempt to assign or claim in the course of social life (Ochs 1993: 288). Like identities, social roles can be seen as particular forms of semiotic potential, organized in a repertoire, and constructed and enacted by linguistic and other semiotic practices in social interaction (Blommaert 2005: 207). The relationship between social roles and language use is intriguing. Particular social roles can imply particular linguistic choices that are appropriate to enact those roles, but at the same time individuals can make linguistic choices and mobilize parts of their linguistic repertoire to index, negotiate and construct their social roles. The studies in this volume address the relationship of social roles and language use in texts written in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. They all examine language use as social practice, social behaviour and human interaction – as communication by which people build, index and maintain social relationships and influence other people in various ways. The focus is on the “identity” and “relational” functions of language, which, in addition to the “ideational” functions, are present in all texts and communicative situations.



Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

1.1

Theories of social roles in social sciences

The notion of “role”, deriving from the theatre, began to appear in the social science literature in the 1920s and 1930s (Biddle and Thomas 1966), and has since then been widely studied and theorized in sociology and social psychology. There are two basic perspectives on roles in social sciences, structural-functionalist and symbolic-interactionist, which use the term “role” in two different but related senses. In structural-functionalist approaches to roles, growing from the work of anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936), roles are attached to socio-cultural expectations and knowledge schemata (Ribeiro 2006: 50). They are defined as sets of behavioural expectations associated with given positions in the social structure, and seen as functional for the social systems within which they are embedded (Ashforth 2000: 3–4). In this approach, a role is a largely fixed attribute. Roles are created by society as a whole; they are relatively inflexible and universally agreed upon taken-for-granted positions, learned through the family, peer group, school and work (Haslett 1990: 332). Individuals take on their designated roles and “perform” them, attempting to fulfil their roles by doing what is expected in them. In addition to expectations, the notions of norms, patterns, rights and obligations are also important. According to structural-functionalist role theory, social roles can be experienced and understood in terms of specific role relationships (e.g. parent-child, doctor-patient, teacher-student), memberships in general social categories (e.g. parents, medical professionals, academics), or as more or less institutionalized positions in given social structures (e.g. mother in a family, doctor in a hospital, professor in a university). Groups of interlocking roles, interdependent or complementary, create social institutions. In social institutions, various more or less directly interlinked roles will form role sets, where the roles tend to be differentiated by function and power. Because of this differentiation, the nature of the interaction between any two roles in a role set tends to be more or less unique. According to Ashforth (2000: 6–7), the notion of differentiation has several implications for the enactment of a role. Firstly, it suggests that a role identity is largely defined by its role set, and as such, complementary roles serve as foils for one another. The role identity of the doctor, for example, is largely defined by the complementary role of the patient. Second, the notion of differentiation suggests that any given role is multifaceted in the sense that a role occupant will display a certain characterization of the role toward each member of the role set. Furthermore, individuals have multiple roles, sequential and simultaneous, that tend to be bounded by time and space and imply interrole transitions from one role to another. Some of these transitions are macro role transitions, defined as



Language practices in the construction of social roles

the ­psychological, sometimes also physical, movement between sequentially held roles (e.g. becoming a mother or getting a promotion at work). Some are micro role transitions, or role alternations, involving the psychological and possibly physical movement between simultaneously held roles, including shifts between one’s home and work roles, one’s at-work roles of supervisor and subordinate, one’s at-home roles of parent and spouse, and between work or home roles and roles embedded in other social domains, such as church or a health club. An interesting question concerning multiple simultaneous roles is how and to what extent these different roles are and can be differentiated (Ashforth 2000: 260–261). The total role of an individual in society is often described as consisting of sets of relations of various types linking this person as ego to sets of others (see e.g. ­Lorrain and White 1971; Brewer and Gardner 1996). The interactional and interpersonal nature of roles is emphasized in socialpsychological role theory, symbolic interactionism, based on the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), and social action theory, which has its foundations in Max Weber’s interpretive sociology (1947). In these approaches, providing a very different view on roles, a role is seen primarily in an interactionist frame, as a more fluid and subtle concept, depending on the situation, not on a fixed social structure. A role is not something that is simply prescribed and enacted, but, like identity, something that is constantly negotiable – an emergent and negotiated understanding between individuals in social interaction (Burr 2002: 71–73). The ideas of role-taking and role-making are important: in social interactions, each individual actively tries to define the situation, understand his or her role in it, choose a role that is advantageous or appealing, construct that role, and persuade others to support it. Here roles, like identities, can be self-claimed, or they can be appointed by others – achieved or ascribed (Blommaert 2005: 205–206). Instead of moving between fixed positions in a social structure, individuals are seen as having multiple roles that they are “capable of fulfilling or representing in the socio-cultural relationships in which they participate” (Omoniyi 2006: 12), and foregrounding different roles in different situations. Or, as Agha (2007: 242) puts it, actors semiotically display a range of roles in different kinds of interactional scenarios. For Goffman (1959), for example, the “presentation of self ” to others in the various multiple role scenarios in which individuals participate forms a major daily enterprise of social life. Contemporary social psychology aims at establishing a general theory of the self that attends to both macro and micro processes (Stets and Burke 2000; ­Stryker and Burke 2000). Stryker and Burke’s discussion integrates the social structural sources of identity and relations among identities with internal, cognitive identity processes, and they use the term identity to refer to “parts of a self composed of the meanings that persons attach to the multiple roles they typically play in highly





Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

differentiated contemporary societies” (2000: 284). Similarly, Stets and Burke discuss the different bases of identity, including group, role and person, posited in different strands of social identity theory and identity theory, and conclude that “a complete theory of the self would consider both the role and the group bases of identity as well as identities based in the person that provide stability across groups, roles, and situations” (2000: 234).

1.2 Language and social roles Social interaction enables us to develop a sense of who we are, our self (Burr 2002: 71). It also enables us to acquire language, and remains at the core of how we use language to communicate with others – to present ourselves, define, construct and negotiate our identity and roles, and those of others, in the varying socio-cultural relationships or interactional scenarios in which we find ourselves in the course of our social life (Heiss 1976: 5). How exactly this construction and negotiation is done through language is a question that over the past decades has received a fair amount of attention in various branches of linguistics. The idea of speakers displaying variation in the ways they use language in different communicative situations, something that now seems a commonplace, is a major contribution of early sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to our understanding of the relationship of language and the social (e.g. Labov 1966; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1974; Gumperz 1982). According to Hymes, for example, each language user has at his or her disposal a verbal repertoire, a complex of linguistic resources or a set of ways of speaking, consisting of “speech styles, on the one hand, and contexts of discourse, on the other, together with relations of appropriateness obtaining between styles and contexts” (1996: 33). The ideas about the relationship of these basic components of the communicative situation have been developed in various ways in subsequent research studying language use in its social embedding from different perspectives and relying on different methodological approaches. In stratificational sociolinguistics, the quantitative paradigm in the study of linguistic variation in relation to social systems, viewing the social largely as a fixed and external structure that is only reflected in linguistic variability, has held centrestage. Major lines of research here include quantitative analysis of linguistic features in correlation to social class (e.g. Labov 1972) or domain-specific contexts of use, i.e. registers (e.g. Biber 1988). In linguistic anthropology, relying on qualitative ethnographic methodologies, the focus of attention has been on meaning-making processes that are at the core of understanding language as social practice. Here linguistic forms and processes, with other semiotic means, provide a window to the interpretation of socio-cultural



Language practices in the construction of social roles

processes, ­including socialization, ideologies and identities (e.g. Silverstein 1985; Ochs 1988; Kulick 1992). Meaning-making processes have also been focal in the linguistic orientations of pragmatics and discourse analysis, examining languagein-use and language-in-action in its various social contexts, spoken and written (e.g. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Brown and Yule 1983; Levinson 1983). These different orientations towards the relationship of language and society have given rise to several interesting “mergers”, also providing a perspective on social roles. These include interactional sociolinguistics, grounded in the work of Gumperz, concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction (e.g. de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006; Auer 2007), social network analysis (e.g. Milroy 1980), and research on communities of practice (e.g. Eckert 2000). While much of the research into language and the social paradigm has focused on spoken language, the role of literacy, a resource which is generally unequally distributed in any society and has effects on the way in which people construct roles and identities, has also been examined in some work in New Literacy Studies, shedding light on the complex relationship between literacy as a practice and identity work (e.g. Collins and Blot 2003; Blommaert 2008). In this body of research, the notion of social role has rarely been the centre of attention, largely because of its “passive” connotations, deriving from structuralfunctionalist conceptions, where roles are seen as fixed, objectified attributes. According to Agha (2007: 242), the term “role”, like the related term “status”, once so fashionable in anthropological and sociological studies, is now considered questionable, and this is also reflected in socially-oriented linguistics. Instead, the focus of attention in research on social personae has been on identity, and during the last ten years, the relationship of language and identity has become one of the most intensely studied topics in linguistics (see e.g. Joseph 2004; de Fina et al. 2006). This has happened simultaneously with an increased interest in identity as a subject of inquiry across the humanities and social and behavioural sciences. In research on institutional language use, for example, in studies on doctor-patient interaction, the notion of roles is relevant, although not always explicitly thematized in terms of roles but related concepts, such as voices (e.g. Cordella 2004). In some of the research that does explicitly deal with roles, they have in fact often been portrayed in a rather negative light, as something forced upon individuals, as in, for example, gender studies (see Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003). From a historical perspective, research that explicitly thematizes or theorizes the notion of social roles and their relationship with language use is practically non-existent. We think that social roles, however, are worthy of attention also in historical linguistics. No one would deny, we believe, that roles are part of the various interactional social structures, systems, relationships or scenarios in which individuals of past periods also participated, presenting themselves to others and





Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

negotiating and constructing their places and positions in interaction. The studies in this volume, focusing on language-in-use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, demonstrate the ways in which the notion can be applied in studying language of the past in social interaction. Making use of the concepts of social networks, discourse communities and communities of practice, hierarchies and power relations, intimacy and social distance, the studies show that the concept of roles can be useful for our understanding of the linguistic meaning-making processes by which individuals participating in various social relationships in late modern Britain built, indexed and maintained these relationships and influenced each other in various ways in their writings.

2.

Studying historical language-in-use

In this volume, the texts studied from the perspective of role construction range from journals and personal correspondence to business correspondence, from the Spectator essays and book reviews to children’s books. These genres include both private manuscript texts written by one individual to another, or even to herself, as well as published writings intended for a wider circulation. Thus, the production circumstances, the audience and the purpose of writing vary, but the texts entail the interpersonal dimension, “enacting our personal and social relationships with the other people around us” and are studied as interaction between writers and readers (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29). A letter writer just like a journal writer, a book reviewer, a periodical editor or a novelist position themselves or the characters they create in relation to the expected audience, the intended effect of the text and the conventions of a genre at a particular moment in history. In this section we focus on methodological issues in the study of interpersonal meanings in language use in past periods, including the type of materials, recent developments in corpus methodology and the nature of available contextual information.

2.1 Characteristics of historical linguistic data Since the bulk of research on role construction focuses on present-day communities, mainstream analytic models are not always directly applicable to the historical context, even though research methods in historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics in general are adopted from current theories of language (cf. ­Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 15–16). Present-day studies on role and identity construction, for instance, deal overwhelmingly with talk-in-interaction using conversation or



Language practices in the construction of social roles

discourse analytic methods. Alternatively or in addition to such analyses, ethnographic methods including interviews, questionnaires and participant observation are frequently used. Moreover, studies concerning present-day languages and speech communities typically pay attention not only to the linguistic repertoires used in interaction but also to auditory features like prosody, or extralinguistic features like posture and gesture (see e.g. studies in de Fina et al. 2006; Auer 2007; Spencer-Oatey and Ruhi 2007). For a historical linguist, face-to-face interactions are available only in written transcriptions, but some of the methods employed for the analysis of talk-ininteraction may be used to explore historical genres like drama or trial records. Dialogues in plays are fictional representations of spoken interactions, while trial records are written transcriptions of oral legal procedures. Both types of texts have been used to study patterns of interaction in the past. Articles in Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft (1999) provide examples of historical dialogue analysis in different text genres in the Romance languages, German and English. Culpeper (2002; also Culpeper and Kytö 2010) focuses on the analysis of character description in plays drawing on a rich theoretical background of literary criticism, linguistic description and pragmatics. Archer (2005) employs socio-pragmatic methods to study question-answer sequences in courtroom interaction from 1640 to 1760 and establishes changes in the institutional roles of judges, defence lawyers, defendants and witnesses during the period as a result. Among the genres studied in this volume, letters are apparently the most dialogic and interactional in the sense that the writer-addressee dyad can be located in specific individuals. Ideally, letters sent between the correspondents could even be observed as “turns” in interaction, but unfortunately this is seldom possible, as all the letters sent between the correspondents have not necessarily been preserved and/or edited (for the preservation of letters, see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005). As the vast majority of extant historical texts are anything but recordings of talk-in-interaction, new methodologies and a different toolkit from presentday analyses have to be developed. Most clearly this toolkit includes a means of tackling written data that have been haphazardly preserved and are consequently patchy in many ways (for advantages and disadvantages of historical data, see e.g. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 26–28). Additionally, historical people are available for observation only in their texts and possibly through notes and interpretations of contemporaries and/or historians, and researchers do not have first-hand experience of the communities they work with (for examples of the methodology of historical network reconstruction, see Bax 2000 and Sairio 2009). Reliable and systematic methods of linguistic analysis and contextualization are thus essential, but the historical linguist is not severely hampered by the temporal distance of the data as pointed out by Archer (2005: 8): “although the distance in





Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

(historical) time may exacerbate the [analyst’s] potential to ‘err’, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct ‘plausible’ intentions, given adequate evidence”. The analyst’s closeness and involvement with the analysed community also introduces biases. Blommaert (2005: 50–56) observes that critical discourse analytical studies of present-day communities often contain a priori statements on power relations that are used as perspectives on discourse. The same power relations are then confirmed in a circular manner by the analysis. Since sociolinguists and pragmaticians dealing with present-day languages prioritize spoken data, historical sociolinguists and pragmaticians used to feel apologetic about their “bad data”, but attitudes have now changed. Jucker (2008: 896) identifies three aspects contributing to a “new appreciation of the communicative complexity of historical data”. First, spoken language and written language are no longer regarded as dichotomous opposites, as both exhibit linguistic variation and may be more or less (in)formal or interactive (Biber 1988). Thus, more fluid conceptualizations, such as a scale between the language of immediacy and the language of distance, are felt to be more appropriate (Koch and ­Österreicher 1985). Linguistic variation within the letter genre, for example, is evident as business correspondence in general tends to be more formal than private correspondence, but private correspondence may also be formal particularly if the correspondents are socially distant and/or unequal in status. Second, the communicative nature of written language is now widely recognized. Consequently, written language can be analysed as a communicative act for its own sake, not just as a poor substitute for spoken interaction. Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008), for example, discuss letters as written interaction and conclude that although personal letters are highly interactive in general, interactive involvement features surface most prominently in correspondence between socially equal and/or intimate writers. Third, linguists have moved away from describing language in general to describing specific varieties and genres, as illustrated by all the articles in this volume that are highly contextualized in particular settings and/or located at certain individuals. Finally, issues concerning literacy, relevant for language practices in any period, have a profound impact on the nature of historical linguistic data in many ways. Literacy practices, access to literacy and varying levels of literacy in the community as such have important implications for individual identities and possible situated roles, as various roles and identities may or may not be available depending on the nature of the individual’s reading and writing skills (Blommaert 2008; see also p. 11 below). In historical studies, the language practices observed are usually those of highly literate elites, although there is also a distinct language history from below paradigm focusing particularly on the language of the ­majority (e.g. Elspass, Langer, Scharloth and Vandenbussche 2007; ­ Vandenbussche and ­Elspass 2007).



Language practices in the construction of social roles

2.2 Corpus methods Corpora and corpus methodology are identified as the key feature of current research in historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics (Jucker 1999, 2008; ­Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007). Electronic corpora and corpus tools facilitate data searches and analyses of linguistic features, and, ideally, corpora provide plentiful evidence. With corpus methodology, it is possible to draw conclusions about typical linguistic patterns in a given data set without reliance on intuitions only. It is also possible to observe differences in usage between data sets, as well as to reveal lexical and grammatical characteristics of the text that are not immediately observable to the reader but still form an important part of the style of the text (for ideas on using corpus tools for discourse analysis, see Conrad 2002). This is a good heuristic tool, as linguistic features indexing identity and social roles may encompass a variety of linguistic phenomena including labels, implicatures and presuppositions, stances, styles and linguistic structures and systems, but it is difficult to know beforehand which will be relevant in a given situation (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Rampton 1999: 501; Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 593–598). Many of the contributions in this volume are based on electronic corpora of varying sizes, compiled from original manuscripts, original printed sources or modern editions. Authors also make use of analytic tools easily available in corpus software such as WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004–2007). As a case in point, Susan Fitzmaurice as well as Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala employ a relatively new corpus tool for identifying positive and negative keywords in a given text. These are words that occur significantly more or less frequently in the corpus investigated than in a reference corpus (for a detailed methodological presentation of a keyword analysis applied to character description in plays, see Culpeper 2009). This statistical tool of analysis helps them identify linguistic patterns and then interpret the significance of these patterns in role construction through qualitative readings of the texts and by means of situating the texts in their socio-cultural and discursive contexts. Using frequency lists of words occurring in the corpus as a starting point may also help us identify typical semantic domains in the text. In the case of nineteenth-century children’s literature, family roles are important in the children’s world and such social roles are often labelled, as words referring to people occur particularly frequently among the 500 most common words. Thus, Hanna A. Sveen divides these words into gender roles, adult and child roles and family roles and explores which recurring adjectival patterns are used to describe them in order to understand what the typical contents of the roles are. However, corpora and corpus tools do not always facilitate searches. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala investigate reporting constructions and their functions in terms of social role construction. As reporting constructions and



10

Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

reporting frames vary to quite an extent, it would be difficult to identify reporting events comprehensively by automatic means using corpus tools based on specific words or characters, or even POS tags or grammatical annotation, but the corpus would have to be manually coded for the array of reporting constructions. It is similarly difficult to use corpus programs to search for thematic issues in texts, like Carol Percy does, or particular linguistic functions. Relevant linguistic constructions would have to be identified from the texts first. This is what Marina Dossena does when dealing with trust-building in business letters. She shows that building trust is a complex function in linguistic terms including various lexical, syntactic and politeness features. At the next stage, corpus tools could perhaps be used to search for these items.

2.3 Contexts of language use Social role construction in this volume is discussed as a situated linguistic phenomenon, but to make interpretations as plausible as possible the context has to be approached in a systematic way. How can this be accomplished, and what kind of contextual information is there? First, the notion of context is not unproblematic, and the relevance and definition of context varies in different linguistic paradigms, as shown by Archer and Culpeper (2003) in their discussion of research traditions in corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Even though each of these disciplines regards language and context as inseparable, they often emphasize different aspects of context. In variationist, correlational sociolinguistics, such social categories as gender, class and ethnicity tend to be regarded as discrete, stable and primary contextual factors affecting linguistic variation, whereas some strands of conversation analysis do not allow any prior categorization, requiring interpretations to be based on insiders’ understanding of what makes talk comprehensible for them at that moment (for a discussion, see e.g. Coupland 2001). In order to make sense of historical interactions, it soon becomes evident that context has to be treated as multilayered, where the layers are simultaneously important and incorporate the “here and now” of the interaction as well as wider expectations and possibilities stemming from various societal constellations. One such multilayered notion of context is provided by Schiffrin (1994: Ch. 10), who identifies “context as knowledge” and “context as situation”. When defined as knowledge, context is viewed essentially in terms of knowledge that the interactants can be assumed to have, such as awareness of social institutions and of the general wants and needs of others. Context as situation, meanwhile, signifies knowledge of the “here and now”. Context as knowledge of cultural norms and conventions and context as situation are intertwined in



Language practices in the construction of social roles

­historical socio-pragmatic research, as language use is analysed and interpreted in relation to who the interactants are, what kind of an interaction they are involved in, and why they are communicating. The definition of appropriate and expected participant roles and linguistic behaviour is based on the interactants’ cultural and situational understandings. Blommaert’s (2005: 58–62) notion of “resources as context” captures the essence of the interactional dynamics as we understand them, linking macro-societal contexts with micro-interactional contexts: Speakers can/cannot speak varieties of languages, they can/cannot write and read, they can/cannot mobilise specific resources for performing specific actions in society. And all these differences – different degrees of proficiency ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘full mastery’ of codes, language varieties, and styles – are socially consequential.  (Blommaert 2005: 58)

This understanding of context highlights the significance of literacy skills, ranging from “can” to “cannot”, as a component in identity formation. Mastery in the art of letter writing or the ability to compose a piece of criticism or a scholarly dissertation are prerequisites for the adoption of certain roles performed through these genres. Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of discourse analysis provides a tool for contextualizing language practices. The framework has been applied in historical socio-pragmatics to the analysis of Margaret Paston’s letters by Johanna L. Wood, most recently in Wood (2009). Although the three dimensions – text, discursive practice and social practice – are not necessarily referred to as such in the articles, the context for language practices/texts discussed in this volume can be understood in terms of discursive and social practices (cf. Fairclough 1992: 62– 100). Discursive practice concerns the production, distribution and consumption of texts, such as who wrote the text, what kind of conventions pertained to the genre, how it was distributed, why it was written and who read the text. Social practice, on the other hand, concerns the macro-frame of ideologies and hegemonies that have a material existence in the practices of institutions and the constitution of subjects (Fairclough 1992: 78–96). Discursive practices and social practices are intertwined aspects of the context, as for instance letter writers followed the discursive conventions of the genre in recognizing the intended recipient with conventional address formulae at the beginning of the letter, and by doing so they recognized and recreated social patterns and societal hierarchies. Similarly, the availability of education was biased in favour of upper ranks and men on the societal level, and consequently the level of literacy varied extensively in the population. Therefore, the discursive practices of text production and consumption in many cases primarily concerned the educated ranks of men.

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The articles highlight different discursive and social aspects of the texts. S­ usan Fitzmaurice places her discussion in the context of eighteenth-century periodical publishing, comparing the general periodical discourse community with the Spectator community of practice. Hanna A. Sveen discusses social roles as they emerge in the discourse of nineteenth-century children’s literature. Carol Percy reflects on the role of book reviewers as language guardians as part of the eighteenth-century normative ideology. Anni Sairio also discusses the role of normativity in the private sphere of personal correspondence. Marina Dossena deals with the institutional setting of nineteenth-century business, the language practices of institutional roles, and the values dominating the business scene. In studies concerning personal letters by Anni Sairio, Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta, Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala the networks of writers, their social milieus, personal life histories and immediate family contexts are also important. Thus, in the analyses of language practices, social roles emerge (1) as an individual’s roles vis-à-vis other people, (2) in relation to the practices of a discourse community and (3) within the framework of broader ideologies. In each case, taking on a social role is an activity that makes sense only in relation to other language users and the context of use. Thus, exploring the language of social roles in historical texts essentially means making situated interpretations of language practices. Finally, to provide a sociologically-inspired practical example of possibilities of contextualization in historical research, we shall again refer to letters, as they are written interaction between individuals who can often be identified and contextualized on several levels. In Section 3, we shall further identify various major socio-cultural tendencies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as these tendencies are particularly relevant in understanding the macro-level context and conditions of social life at the time. The levels of contextualization available through letters range a full scale from the very personal and individual level to the most macro-societal level and can be summarized as follows: 1. Psychobiography – the letter writer’s individual background (e.g. family and educational background, social and geographical mobility, personal attitudes and dispositions) can be accessed through historical research and from the letters up to a point and is most easily available in the case of (male) members of high society through sources like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; 2. Situated activity – the current letter written to a certain recipient in a specific context for certain purposes can be localized through dates in the letter, the knowledge we have from other sources about the events at the time of writing and the persons involved;



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3. Social settings – norms governing the letter writing activity, the institutional contexts and social roles available for the writers are accessible through contemporary sources like letter writing manuals and current socio-historical research; 4. Contextual resources – society-wide distribution and ownership of resources such as goods, money, status, occupation and quality of life can be gleaned from socio-historical research. These four levels are proposed by Layder (2003/1997: 2–5, 78) as domains of social life that are related to each other over time and space and bound together by social relations and positions, power, discourses and practices. Layder’s domain theory provides a sociological perspective to mechanisms of face-to-face transactions, incorporating both the notion of systematic and objective knowledge and the analysis of subjectivity to understand social life in general and face-to-face encounters in particular. According to this model, the individual is an active agent who does things which affect social relationships, but within the confines of what the structure, i.e. the objective features of social life, makes possible for the individual to do. The domains certainly affect the production of any kind of text – including also periodical essays and reviews, novels, diaries, sermons and scientific texts discussed in this volume – but depending on the text they may be articulated in various ways and reconstructed to a different degree. In public printed texts, for instance, the author’s psychobiography may remain rather vague if the identity of the author is not known, the author creates a fictional authorial character or the publishing house interferes with the text. Similarly, public texts as a situated activity are usually meant for a wide circulation and the intended audience therefore remains abstract. It may be an extremely complicated task to incorporate all the four domains within the same empirical study of language use, but domain theory might offer tools of contextualization for linguists, historical and otherwise, interested in language in society, and help us incorporate various linguistic aspects and levels of use within the same model of language use, variation and change.

3.

The Late Modern English period

For the writers in this book there have been many reasons for concentrating on the late modern period in general and Late Modern English in particular. The ­articles portray a variety of linguistic, social, societal and ideological changes which have helped to raise awareness on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material in English historical linguistics during the past few years. In this section, we will discuss some of the central factors concerning culture and language

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­development in late modern Britain, each of which has given rise to the studies presented in this book.

3.1

Society

Burke (1992: 10–11) notes that in order to reconstruct social identities in a given society we need to study the “social vocabulary” of it, i.e. those model(s) by which the people themselves perceive their society. By the second half of the seventeenth century, there were at least two current modes of social description, the hierarchical and archaic one, and the new, more informal model. This allowed “the plasticity of social identity” and the terminology of social simplification into sorts of people. The term “sort” was introduced in the later seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century it was firmly established in the vocabulary. The use of different models was indeed flexible, and, eventually, the term “class” became to be used alongside “sort” by the latter half of the eighteenth century. Among eighteenth-century contemporaries, there were, of course, those who wished to make finer distinctions between people. As the following sevenfold categorization by Daniel Defoe shows, the social hierarchy could still be described in terms of a fine-grained structure (cited in Porter 1990: 53): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The great, who live profusely The rich, who live plentifully The middle sort, who live well The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want The country people, farmers etc., who fare indifferently The poor, who fare hard The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want

The predominant division between the working people and those who do not have to do manual labour seems to be a decisive factor for Defoe as well. However, while in the eighteenth century land ownership remained the predominant criterion for distinguishing the wealthy from the less well-to-do, there was a differentiation in the form of property as well as a growing separation of urban and rural strata (Neale 1981: 75). Increasingly, it was not only wealth, but also education, that defined one’s social position, and the definition of what the gentry consisted of changed radically since it no longer rested on status hierarchy alone (French 2000: 94). In general, social relationships between strangers and distant people could be characterized in terms of formality. Munck (2000: 65–66) argues that as late as the eighteenth century, informal social contacts across barriers of wealth and status



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were not encouraged, and that people spent time within their own social groups – the middle and lower sort had their coffee houses and taverns, and the wealthy their salons and societies. Then, as in the earlier periods, people who were distant to each other went by the rules of the social order, so that deference and respect were shown to one’s superiors, and benevolence, sometimes also contempt, could be shown to one’s inferiors. Social equals recognized each other as such, but maintained formal conduct until they were better acquainted, if that ever happened. The line between, for example, employers and employees was largely a matter of tacit knowledge, and no matter how close an employee felt to his or her employer, the social barrier should not be crossed. This is one of the issues introduced by Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala’s article in this book, which deals with the dual social role of a governess as “superior” to the children she taught and as “inferior” to her employers, and the implications the situation had on her use of language. The Victorian period (1837–1901) exacerbated class conflicts between the aristocracy holding political power and the industrial middle class on the one hand, and between men of power and labourers on the other. Despite the public opinion of the press, effective social communication was limited, and the upper and lower classes were said to live “side by side but wide apart as if they lived in separate quarters of the world” (Briggs 1999: 254–255). In the middle Victorian period, both social stability and cultural diversity grew, although the aristocracy managed to retain its social and much of its political influence. Recent scientific progress had reduced geographical distance in the form of the railroad and steamboats, which thus facilitated intercourse as well as the flow of personal and public correspondence. Aspects concerning the role and form of business correspondence became increasingly important in the nineteenth century, and language was developed as a tool for improved interaction between prospective and established business partners, as is shown in the article by Marina Dossena. Thus, new social ties were created between areas previously not in contact, which also had its effect in the rise of organized unskilled labour. Duty took precedence over inclination, and the moral law over the pursuit of pleasure. As ­Hanna A. Sveen discusses in her article, the morals of the social roles imposed on the different sexes were part of the way in which even popular children’s literature was structured and composed: girls were supposed to take on a more passive role than boys. Individualism, which had been characteristic of early nineteenthcentury social thought, turned towards collectivism whereby the state assumed a more positive role by intervening in the affairs of its citizens for their own good and for the good of the common welfare (May 1987: 115). As Webb (1980: 127) notes, the ordered world of the earlier culture was lost: external criteria gave way to internal, and the forms used came not from tradition but from the act of creation itself. This had an effect on unity as well, because the world became more

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complex and interdependent with industry, and science was gradually becoming more culturally divided.

3.2 Polite society – private and public As we have already seen, eighteenth-century English society gave rise to a new way of describing social hierarchy: the middling sort spread among the upper and the lower sort. As before, society continued to be “a matter of status, of hierarchy, of ranks and orders” (Webb 1980: 29). Proper behaviour, and politeness in the social sense of the word, was to be learnt, and this enlightened society was further divided into the common and the élite – a cultural differentiation of “the informed” and “the ignorant” already introduced in the previous century. Social mobility was considerable, but although people talented enough to rise from the lower ranks were welcomed into polite society, it was done condescendingly (­Porter 1990: 49, 2000: 365). Nevertheless, progress, whether social or individual, was considered a great hope among the lower ranks. As, for example, Porter puts it, “today’s vulgar might be tomorrow’s polite” (2000: 370). Burke (2000: 39–40) also notes that in eighteenth-century England the middle ranks used polite speech as a way of showing their closeness to the upper ranks, alongside other means, such as accent or vocabulary. Polite language could, of course, also be used by members of the upper ranks to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors, which Burke suggests may have been “a reaction to the decline of ‘external evidence of rank’” (2000: 47). The old dissenting social groups drew a sharp distinction between “candour”, which they valued, and “cant”, which they condemned. Such possession of civility and education could be shown by the mastery of, for example, code-switching practices between English and foreign languages, as Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta show in their article for this book. It has been suggested that the key concept in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was the formal code imposed for the rich and the poor alike (Briggs 1959: 66–67). Royle (1987: 238) writes about the moral reform central to the period: religious and humanitarian reformers believed that the lower classes had to be rescued from indulging in morally debasing sports, the evils of the public house and the sins of drink and debauchery. This was not, of course, a new concept, since the Society for the Reformation of Manners, whose main aim was the suppression of immorality and other lewd activities, had been set up as early as in 1691. The Society for the Suppression of Vice founded in 1802 was merely a direct descendant along the path towards a more civil society in which there would be no room for the immoral, and sometimes even riotous, behaviour of the poor.



Language practices in the construction of social roles

Throughout the late modern period, different kinds of clubs and societies attracted a growing number of people, and science was popularized by public lectures. Literary and Philosophical Societies founded in the late eighteenth century brought together leading scientists, men of letters, medical men, manufacturers and merchants, but were beyond the means of ordinary working people. In general, the notions of “public” and “private” were not necessarily opposed concepts. Munck (2000: 198–199), for example, notes that in the eighteenth century domestic privacy did not mean the same thing as today: private space was exposed to public control. Following the ideology of Rousseau, “private” was considered secretive and factional. “Public”, on the other hand, was most often connected with the notion of “public good”. However, concerning personal communication like letters, “public” and “private” were more likely to be distinct rather than overlapping notions. Fitzmaurice notes this to be true, particularly when there is a “move from talk in public places to writing in private” (2002: 208). Public reputation was still crucially important, to women in particular, and it must be placed before any intimate aspirations. It is rather questionable how far, for example, personal letters in fact were “private” in the strictest sense of the word, since at least in the early eighteenth century letters were still frequently read among the entire family and among closest friends and neighbours. Yet another aspect concerning the two concepts was introduced by the new genre of travel letters, which were typically circulated among a wide audience. The art of introducing private matters into the public domain, and vice versa, was a thing to be mastered by different means. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala show in this book, for example, how reporting in eighteenthcentury personal letters concerns public matters, or how by quoting direct speech “private” emotions are made “public” to the reader(s) of the letter. The influence of social class even had its effect on the topics and stylistic presentations of books: the educated upper classes read journals like the Gentlemen’s Magazine, whereas the middle and lower classes read chapbooks sold at fairs. This big wave of popular literature, which was held to “imperil the soul as well as degrade the mind”, was countered by publishers who turned their attention to improving literature by printing, for example, religious tracts. Other means were also attempted. With the growth of newsheets and coffee-house discussion societies, an informed public outside the Parliament began to emerge. By 1760 there were around 40 provincial newspapers in existence, and with the spread of ­ information came the formation of public opinion, and politics became less exclusive and more inclusive. But as Susan Fitzmaurice shows in her article, commercial periodicals like the Spectator and its broader periodical discourse community still differed greatly in terms of the social agenda from the party political periodicals of the time.

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In the late modern period in general, new circumstances rose affecting the public, such as the rise of publishing (as distinct from printing and bookselling), the spread of circulating libraries and the growth of female readership. Different societies, such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, published inexpensive texts intended to adapt scientific material for the expanding reading public (Royle 1987: 248–249). Although the newspaper tax was abolished in 1855, the real breakthrough in wider readership did not happen until newspapers were produced in a form which demanded little concentration on the part of the reader with their “tit-bits” of information and news (May 1987: 255). The nineteenth century also saw further development in other genres in addition to the language of newspapers, for example, private letters, the novel and scientific discourse (Kytö, Rydén and Smitterberg 2006: 4). Formal and informal registers increasingly diverged, which offers a modern reader and researcher an interesting insight into the process of language standardization and the overall awareness of multi-purpose language use.

3.3 Standardization and language Late Modern English has been characterized by the concept of standardization. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, a large number of grammars and dictionaries of English and writing manuals were published, and by the midcentury plain and functional English was preferred (Görlach 2001: 4). This development was brought on by the grammars of the likes of Joseph Priestley (1761), Robert Lowth (1762), and Lindley Murray (1795). The contemporary view supported a divergence from Latin, and educated speech was seen as a cause of decay in the language, as was the use of non-standard varieties like slang, cant and dialect. Attempts to refine English were supported by growing British self-confidence, mainly owing to the increasing political and commercial power of England and the spread of English to other continents. The Late Modern English era was also greatly characterized by the so-called complaint tradition (Milroy and Milroy 1991: 4). The need to reform the language was motivated, for one thing, by the “deplorable state” of the language, and writers such as Jonathan Swift described English as “extremely imperfect” (cited in Milroy and Milroy 1991: 34). In a similar vein, Samuel Johnson called for a “struggle” to keep the English language from degenerating (cited in Leith and Graddol 2002: 158). As late as in 1873, Walter Skeat wrote how “eyes should be opened to the Unity of English” (Milroy 2001: 549). Access to improving the mothertongue was, however, out of reach for the members of the lower social classes, and the general



Language practices in the construction of social roles

negative attitude towards the vernacular is shown by the fact that dialect and slang lexis was gathered in glossaries instead of proper grammars and dictionaries. Few lexicographers and grammarians were in fact language professionals, which added to the sometimes negative preconceptions held against their work (Görlach 2001: 25; also Chapman 2008). Priestley, for example, was a scientist and a politician, Murray started as a lawyer, and Lowth practised as a churchman. As Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2006: 541) notes, the unpopularity of eighteenthcentury grammars among later structural linguists also allowed prejudice about the grammars and their authors to grow. Another factor possibly working against them concerned the alleged fact that the grammarians focused on the language of gentlemen in order to decide what was grammatically correct and what was not. The grammarians could also take the language use of the “best” writers as a model for correctness, as was the case with Swift, Pope and Johnson. They listed as their authorities such Elizabethan and Restoration writers, even poets, as ­Bacon, Hobbes, Dryden and Locke. By the end of the eighteenth century, the lists included not only works from celebrated authors but also essays in periodicals like the Spectator. Thus we cannot claim that prescriptivism and models for correct language use would only have been brought forward in Late Modern English grammar books and dictionaries. As for example Carol Percy finds in her article, the ideology of standardization could also be appropriated by book critics, many of them anonymous, in the new review periodicals of the age. She shows that although book reviewers often seemingly used language as an objective index of quality, such criticism could in fact reveal their own, subjective, preconceptions of the writer’s education and linguistic competence. As Milroy (2001: 535) notes, one important effect of standardization has been the development of consciousness among speakers of a “correct”, or canonical, form of language, one aspect of this being a firm belief in correctness. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was common to correct the “mistakes” of the original scribes and to make their language uniform and acceptable to the contemporary sense of propriety. “Correct English” was supported by moral reform in the latter part of the late modern period, and grammarians were affected by the dominant ideologies of the time, such as the elitist theory of social class or the nationalist theory. Grammatical correctness became even more crucial, as it affected a larger proportion of the population than before (see Stein 1994: 8–10). The imposed ideology had not, however, succeeded in the abolition of alternative forms of English usage in earlier practice, as Anni Sairio shows in this volume. Her focus is on the so-called dual spelling system of the eighteenth century, as well as on the differences between the familiar epistolary style and the correct usage encouraged by the language authorities of the time (see Osselton 1984).

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By the end of the nineteenth century the printed word had reached everyone, as had general education, which introduced the three R’s to all sections of society. The situation continued to improve throughout the nineteenth century, and around the 1850s, the rise of new books intended for literary education rapidly increased. The number of different grammars also increased from about 270 (at around 1800) to more than 850 in the course of the century (Görlach 1999: 15). In linguistics, the invention of the historical-comparative method had a huge impact on the overall concept of grammar during the final decades of the century.

4.

The studies in this volume

The studies in this volume deal with social roles from many different points of view. In the first, Susan Fitzmaurice discusses a constructed role in a specific community of practice. She studies the periodical discourse community in eighteenth-century London, focusing particularly on the Spectator and the constructed persona, or eidolon, of Mr Spectator. This role construction takes place in the public sphere, and the men behind the role, Addison and Steele, create the character in many ways quite deliberately, differentiating the construct from their own personal roles and identities. Fitzmaurice discusses the questions of the externally determined identity of Mr Spectator and his identity seen in linguistic choices using qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic methods, particularly keyword analysis. Her comparison data come from the Network of Early Eighteenth-century Texts (NEET), of essays, letters and fiction. Carol Percy analyses a community overlapping that of Fitzmaurice’s study, focusing on the public roles anonymous authors perform as educators and entertainers in eighteenth-century review periodicals. The review authors enforce prescriptive rules of language, both judging and improving contemporary literature. The ostensible purpose is to educate authors and readers alike, and the process is carried out through reasoning, but also through aggression, condescension and mockery. Closely tied to the process was the social prestige and commercial value of education. In the texts, good grammar appears as something elusive, possessed only by educated and privileged social groups. The seeming objectivity of the reviews is belied by their actual subjectivity which is evident, for example, in the sarcasm applied to texts, and much of the criticism functions as a tool for the reviewers to differentiate and elevate themselves with regard to the authors criticized. Anni Sairio looks at a social network of highly literate people, the Bluestocking circle, during the course of the eighteenth century. Her focus is on social roles as perceptions of self, connections with others and membership of social circles



Language practices in the construction of social roles

and networks. The roles attested are both static (family relationships) and negotiable (connections in social circles). The material consists of personal correspondence edited from the manuscripts by Sairio herself, which provides a solid basis for her research on the spelling and contracted forms appearing in the data. The study compares the linguistic practices of two sisters, Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott, who had a similar background and schooling. Both were also published authors, but moved in somewhat different social circles. Sairio’s study employs quantitative corpus-linguistic methods, and shows that in the style of spelling typical of the epistolary genre (which was different from spelling in print) of the two informants, contractions and abbreviations were linked to intimacy between correspondents. Factors influencing spelling choices were membership of differing social networks, the association with polite society for Montagu and the relative exclusion from it in the case of Scott. The spelling forms also function as self representation on three levels, the individual, relational and collective. Both sisters used relatively informal spellings when writing to each other, but Montagu’s spelling was closer to the standard than Scott’s, which may reflect her more prestigious social status. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala study the differing roles of Charles Burney in his personal letters. Burney appears in varying roles according to the recipient: a family man, a member of a literary network, a friend. The linguistic variable observed in connection with Burney’s role-building is reporting. The questions of who and what to report, the complex relationships between reporter, reportee and addressee, and the varying combinations of direct and indirect preferences are all taken into account. The theoretical framework of the study comes from audience design and accommodation theory. The results show that reporting is commonly framed by evaluative remarks. There are clear gender differences: women’s words are reported more rarely than men’s. Reporting is also closely connected to ego-related topics, as a means of professional role enhancement. Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta provide a case study of an individual’s multilingual practices in his writings representing different genres and registers. The focus is on Thomas Twining, an eighteenth-century clergyman and classical scholar, who also appears in his private roles as brother, uncle and friend. The data comprises a sample from Twining’s correspondence, published sermons and other religious writings, as well as two scholarly dissertations and notes on his translation of Aristotle. Twining’s code-switching practices are evidence of his functional multilingualism in several languages. Various genre-specific patterns can be attested. In correspondence code-switching seems to be a marker of ­intimacy. The choice of languages and frequency of switching depend on the recipient, his or her multilingual abilities and the nature of the relationship between the interlocutors. Shared professional interests, such as classical scholarship and an interest in music, seem

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to influence switching patterns in corresponding with friends. The influence of audience can also be seen with the two other genres studied. In Twining’s sermons, contrary to expectations based on previous studies, there is little or no switching, most likely due to the wide expected readership. In Twining’s scholarly writings, on the other hand, typical practices of scientific language can be attested: Greek and Latin are the most frequent languages used, and switches appear as quotations, terminology or references, taking also text-organizing functions, and performing thus the role of membership of the scholarly community. Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala also study the writings of one individual, the eighteenth-century governess Agnes Porter. The data consists of her surviving letters, journal and a book of tales she published anonymously. The study combines qualitative and quantitative methods. A keyword analysis, carried out comparing Porter’s correspondence with contemporary female writers of somewhat similar social status, showed that Porter lived in more female surroundings than the comparison group, and used fewer first-person pronouns. The other linguistic variables studied include third-person reference and modality, and the results support the findings of the keyword analysis. Porter’s language use seems to reflect her difficult social role as a governess, living on fairly intimate terms with her wards and their family, and yet clearly their social inferior. There is evidence of variation in power and distance in how she refers to members of her own family, acquaintances and her employer’s family in both her correspondence and her journal. Both epistemic and deontic modality seem to be a means of constructing a suitable professional role, and contribute to Porter’s constant strategy of self­effacement. All these different linguistic strategies combine to illustrate the narrowness of Porter’s social space, with the constant necessity of not only keeping her place but negotiating its constraints. Marina Dossena continues with a study of how professional roles are negotiated in nineteenth-century business correspondence. She discusses the uses of lexis, the passive and modality as well as pragmatic moves like reciprocal expressions of politeness on the levels of both individual and group identity. The study is carried out with qualitative corpus-linguistic methods. The different social roles in the data are performed by the writers of the letters, who were often writing not on their own behalf, but as representatives of a company or other party. The focus is on performing the different social roles with complex and adaptable social profiles in the context of negotiating business relationships. One of the main elements of such relationships is trust, which needs to be reciprocal. Trust in itself is an abstraction, but it is realized in language through a variety of means. The study concentrates on identifying patterns expressing stance and the interdependent means in negotiating trust between partners. Face is here seen as at least a dyadic concept, related to both sender and receiver, with a plurality of identities



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c­ oexisting in the correspondence. The different means of expressing trust in the data are collected under the theoretical framework of the Appraisal system, discussing authority, power and solidarity between correspondents. In the final article of the volume, Hanna A. Sveen studies gender roles, both overall in nineteenth-century society and in a family context. The study is based on Sveen’s corpus of nineteenth-century children’s literature. Using qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic methods she follows patterns in the adjectival descriptions of fictional characters. In the study, language practices are seen as both reflecting and constructing social roles, and children’s literature is particularly rife with generally approved social roles and the practices of enforcing them. Roles are often manifestations of ideologies, as authors construct desirable gender models for child readers through linguistic means. The study identifies different social roles through the nouns that label them, and shows how co-occurring adjectives reveal the attributes associated with them. Kinship terms define the central roles in a child’s life, but more general trends are also visible. The results show that age and appearance are mostly mentioned in connection with female characters, while mental properties and situations are more typically descriptive of males. Male characters have more positive attributes, expressing subjecthood, while female characters are typically represented as passive victims of circumstances. To conclude, it is apparent from the studies included in this volume that the concept of social role can be succesfully approached from multiple points of view through various methodological approaches in several theoretical frameworks. While related to the ways in which a speaker’s identity is linguistically constructed, the examination of social roles provides insights into the social and linguistic behaviour of people that is not otherwise evident. The ways in which roles are performed, assigned, taken and maintained are numerous, and the interrelated speaker/writer internal and external constraints reveal the ways in which sociocultural reality and language practices of any historical period exist entwined and mutually dependent.

References Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Dawn. 2005. Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Archer, Dawn and Culpeper, Jonathan. 2003. “Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics.” In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Anthony McEnery (eds), 37–58. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of practice and the periodical discourse community Susan M. Fitzmaurice University of Sheffield

This paper explores questions of identity and social roles in the Spectator community of practice and its broader periodical discourse community in commercial publishing in early eighteenth-century London. A keyword analysis of the Spectator essays reveals the lexical underpinnings of the periodical’s social niche in the form of its eidolon, Mr Spectator. A study comparing the periodicals published in the first two decades of the eighteenth century with the Spectator highlights the different social agendas of the Spectator and contemporary party political periodical papers. The paper concludes that the Spectator’s identity and social roles are distinct from those of its principal authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, thereby casting new light on the significance of authorship in the period.

1.

Introduction I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account of them of the several Persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief Trouble of Compiling, Digesting and Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do my self the Justice to open the Work with my own History.  (Spectator No. 1, Thursday, March 1, 1711)

It is with these words that Mr Spectator introduces himself as the eidolon of a brand-new periodical publication, as the official voice that offers instructive

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s­ peculations to its readers. Mr Spectator reasonably anticipates his readers’ curiosity about the identity of the writer and sketches his own character, taking pains to impress upon them his disinterested stance as a “Spectator of Mankind” not as “one of the Species”, thus making himself a “Speculative Statesman, Soldier, ­Merchant and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life”. While the public expression of the Spectator was declared to issue from this taciturn observer, the people behind the periodical were neither disinterested nor taciturn. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were established political periodical essayists. They were responsible for producing the Tatler and for creating the paper’s highly popular persona, Isaac Bickerstaff. They also participated in Whig politics and were members of the Whiggish Kit Cat Club. In this paper I explore questions of identity and the nature of social roles as they relate to two particular social constructions in the early eighteenth century. These are the Spectator community of practice and its broader discourse community in the commercial publishing enterprise that is the periodical press in early eighteenth-century London. On the one hand, periodical production, as exemplified by the Spectator and the Tatler, involves a small tightly knit social network of like-minded colleagues with similar literary ambitions and shared politics. This context promotes the development of practices that mark the joint activities of participants in a common domain of interest. On the other hand, the grittier newspaper world of Defoe’s Review and the Tory papers edited by Swift and others represent the institution of discourse practices that are determined by the culture of the genre – an explicitly partisan political and commercial enterprise – in which difference is reflected in the diversity of papers. Participation in this enterprise is marked by a broader and less cohesive group of writers, working more from self-interest than common political or social cause. Indeed, the later enterprises of Addison (The Freeholder) and Steele (The Guardian, The Englishman) belong fairly clearly to this community. In exploring the interstices in the world of the periodical essay in early eighteenth-century London, we consider the social roles of key individuals like Addison and Steele who appear to identify with different political communities and agendas that find expression in very different ways and media, and the nature of the social and political identity of the Spectator as distinct from the broader periodical discourse community. The idea of identity that would have been most familiar to the readers of the Spectator is that of constancy of conviction, manners or habits. In Spectator No. 162 (Wednesday, September 5, 1711), Mr Spectator discusses the contempt with which the world regards the man who changes his religion or his politics, and speculates on the inevitability of inconstancy in life:



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

There is scarce a State of Life, or Stage in it, which does not produce Changes and Revolutions in the Mind of Man. Our Schemes of Thought in Infancy are lost in those of Youth; these too take a different Turn in Manhood, till old Age often leads us back into our former Infancy. A new Title or an unexpected Success throws us out of ourselves, and in a Manner destroys our Identity.  (Spectator No. 162, Wednesday, September 5, 1711)

This interpretation of identity as constancy of character and outlook is challenged in the period by the notion of personal identity as individuality or selfhood. It concerns the notion of personal identity – a notion explained by John Locke in his (1690) Essay concerning Human Understanding in the context of the concept of identity as referring to the sameness of a substance or thing over time regardless of its different phases of life or states. The key to Locke’s challenge to the Cartesian cogito was continuity of consciousness. Eustace Budgell, author of Spectator No. 578 (Monday, August 9, 1714), paraphrases Locke’s notion of personal identity as follows: Mr Lock, after having premised that the Word Person properly signifies a thinking intelligent Being that has Reason and Reflection, and can consider it self as it self; concludes, That it is Consciousness alone, and not an Identity of Substance, which makes this personal Identity or Sameness. Had I the same Consciousness (says that Author) that I saw the Ark and Noah’s Flood, as that I saw an Overflowing of the Thames last Winter, or that as I now write; I could no more doubt that I who write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last Winter, and that view’d the Flood at the general Deluge, was the same Self, place that Self in what Substance you please, than that I who write this am the same My self now whilst I write, (whether I consist of all the same Substance material or immaterial or no) that I was Yesterday: For as to this Point of being the same Self, it matters not whether this present Self be made up of the same or other Substances.  (Spectator No. 578, Monday, August 9, 1714)

So whereas Addison in 1711 regards identity as an individual’s social sense of self that can change with circumstances and alterations in the environment across time, Locke argues that human consciousness ensures that one’s self is constant throughout the inevitable changes that shape and mark the life of an individual over time. As Porter (2003: 76) notes, “Identity – the ‘I’ – was thus continuity of experienced consciousness or memory”. In this essay, I consider both aspects. On the one hand, I am interested in the identity – the social image and roles – ascribed to the Spectator as a major social force in early eighteenth-century English periodical culture. On the other, I am interested in the extent to which this externally determined identity is matched by the internal linguistic stuff of the Spectator. This will require an exercise in testing the claim that the identity of the Spectator

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was different and separate from the identities of its key components, ­Joseph Addison and Richard Steele on the one hand, and different from its broader literary context on the other. I approach these questions by conducting two corpus linguistic studies. In study 1, I conduct a keyword analysis of the Spectator essays with reference to the literary context as represented by the texts collected in the Network of Eighteenthcentury English Texts (NEET) in order to examine the extent to which there is a clear lexical basis for concluding that Addison and Steele carve out a deliberate social niche for the periodical in the form of its eidolon, Mr Spectator. In study 2, I conduct a keyword analysis of the periodicals published in the first two decades of the eighteenth century with reference to the Spectator in order to investigate the linguistic basis for the cultural historical impression of how different the social agenda of the Spectator is from the party political periodical papers of the time. In the sections that follow, we examine the early eighteenth-century historical and cultural context for these studies in the form of the periodical discourse community. Then as preparation for the keyword studies, we examine the historical evidence for the argument that the Spectator forms a distinct community of practice in early eighteenth-century London by virtue of its common goals and domain of interest. The focus of both studies is thus the language of the Spectator.

2.

The periodical discourse community

The discourse community according to Watts (1999: 43) is “a set of individuals who constitute a community on the basis of their common interests, goals, beliefs, and enterprise as revealed in their oral or written practices”. This statement could reasonably be used to characterize the group of individuals participating in the production and distribution of periodical literature in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Table 1 lists some of the most prominent and well-known periodicals of the period together with the key people involved in their production. A little historical background is necessary to contextualize the periodical press. William Speck (1986) notes that the final lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to formal pre-publication censorship of the press, and paved the way for publication to play a more vital role in politics than ever before. He notes that the absence of formal government control meant that politicians could develop more protracted propaganda campaigns through newspapers and periodicals that could appear regularly and reliably without fear of prosecution. The consequence was the vigorous proliferation of privately owned newspapers allied with political parties, starting with the Whig Daily Courant (1702) and Flying Post jousting with their Tory counterparts, the PostBoy and Heraclitus Ridens.



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

Table 1.  Major periodical publications in early eighteenth-century London The Review Tatler

Defoe, 1704–1713 Steele, Addison, Swift, 1709–1711

Spectator

Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Hughes, 1710–1712, 1714

The Examiner

King, Swift, Freind, Prior, Manley, Atterbury, 1710–1711

Guardian

Steele, Addison, Pope, Budgell, Philips, Tickell, Garth, 1713–1715

Freeholder

Addison, Dec 1715–June 1716

The Medley

Oldmixon, Maynwaring, 1710–1711

The government also had an official news mouthpiece, the London Gazette, but ministers like Robert Harley also exploited unofficial organs such as Defoe’s Review and Swift’s Examiner for government use (Speck 2004/2007). Whereas the newspapers tended to carry news items gleaned from the Gazette, the periodicals offered opinions about the news in essays and editorial features. Accordingly, the periodicals can be identified with partisan interests – the prominent and durable Review was chief among the Whig periodicals. The lesser periodicals conducted a vigorous running commentary on one another (Downie 2004). John Tutchin’s Observator was published in dialogue form in which “Observator” kept a “­Countryman” Roger “on the Whig straight and narrow”, and vilified the Tories. Charles Leslie’s Rehearsal (of Observator) responded in kind, “showing [Observator] to be a villainous Whig hack” (Speck 1986: 48). At the same time as the Spectator was being published, the Whig Medley was produced to challenge the Tory Examiner (Snyder 2004/2005). In short, the periodical scene was dominated by explicitly political journalism immersed in current affairs. The periodical discourse community is characterized by conventions and practices surrounding the production and distribution of the periodical in the historical milieu of early eighteenth-century London. The roles of the bookseller and printer were key in establishing these practices. The printers were crucial in the production and distribution of periodicals that had multiple contributors and particular patterns of production. Many printers had diverse interests and projects running simultaneously. Major printer-booksellers published a range of products by diverse authors; John Morphew published Steele’s works, including the Tatler, as well as the pamphlets and histories of his political opposite, Mary Delariviere Manley. Booksellers discovered that periodical publication could be highly ­lucrative if . Harley first got Defoe to write in support of the ministry in the Review in 1704. Speck notes that he re-established his professional relationship with Defoe in 1710 when he was Prime Minister, but that he also engaged Swift to support his administration in the Examiner. So, Harley was a highly professional politician who understood how to use the press in politics (Speck 2004/2007).

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they could keep the copy coming. For example, Samuel Buckley, who published the Spectator, assumed the printing of the Daily Courant just ten issues after it appeared in the imprint of Elizabeth Mallet. Mallet mainly printed sensational tracts and several serial publications including The New State of Europe, the first number of which was dated 20 September 1701 (Maxted 2004). Another woman printer, Abigail Baldwin, ran a business in Warwick Lane, publishing and distributing a wide range of pamphlets and periodicals under her imprint A. Baldwin. She published pamphlets by Whigs and periodicals that ranged from the economic journal British Merchant of Commerce Preserved to the Female Tatler. Political sponsorship also affected and shaped the conditions in which the political press operated. Hyland (1986: 865) notes that although the government could promote its policies and interests highly effectively, it could also undermine those interests. Because the most vigorous economic competition was among newspapers and periodicals that held complementary views, strong ministerial support for one could jeopardize the future of another in a number of respects. Hyland argues that as papers depended increasingly on their sponsors for financial and political support, so they tended to become increasingly detached from their readers’ interests. Accordingly, serial propaganda publications ceased production rapidly when governmental assistance was withdrawn. Hyland (1986: 865) cites as an example the withdrawal of the government sponsorship and hence the demise of the publication of the Examiner and Monitor with the fall of the Tories in 1714. The periodical press in the first two decades of the eighteenth century is therefore an institution with its own historicity, reflecting contemporary preoccupations and inclinations as regards the politics, culture and life of the time. The context in which the periodical is produced and consumed shapes the periodical discourse community. It is in this environment marked by an obsession with party politics and news that the avowedly nonpolitical and nonpartisan Spectator project is launched.

3.

The Spectator project and the coffee house community

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were the two men at the centre of the Spectator coalition. It is important to stress that the Spectator was a very special project; as a daily paper that explicitly eschewed party political comment or support, it stood outside the cut and thrust of the Tory and Whig periodical antagonists of the time. However, this is not to say that the Spectator was not interested in topical events, interests and preoccupations. If anything, it was firmly embedded in the social fabric of London in the last years of Queen Anne and had the potential to function as an agent of reform of public discourse. The locus par excellence of



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

public discourse was the coffee house, where people of all sorts would meet to talk politics, get the news, conduct business and socialize. It was also the place to read broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals. It is no accident that the dateline of many of Steele’s Tatler essays included the name of a coffee house such as Will’s or St. James’s, or Grecian Coffee House. The identity of the coffee house by the beginning of the eighteenth century was complex; it was a place that promoted sociability and civility, on the one hand, but the quality of that civility was dubious. According to Cowan (2004b), Swift thought that ‘the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life’, was to be found there; self-important playwrights ‘entertained one another with their trifling composures’ before ‘an humble audience of young students from the inns of court, or the universities’, who, having ‘listened to these oracles, … returned home with great contempt for law and philosophy, their heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and belles lettres’  (Prose Writings, 4.90)

The coffee house and its associated social structure, the club, were targeted by writers of serial publications like news-sheets. For instance, Novak (2001: 214) suggests that Daniel Defoe’s use of a mythical society (the Scandalous Club) to discuss various ethical and social issues of the period placed the Review in the public sphere of the coffee house where ideas about politics, economics and foreign affairs that would ultimately transform the politics of a nation may be debated. As a place that was intimately bound up with the public consumption of news as well as with public debate and discourse, the coffee house could be satirized as the hub of newsmongers, gossips and idlers, as the Tatler comments of Will’s Coffee-house: Where you us’d to see Songs, Epigrams, and Satyrs, in the Hands of every Man you met, you have now only a Pack of Cards; and instead of the Cavils about the Turn of the Expression, the Elegance of the Style, and the like, the Learned now dispute only about the Truth of the Game.  (Tatler No. 1, Tuesday, April 12, 1709)

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the coffee house had become a disreputable place, associated with the degradation of discourse rather than an exemplary level of debate and discourse. Cowan (2004a) argues that Addison and Steele were concerned to reform coffee house activities such as newspaper reading, political discussion and club socialization in constructing a different social world. He suggests that their goal was to ensure the survival of Whig values and politics in the face of the resurgence of Tory values as expressed in high church . Quoted by Backscheider (2004/2008).

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politics (Cowan 2004a: 348). Of course, this goal of refocusing and changing the content and tenor of public discourse was not expressed overtly. However, as early as No. 10 (March 12, 1711), Addison identifies the target readership of the Spectator’s instruction as “well-regulated Families”, “the Fraternity of Spectators who live in the World without having any thing to do in it”, “the Blanks of Society”, and “the female World” (Bond 1965: vol. 1, 44–46). He also sets out the agenda of the Spectator thus: I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways find their Account in the Speculation of the Day. And to the End that their Virtue and Discretion may not be short transient intermitting Starts of Thought, I have resolved to refresh their Memories from Day to Day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate State of Vice and Folly into which the Age is fallen. ... I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses.  (Spectator No. 10, March 12, 1711)

Steele had reacted to the deep suspicion with which the authors of serial publications were regarded by adopting the eidolon of Isaac Bickerstaff for the Tatler, and Addison and Steele followed suit by adopting that of Mr Spectator for the Spectator. This name allowed the writers to adopt a persona for the periodical that could conveniently be argued to be independent of the personal histories and habits of his creators. At the same time, this eidolon allowed the Spectator to reflect the interests and attitudes of a community rather than those of a pair of individuals. The Spectator sense of community was expressed in different forms. For example, one of the ways in which readers responded to Mr Spectator’s speculations was the formation of clubs and societies, often congregating in public places such as coffee houses, to read and discuss the latest Spectator. So, the Spectator effectively rehabilitated the coffee house as a potentially polite place; as a site for “a conversable sociability conducive to the improvement of society as a whole” (Klein 1996: 33). Maurice Johnson, a barrister who practised in London but who lived in Spalding, Lincolnshire, formed the Gentleman’s Society on November 3, 1711, with the approval of Addison and Steele, “for the supporting of a mutual benevolence, and their improvement in the liberal science and in polite learning” (­Haycock 2004/2008). When Johnson was in London, he associated with the literary circle that met at Button’s Coffee-house, Covent Garden, from 1712. This circle attracted people who wanted to be associated with Addison and Steele and who sought their patronage and help. These included minor Whig writers like Eustace Budgell, Ambrose Philips, Thomas Tickell, and John Ozell, as well as the much better known figures, Alexander Pope and John Gay.



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

There is another sense of community that the Spectator embodies. This is the notion of the community of practice, a notion that has gained considerable currency in present-day sociolinguistics to capture the juncture of group identity and its expression in linguistic behaviour (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). Key indices of a community of practice include a domain of interest shared by its members, activities engaged in as joint enterprises, and most importantly, shared practices. The shared domain of interest that engages the Spectator community is the vision of a public sphere as a forum for urbane (rather than risqué) conversation, moral reflection rather than obsession with the news of the day or the latest fashions, and above all, temperate agreement on affairs of state instead of heated political debate. This domain of interest was maintained by the pursuit of joint activities conducted over time through sustained interaction. In practice, these activities consist of the regular publication of essays for sociable consumption in coffee houses like Button’s as a reformed social sphere. Members of the community develop a shared set of practices or repertoire of resources to advance their engagement with the domain of interest. The shared practice that differentiates this community from others is the active championing through serial publication of the Whig social ethic of politeness to replace newsmongering (quidnunc) and irresponsible coffee house gossip with discursive decorum. Of course, this moral and social work is also political in intention as its ultimate end is to ensure that the public sphere is oriented to Whig rather than Tory politics.

4.

Keyness, the Spectator and the periodical press

The challenge posed by the cultural historical examination of the Spectator community in the context of the early eighteenth-century press is to demonstrate that its social distinctiveness is matched by linguistic distinctiveness. In the two studies reported in this paper, two keyword studies will reveal the extent to which the linguistic texture of the Spectator periodical confirms the impressions gained by a close analysis of the historical and cultural context of the periodical. Keyword analysis is an empirical and systematic methodology increasingly used in corpus linguistic studies to explore the distinctiveness or unique characteristics of a body of texts compared with its textual context. A keyword list for a given corpus reflects the unusually frequent (or infrequent) occurrence of words in that corpus compared with another corpus for reference. For our purposes, a keyword analysis can be used to explore the lexical and structural linguistic distinctiveness . For a detailed theoretical account of communities of practice, see Etienne Wenger’s discussion (http://www.ewenger.com/theory, accessed 28 February 2008).

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of the Spectator essays in two contexts: first, in the broad social, historical and literary context; and second, in comparison with the periodical press in the period. The methodology has been applied to the study of characterization in drama (Culpeper 2002), the stuff of political and cultural movements as reflected in newspaper coverage (e.g. Johnson, Culpeper and Suhr 2003; McEnery 2006), as well as register specificity (Xiao and McEnery 2005). Culpeper (2009) comments that the term “keyword” is “simply another term for statistically-based style markers”, and is not to be confused with the identification of lexical items that might be considered “key” in terms of their social, political or cultural salience. Culpeper and McEnery have used Scott’s WordSmith package in their keyword studies; I adopt Laurence Antony’s concordancer, AntConc 3.1 for the same purpose. Keywords are derived in the following way. First, a target corpus is selected. AntConc can compare the words that appear in the target files with the words that appear in a reference corpus to generate a list of keywords, words that are unusually frequent (or infrequent) in the target files. To derive keyness, the program compares word frequency in the target corpus, the number of running words in the target corpus, word frequency in the reference corpus and the number of running words in the reference corpus. The program then cross-tabulates these results and applies Ted Dunning’s Log Likelihood test as a statistical measure (Antony 2006: Readme). As Scott (1999: Help Menu) notes, “a word will get into the listing if it is unusually frequent (or unusually infrequent) in comparison with what one would expect on the basis of the larger wordlist”, that is, the wordlist generated for the reference corpus. So “keyness” is a matter of unusual frequency (relative to the reference corpus). The keyword list provides the basis for the exploration of the lexical and grammatical patterns that mark the texts in the target corpus. Cluster analysis then reveals the typical grammatical contexts in which a keyword occurs as well as the most common lexical collocates that a keyword selects.

5.

Study 1: The Spectator in early eighteenth-century literary London

The target corpus for study 1 is a text file of 212 issues of the Spectator between October 24, 1711 and Thursday, June 26, 1712, which amounts to 293,269 words. The reference corpus for this purpose is a sample taken from the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET), consisting of essays, letters, and fiction, 1,069 text files totalling just over 1 million words (exactly 1,072,126 words; see Fitzmaurice (2007) for details of the corpus). In this section, I discuss the topranked keywords in the Spectator in the broader literary context as represented by NEET, and explore the linguistic texture that a cluster analysis of selected keywords reveals. Table 2 lists the top thirty keywords in the Spectator. For each item,



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

Table 2.  Keywords of the Spectator Rank

Frequency

Keyness value

Item

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

   262   6830    150     77   6838    927   1396    194     65    377    435 12278    787   1495   3671    131 15634    150    140     41    129    179     74   1258    115     59     69    130   2599    333

649.916 336.427 320.970 227.146 205.507 189.716 183.512 182.205 177.227 170.106 169.687 168.824 167.905 155.057 151.005 139.581 139.095 137.257 135.934 126.389 125.214 117.698 115.631 115.141 114.433 109.275 107.633 107.569 105.659 103.776

spectator in Milton* Hor. a man an reader Roger several self of d who is eye the poem following Virg behaviour virtue et upon imagination fable paradise beautiful which mind

*See Fitzmaurice (2010) for a detailed discussion of the occurrence of Milton, the abbreviations Hor. (Horace) and Virg. (Virgil), Roger (Sir Roger de Coverley).

column 1 indicates its rank as a keyword, column 2 gives its raw frequency in the target corpus, column 3 indicates its keyness value (as described above), and column 4 contains the item. I will discuss the keyness values of selected lexical and then structural keywords, and discuss their collocational and cluster characteristics in order to try to ascertain the salience of these expressions in indicating the agenda of the Spectator. Because the features that distinguish the Spectator from the essay genre in the

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40 Susan M. Fitzmaurice

early eighteenth century are examined in Fitzmaurice (2010), I will not discuss positive keywords shared by the two sub-corpora. For the purposes of this study, I am particularly interested in the extent to which the analysis aids an examination of the social roles ascribed both to the Spectator as a community of practice and to its key individual exponents – Addison and Steele – operating at a critical historical and political juncture.

5.1

Identity and Mr Spectator

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most unusually frequently occurring word in the Spectator target corpus is the name of both the key persona and of the periodical itself, namely, spectator. The examples in (1) illustrate how the eidolon of the periodical provides a means of giving the values and agenda of the periodical a material substance that pervades the text. The most frequent realization of the term is as part of the name, Mr Spectator. Mr Spectator is the addressee of the letters that are an integral part of the periodical (1a), but the Spectator is also the paper’s speaking persona (1b): (1) a. b. 

Now, Mr. SPECTATOR, you that are a professed Friend to Love, will, I hope, observe upon those who abuse that noble Passion, and raise it in innocent Minds by a deceitful Affectation of it, after which they desert the Enamoured.  (Spectator No. 288, Wednesday, January 30, 1712) This is to give Notice, that the SPECTATOR has taken upon him to be Visitant of all Boarding-Schools, where young Women are educated; and designs to proceed in the said Office after the same Manner that the Visitants of Colleges do in the two famous Universities of this Land. All Lovers who write to the SPECTATOR, are desired to forbear one Expression which is in most of the Letters to him, either out of Laziness, or want of Invention, and is true of not above two thousand Women in the whole World; viz. She has in her all that is valuable in Woman. (Spectator No. 314, Friday, February 29, 1712)

These two excerpts are taken from papers produced by Richard Steele. The prominence of self-reference in the periodical seems to be aligned with the impression of gravity accorded to individuality or self-hood. The frequency with which the Spectator persona refers to the purposes and interests of the Spectator as a person contributes to the impression that the reputations and identities of its primary contributors, Addison and Steele, are subordinated to the identity for the paper itself. The example in (2) is an apt illustration of the way in which the authority of Mr Spectator appears to be reinforced within the periodical itself.



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

(2) The SPECTATOR writes often in an Elegant, often in an Argumentative, and often in a Sublime Style, with equal Success; but how would it hurt the reputed Author of that Paper to own, that of the most beautiful Pieces under his Title, he is barely the Publisher? There is nothing but what a Man really performs, can be an Honour to him; what he takes more than he ought in the Eye of the World, he loses in the Conviction of his own Heart; and a Man must lose his Consciousness, that is, his very Self, before he can rejoice in any Falshood without inward Mortification.  (Spectator No. 382, Monday, May 19, 1712)

This excerpt appears in a paper devoted to the topics of candour and honesty. Curiously, by referring to the Spectator in the third person in a particularly approbatory fashion, the author of this particular issue separates this act from the more general identity of the paper. More specifically, by this time, it was reasonably well-known that Steele and particularly Addison were behind the Spectator, and the effect of referring to the Spectator in the third person is to extricate aspects of the periodical’s authorship from its publication. Although Steele does not explicitly sign his name to this issue, there is sufficient evidence to support the supposition that Steele is acknowledging Addison’s massive contribution to the project. He refers to himself as “the reputed Author” who ought to be able to admit that some of the best work issued under “his Title”, namely the Spectator, cannot be attributed to him. Together with this attempt to pay tribute to his partner by citing the Spectator rather than its persona, Mr Spectator, Steele illustrates the extent to which the word self is intimately associated with selfhood and identity on the one hand and the association of these concepts with humankind, in the form of Man on the other. In addition, the excerpt illustrates nicely the extent to which the keywords in the top 30 cluster together in particular passages (see the underlined instances of eye, man, self, Spectator, and beautiful). The co-occurrence of the keywords in the same contexts contributes to the salience of the keywords, and underlines the integrity of the concerns that we can ascribe to the Spectator community. Excerpts (3) and (4) below illustrate further how connected these terms and concepts are in the world of the Spectator. (3) There is a Call upon Mankind to value and esteem those who set a moderate Price upon their own Merit; and Self-denial is frequently attended with unexpected Blessings, which in the End abundantly recompense such Losses as the Modest seem to suffer in the ordinary Occurrences of Life. The Curious tell us, a Determination in our Favour or to our Disadvantage is made upon our first Appearance, even before they know any thing of our Characters, but from the Intimations Men gather from our Aspect. A Man, they say, wears the Picture of his Mind in his Countenance; and one Man’s Eyes are Spectacles to his who looks at him to read his Heart.  (Spectator No. 206, Friday, October 26, 1711)

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(4) One may see now and then this Humour accompanied with an insatiable Desire of knowing what passes, without turning it to any Use in the world but merely their own Entertainment. A Mind which is gratified this Way is adapted to Humour and Pleasantry, and formed for an unconcerned Character in the World; and, like my self, to be a mere Spectator. This Curiosity, without Malice or Self-interest, lays up in the Imagination a Magazine of Circumstances which cannot but entertain when they are produced in Conversation. If one were to know, from the Man of the first Quality to the meanest Servant, the different Intrigues, Sentiments, Pleasures, and Interests of Mankind, would it not be the most pleasing Entertainment imaginable to enjoy so constant a Farce, as the observing Mankind much more different from themselves in their secret Thoughts and publick Actions, than in their Night-caps and long Periwigs?  (Spectator No. 228, Wednesday, November 21, 1711)

These excerpts also illustrate the prevalence of the present tense frame for the speculations in the construction of papers that offer advice, moralizing lectures, and generally seek to instruct the reader. In (3) above, Steele opens his piece on the virtues of self-denial with a set of sententious statements that set the agenda of the paper. He then offers several examples by way of anecdotal evidence for the truth of the opening statements. It is typically in the opening set of statements that the gnomic present frame accommodates the presentation of the type or the generalization signposted by the indefinite article a, as well as the restrictive relative marked by the wh-pronouns who and which. In (4), Steele uses a study of inquisitiveness as an opportunity to explore the relationship of chatter, rumourmongering and speculation in the news on the one hand and (tongue in cheek) the harmlessness of the spectator who keeps the gossip for his own entertainment rather than passing it on. This excerpt, like (3), illustrates how the keywords congregate together to provide a sense of the consistency with which the Spectator is concerned with the sententious. The lexical coherence illustrated by these excerpts encourages the impression of a single ideological and intellectual framework for the speculations offered by the Spectator. The opacity with which one contributor refers to the other through the medium of the Mr Spectator persona does not confuse the experience of reading issues of a single periodical with that of browsing through the contributions making up a miscellany. So, despite the fact that Steele rather than Addison is the author of these issues, the linguistic integrity of the speculations does not privilege authorship above the periodical’s generic identity as developed in the community of practice.



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

5.2 The Spectator instructs the Reader Let us examine the ways in which the reader figures in the Spectator’s intention of instructing its target audience. In contrast with the excerpts quoted in the section above on identity, selfhood and the Spectator, the following ones (5), (6), (7) are taken from papers by Addison. They happen to entertain altogether more serious topics; (5) is taken from an introduction to Sappho’s “Hymn to Venus” by way of a translation by Addison’s protégé, Ambrose Philips. Addison directs the reader’s reading of the translation, seeking to instill in him/her the appropriate response to the poem (as well as to the translation). (5) After having given this short Account of Sappho so far as it regards the following Ode, I shall subjoin the Translation of it as it was sent me by a Friend, whose admirable Pastorals and Winter-Piece have been already so well received. The Reader will find in it that Pathetick Simplicity which is so peculiar to him, and so suitable to the Ode he has here Translated. This Ode in the Greek (besides those Beauties observed by Madam Dacier) has several harmonious Turns in the Words, which are not lost in the English.  (Spectator No. 223, Thursday, Nov. 15, 1711)

Excerpt (6) is taken from the second treatment of Sappho. Addison here presents three versions (Latin, French, English) of the same fragment of the “Hymn to Venus” in order to instruct the reader about translation and imitation. The third version is another Philips translation. Addison avoids seeming to prefer this to the other versions by delicately directing the reader to Longinus’ criticism of Sappho. However, by telling the reader what he should find upon consulting the criticism, he attributes to Philips’ translation “the very Spirit of Sappho”, and so implicitly recommends it: (6) My learned Reader will know very well the Reason why one of these Verses is printed in Roman Letter; and if he compares this Translation with the Original, will find that the three first Stanzas are rendred almost Word for Word, and not only with the same Elegance, but with the same short Turn of Expression which is so remarkable in the Greek, and so peculiar to the Sapphick Ode.  (Spectator No. 229, Thursday, Nov. 22, 1711)

Example (7) is taken from one of Addison’s Saturday papers, which discusses divine providence, prosperity and adversity. In it, he quotes Paradise Lost as well as invoking Plato and Seneca and offering an anecdote of Moses, derived from the Talmud. It is striking that when referring to the reader, the Spectator issues indirect instruction through the use of the predictive modal will together with the perception verb, observe. Addison uses a variation of this formula with the

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44 Susan M. Fitzmaurice

verbs find and know in excerpts (5) and (6) respectively. The use of this formulation adds to a rhetoric of instruction that adds intellectual weight to the moral authority of Mr Spectator. (7) Plato expresses his Abhorrence of some Fables of the Poets, which seem to reflect on the Gods as the Authors of Injustice; and lays it down as a Principle, That whatever is permitted to befal a just Man, whether Poverty, Sickness, or any of those Things which seem to be Evils, shall either in Life or Death conduce to his Good. My Reader will observe how agreeable this Maxim is to what we find delivered by a greater Authority. Seneca has written a Discourse purposely on this Subject, in which he takes Pains, after the Doctrine of the Stoicks, to shew that Adversity is not in itself an Evil; and mentions a noble Saying of Demetrius, That nothing would be more unhappy than a Man who had never known Affliction. (Spectator No. 237, Saturday, December 1, 1711)

By adopting the role of instructor, the Spectator assumes the stance of the intellectual that is above the fray. This is consistent with the disinterested and detached position that Mr Spectator declares he occupies when contemplating or observing the world. However, Mr Spectator is careful not to appear to be out of the ordinary by situating his comments with those of what he calls “greater Authority”. We must distinguish between the community of practice associated with the Spectator intellectual and moral project and the material history of the Spectator. The nature of the community’s domain of interest is strongly evident in the speculations. However, once the Spectator had ceased to be published as a daily paper and after its issue by Jacob Tonson as eight volumes of essays, the separate identities of Steele and Addison became apparent once more.

5.3 Structural keywords In addition to the keyness of lexical expressions as illustrated above, the topranked 30 keywords include structural items or what Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999: 55) call function words. These are typically members of closed word classes, they tend to be short and lack internal structure, and they are frequent and tend to occur in any text. In contrast, the individual members of lexical open classes such as nouns and verbs occur with variable frequency and tend to be bound to the topic of the text. It is worth reiterating that keyness is a statistical expression of unusual frequency or scarcity of an item in a target corpus relative to a broader context represented by a reference corpus. Accordingly, we are invited to infer that the indefinite and definite articles occur with much more intensity in the Spectator than the broader literary context would lead



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

Table 3.  Structural keywords Objectification Situatedness Here and now Collectivity Definition

Indefinite articles (a, an); definite article (the) Prepositions (in, of, upon) is as key verb Quantifier several (several passages, several parts, several years, free several sentences) Relative pronouns (which and who rather than that)

us to expect. A close reading of the excerpts quoted in the sections above invites the conclusion that the following rhetorical and discourse features pervade the Spectator. Table 3 summarises the types of structural items that command high keyness values for the Spectator. The unusual frequency of the indefinite articles a and an together with the definite article the suggests a preoccupation with objects and their definition. We should probably treat this feature together with the feature I have labelled “definition”, as realized in the predominance of the wh-relative pronouns who and which because the definition specifies the nature of the subject identified as newly introduced by the article. These structural items appear in each of the excerpts in the examples (1) through (7). For example in (1b), repeated below as (8), the relative markers figure prominently as a device for defining and specifying the nature of the general, introduced as definite or indefinite phrases: (8) This is to give Notice, that the SPECTATOR has taken upon him to be Visitant of all Boarding-Schools, [where young Women are educated]; and designs to proceed in the said Office after the same Manner [that the Visitants of Colleges do in the two famous Universities of this Land]. All Lovers [who write to the SPECTATOR], are desired to forbear one Expression [which is in most of the Letters to him, either out of Laziness, or want of Invention, and is true of not above two thousand Women in the whole World]; viz. She has in her all that is valuable in Woman.  (Spectator No. 314, Friday, February 29, 1712)

In this excerpt, the two wh-pronouns who and which mark relative clauses (as underlined); however, the function of definition is underpinned by the prominence of the relative clause which is marked by other means. For example, in (8), the first two relative clauses are marked by the wh-forms where and that respectively. Note that the definite article is given the task of anaphoric reference together with said for an effect that matches the formality of the frame taken by Mr Spectator’s announcement that he will visit girls’ boarding schools. Finally, this excerpt also illustrates effectively the use of the present tense frame adopted for the speculations, particularly in the use of the third-person present tense singular form of be

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(italicized). This verb, which appears in the relative clauses, also contributes to the impression that the topics treated are both singular and generic. The excerpt also happens to illustrate the ways in which the preposition in functions in the Spectator. As the relative clauses serve to define topics of discussion, prepositional phrases with in are deployed as modifiers. In order to ascertain the extent to which the structural items that appear as highly ranked keywords might be taken to characterize the rhetorical and grammatical tenor of the Spectator by contrast with the texts in the more general literary context, we also examine those items that are distinctive as negative keywords.

5.4 Negative keywords: What the Spectator is not The unusual lack of frequency with which words occur in a corpus in comparison with a reference corpus provides an additional basis for exploring how distinctive the Spectator is in the literary world of early eighteenth-century England. Table 4 lists the negative keywords of the Spectator. These give us a good idea of what is common in the literary context as a whole. Table 4 indicates the top twenty negative keywords in the Spectator relative to the reference corpus of NEET. For each item, column 1 indicates its negative keyness rank, column 2 indicates its raw frequency in the Spectator, column 3 indicates its negative keyness value (the higher the number, the more negative the keyword value), and column 4 indicates the item. As the list of top-ranked positive keywords includes a number of structural items, so does the list of top-ranked negative keywords. The top-ranked item is the first-person singular subject I, followed by the second-person subject pronoun you, with the possessive second-person pronoun your in the sixth place, and the first-person singular object pronoun me in the ninth place. Three more pronouns appear in the negative top twenty. Two of them are quite marked in form – the old fashioned second-person plural subject form ye at 14, and the contracted third-person plural object form em at 16. The third one is myself, reflexive first-person singular pronoun, at 19. These pronouns are typical of interactive genres such as letters and drama; the part of the NEET corpus used as a reference corpus includes fiction, essays and a large sub-corpus of letters. Accordingly, we can infer that although the first- and second-person pronouns are not exactly infrequent in the Spectator – note the raw frequencies in the second column of Table 4 – they are much more typical of the Spectator’s broader literary context. Two related items are lord (3) and Lordship (7), a title and address form respectively that are common in the essays but markedly infrequent in the Spectator. It is worth noting that these occur as part of the third-person reference my lord (for



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

Table 4.  Negative keywords Rank

Frequency

NEG keyness

Item

 1

4329

852.233

I

 2

1508

532.050

you

 3

   36

346.354

lord

 4

   62

312.889

written

 5

  842

271.677

had

 6

  824

256.330

your

 7

    7

201.830

lordship

 8

8491

195.386

to

 9

  978

177.493

me

10

1426

164.140

was

11

   81

152.089

god

12

2128

151.877

for

13

  197

124.081

yet

14

   38

123.586

ye

15

2052

123.101

be

16

   28

118.423

em

17

   59

116.436

king

18

   73

110.033

tis

19

   45

109.565

myself

20

    4

106.109

shore

example, as in my lord Somerset) and the address formula your lordship. Accordingly, it seems that the Spectator does not participate in the kind of interactivity that is apparently common in the more general corpus. There are some verb forms among the top-ranked negative keywords for the Spectator, including the past participle written, the past tense forms had and was, the infinitive copula be and the contracted form tis (it is). In addition to these structural items, prepositions to and for and adverb yet also occur relatively infrequently in the Spectator compared with the literary context. The only other salient lexical items are god, king, and the extremely infrequent shore. In light of the discussion of the positive keywords, which revealed the extent to which the Spectator project is concerned with social and literary matters, the appearance of terms that have to do with the highly charged domains of church and state like god and king should not be surprising. What seems slightly odder is the appearance of the extremely rare shore. The context in which this item does occur in the

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Spectator is, however, consistent with its agenda. The term occurs just four times, in discussions of poetry, for example: (9) If our Poet has imitated that Verse in which Ovid tells us that there was nothing but Sea, and that this Sea had no Shore to it, he has not set the Thought in such a Light as to incur the Censure which Criticks have passed upon it. The latter part of that Verse in Ovid is idle and superfluous, but just and beautiful in Milton. ‘Jamque mare et tellus nullum discrimen habebant, Nil nisi pontus erat, deerant quoque littora ponto.’ (Ovid.) 

‘– Sea cover’d Sea, Sea without Shore –’ (Milton.) (Spectator No. 363, Saturday, April 26, 1712)

So, the Spectator keyword lists, both positive and negative, present no surprises; indeed, they demonstrate the topical coherence and linguistic integrity of the stated aims of the project. This consistency allows us to review the question of the extent to which the Spectator reveals the performance of community practices. If we acknowledge the key roles of Addison and Steele in both setting and carrying out the agenda of the Spectator against the general trend of the periodical press, we must now consider the question of whether these two men shape the Spectator naturally, by virtue of their personalities as it were, rather than as a consciously conceived plan. It seems that if we were able to demonstrate that the Spectator represents a project that is different from others in which they were involved, we would be able to support the claim that they, with other key people, formed a community of practice that pursued joint activities with a clear goal. Further, we would be able to determine the social role accorded to Mr Spectator. The results of Study 2 should enable us to examine how far the Spectator project diverges from the interests and concerns of the periodical press of the time.

6.

Study 2: The periodical press and the Spectator project

Study 2 is designed to allow the exploration of the relation of the periodicals of the day to the Spectator. Thus, we consider the nature of the Spectator’s natural discourse community in order to understand how distinctive the Spectator project is, and consequently, how distinct its identity is in the periodical press. Accordingly, the target corpus consists of all of the periodical essays collected in NEET (165,000 words). The reference corpus is composed of the Spectator essays (293,269 words). This analysis yields a list of keywords that typify the periodical



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

press. A quick glance indicates that the list suggests a preoccupation with current affairs and politics. In contrast with the Spectator’s concern with the individual, the reader, and the agenda of diverting or instructing its readership, the periodical press is concerned with secular national matters (people, nation, kingdom, Table 5.  Keywords of periodicals relative to the Spectator Rank

Frequency

Keyness

Item

 1

  345

146.703

people

 2

  205

145.432

king

 3

1397

137.120

their

 4

  167

133.483

nation

 5

1349

131.685

they

 6

  128

131.442

government

 7

   77

120.077

ministry

 8

  146

109.183

majesty

 9

   66

100.606

rebellion

10

   93

  94.709

trade

11

   66

  79.633

parliament

12

   90

  71.507

hath

13

   74

  71.474

kingdom

14

6763

  67.679

to

15

  101

  65.596

party

16

  108

  64.535

queen

17

  167

  63.028

power

18

1824

  62.198

be

19

   46

  61.369

clergy

20

  111

  59.269

England

21

  436

  54.147

men

22

   29

  53.721

ants

23

   29

  53.721

Helim

24

  231

  52.773

against

25

   47

  52.471

treaty

26

   94

  51.099

interest

27

   89

  51.086

subjects

28

  223

  50.320

country

29

  916

  50.310

them

30

  109

  49.337

church

31

  107

  48.443

religion

49

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­ ngland, ­ country) as well as religious ones (clergy, church, religion), monarchy E (king, majesty, kingdom, queen, subjects), government (ministry, parliament, power) and politics (rebellion, trade, party, treaty). The key structural items also point to the difference between the Spectator and the periodical press. Whereas the Spectator shares with its literary context a focus on the first and second persons, the periodical press is defined by the predominance of the third-person plural pronouns: their (3), they (5) and them (29). There are also only two verbs in the top-ranked keywords for the periodical press, namely the old fashioned third-person singular present form of have, i.e. hath, and the infinitive copula be. Another structural item that is in the top 30 keywords is the preposition to (14), an item that also appears in the top-ranked negative keywords of the Spectator. The rest of the items are lexical expressions. A few items appear both in the negative keywords list of the Spectator and in the positive keywords list of the periodicals. These include the lexical item king, and the structural items, to and be.

7.

The Spectator and questions of identity and social roles

The two studies presented reveal the special place of the Spectator in the broader contexts of early eighteenth-century London and in the periodical discourse community. The fact that the keyword studies result in rather different lists of positive keywords suggests that the Spectator is as distinct from the other periodicals that populate London print culture as it is from the broader multi-genre literary context. In lexical terms, the keyword analysis seems to support the analysis yielded by a cultural and literary historical interrogation. In particular, the

. There are two lexical items included in the keyword list presented here that seem to be inconsistent with the semantic coherence of the others. These are ants and the name Helim. It is worth reiterating that keyness of an item is the statistical expression of the unusual or unexpected frequency of an item relative to a larger context. In these cases, the peculiar salience of the items can be accounted for by a concentration of frequency in two text files. In truth, the keyness value of each is not very high, certainly not by comparison with the top ten keywords. However, ant occurs 29 times in the periodicals target corpus, by comparison with just once in the entire Spectator reference corpus. It occurs in a paper by Addison (No. 343, Thursday, April 3, 1712) in which he treats the topic of transmigration through a letter written ostensibly by Jack Freelove, narrating the several lives of an “Indian Brachman”. The frequency of the item in the periodical target corpus can be accounted for by Richard Steele’s narrative of the ants in a single issue of the Guardian, Number 157 [rsess027]. Steele is also responsible for the surprising keyness status of the name Helim; it occurs in another issue of the Guardian, Number 167 [rsess030].



Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

Spectator is concerned with matters that it designs to appeal to key readerships, from moral and social topics to literary and intellectual ones. From the selected excerpts presented as illustration, it would appear that while Steele is responsible for the more mundane social trivia, Addison produces the weightier, more serious papers. However, both make use of the distinctive style as indicated in the keyness of the structural items, both use the eidolon of Mr Spectator, and both draw upon the contributions of correspondents as a basis for many of the speculations. In contrast to the Spectator, the periodical press of the time appears concerned with highly topical, political domains of interest. The predominance of lexical items associated with state and church, monarchy and party politics, indicates that their focus is on current affairs and the political ramifications of daily news. As such the subject matter of periodicals like the Review, the Examiner, and the Freeholder is grist to the social historian’s mill and ephemeral to anybody other than the most committed newshound. The fact that the negative keywords list of the Spectator study shares some items with the positive keyword list of the periodicals study provides additional evidence that the Spectator is distinctive for its time. The Spectator carves out a distinctive identity through its persona Mr Spectator, and within the project assumes a variety of social roles that might be only obliquely connected to its major contributors, Addison and Steele. Indeed, it would oversimplify the case to suggest that while Steele performed the role of Mr Spectator as entertainer, Addison performed his role as instructor. The Spectator amounts to a major project with a clear agenda which ended when Addison and Steele turned their attention to different projects. Indeed, although both men continued to work on periodicals independently after the end of the Spectator – Addison on the Freeholder and Steele on the Guardian and then the Englishman – their new projects shared more with the Medley and the Examiner than the Spectator. In consequence, the identity of the Spectator is more than the sum of the identities of the individuals that make up the community of practice that had as its principal aim to rehabilitate public discourse.

References Antony, Laurence. 2006. AntConc 3.1. http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html, accessed 28 March 2008. Backscheider, Paula R. 2004/2008. “Defoe, Daniel (1660?–1731).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7421, accessed 31 March 2008. Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan and Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd. Bond, Donald (ed.). 1965. The Spectator, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Cowan, Brian. 2004a. “Mr Spectator and the coffeehouse public sphere.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (3): 345–366. Cowan, Brian. 2004b. “Urwin, William (d. 1695).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/74228, accessed 29 March 2008. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2002. “Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet.” In Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium [Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliquée 15], Ulla Melander-Marttala, Carin Östman and Merja Kytö (eds), 11–30. Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. “Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (1): 29–59. Downie, J. A. 2004. “Tutchin, John (1660x64–1707).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27899, accessed 28 March 2008. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ ECCO, accessed 27 March 2008. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2007. “Questions of standardization and representativeness in the development of social networks-based corpora: The story of the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts.” In Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vol. 2, Diachronic Databases, Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds), 49–81. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2010. “Coalitions, networks, and discourse communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the early eighteenth-century essay.” In Eighteenth Century English: Ideology and Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haycock, David Boyd. 2004/2008. “Johnson, Maurice (1688–1755).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/14908, accessed 31 March 2008. Hyland, P. B. J. 1986. “Liberty and libel: Government and the press during the succession crisis in Britain, 1712–1716.” The English Historical Review 101 (401): 863–888. Johnson, Sally, Culpeper, Jonathan and Suhr, Stephanie. 2003. “From ‘politically correct councillors’ to ‘Blairite nonsense’: Discourses of ‘political correctness’ in three British newspapers.” Discourse and Society 14 (1): 29–47. Klein, Lawrence. 1996. “Coffeehouse civility, 1660–1714: An aspect of post-courtly culture in England.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1): 30–51. McEnery, Tony. 2006. “Keywords and moral panics: Mary Whitehouse and media censorship.” Paper presented at Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction: AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar on Linguistics, 8 September 2006. Lancaster University. Maxted, Ian. 2004. “Mallet, Elizabeth (fl. 1672–1706).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66880, accessed 29 March 2008. Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET). Novak, Maximillian E. 2001. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Porter, Roy. 2003. Flesh in the Age of Reason. New York/London: W. W. Norton.



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Scott, Mike. 1999. WordSmith Tools. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith, accessed 27 March 2008. Snyder, Henry L. 2004/2005. “Maynwaring, Arthur (1668–1712).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17809, accessed 29 March 2008. Speck, William A. 1986. “Politics and the Press.” In The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), 47–63. London: Associated University Presses. Speck, William A. 2004/2007. ”Harley, Robert, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/12344, accessed 28 March 2008. Watts, Richard. 1999. “The social construction of Standard English: Grammar writers as a ‘discourse community’.” In Standard English: The Widening Debate, Tony Bex and Richard Watts (eds), 40–68. London: Routledge. Wenger, Etienne. 2006. “Introduction to communities of practice.” http://www.ewenger.com/ theory, accessed 25 February 2008. Xiao, Zhongua and McEnery, Tony. 2005. “Two approaches to genre analysis: Three genres in modern American English.” Journal of English Linguistics 33 (1): 62–82.

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How eighteenth-century book reviewers became language guardians Carol Percy

University of Toronto

Contributing to studies of standardization in mid eighteenth-century Britain, this paper draws on a corpus of criticism in the new review periodicals in order to explain reviewers’ enthusiastic enforcement of linguistically prescriptive rules. Reflecting consumers’ need for guidance in an expanding market, reviewers often used authors’ language as a seemingly objective index of a book’s quality. However, reviewers’ judgments were sometimes relayed in subjective tones. Reviewers’ satiric perspective in part reflected their dual roles as entertainers and educators, publicly punishing individuals in order to improve standards of writing and reading in a market that was perceived as increasingly socially heterogeneous. Drawing on Bogel’s theory of satire, I also argue that reviewers mocked authors in order to differentiate and elevate themselves.

1.

Introduction The writing runs as foul as the disease it treats of, and is no better than, to use the author’s words, a gonorrhaea fluor, a gonorrhaea gleet, a fluor gleet, or a ­fluor mucus. A p-x on such writing! And yet, though this author writes without knowledge, judgment, common sense, decency, or language, he may turn out a thriving practitioner in this merit-distinguishing metropolis. But that our readers may judge whether this censure is too severe or not, we shall lay before them a few specimens of Mr. Neale’s erudition, beginning with the title leaf, in which is considered the mischievous consequences of an improper and injudicious manage(Armstrong 1756b) ment. 

This quotation, taken from a large database corpus of excerpts from eighteenthcentury book reviews (Percy 1997), exemplifies the roles played by both linguistic

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Carol Percy

criticism and critical invective in eighteenth-century print culture. Contextualizing representative book reviews in a synthesis of interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper will describe and interpret how the ideology of linguistic standardization was appropriated by reviewers and received by some authors. I am particularly interested in the tone of reviews: sometimes aggression, condescension, and mockery supplemented a more reasoned critique. Indeed, it has often been observed that such labels as the “age of reason” erase the conflicts and contradictions inherent in any culture (e.g. Redwood 1976; Brewer 1995). In response to social difference, for instance, both satire and politeness seem stereotypical of the period. Moreover, linguistic criticism in eighteenth-century periodicals had its own paradoxes. Writing about the period’s periodical criticism, Eagleton (1984: 12) identifies its “irony”: “while its appeal to standards of universal reason signifies a resistance to absolutism, the critical gesture itself is typically conservative and corrective” (see also Fitzmaurice 1998: 327). Interpreting the promotion in mid-century grammars of “an absolute standard of prescriptivism and correctness”, Fitzmaurice (1998: 327) reminds us that the idea of a standard language can stratify as well as unify a society. In this paper I will account for both the content and tone of mid-century reviewers’ invocation of an ideology of standardization by considering how both helped them establish their own new roles in the print culture of the mid-century. Well before this time, print culture had been criticized for its dependence on the market and for what were perceived to be declining cultural standards (e.g. Ingrassia 1998). Drawing on Marxism, Eagleton (1984: 33) has argued that social alienation accompanied the commercialization of print culture by contrasting two well-known periodical writers: Joseph Addison, creator of the gentlemanly and sociable everyman Mr Spectator and his club of friends and reader-correspondents, was succeeded only decades later by the vituperative and pontificating pedant Samuel Johnson, who famously asserted that only a fool would not write for money (see also Patey 1997: 11–13). Pope’s portrayals of poets laureate, pedants, and Grub Street hacks in The Dunciad represent his anxieties about both cultural authority and popular writing. However, Pope himself is a useful reminder of the importance of the market. Despite publicly disseminated criticism of his translation (e.g. Ault 1941: 430), Pope profited from the public’s desire to buy his adaptation of high culture. Moreover, by publishing his translation of Homer as a subscription and keeping control of the copyright, he is famous for having made a fortune by his writing and becoming “the first English man of . For research support, I gratefully acknowledge SSHRC grant 410-97-0981 and the many talented assistants whose names appear here: http://chass.utoronto.ca/reviews/students.htm. Special thanks to Aidan Goodwin for editorial assistance.



How book reviewers became language guardians

letters to ­become financially independent by means of his own work” (Williams 1990). From ­Bogel’s study of eighteenth-century satire, we might infer Pope’s satire of Grub Street writers was inspired by his awareness that they were “not alien enough” (Bogel 2001: 41). It might be added that the viciousness of eighteenthcentury satire arises in part from the importance of public opinion. The reviewers themselves were a symbol of the power of a socially heterogeneous market for printed material (e.g. Donoghue 1995: 67; 1996: 41). The first periodical review had been founded by a bookseller on the grounds that potential purchasers required a disinterested guide to vernacular publications, often described as numerous and mostly substandard. Yet, as hired specialists, reviewers differed from authors only in their anonymity. In this context, it is in some ways unsurprising that linguistic criticism became an apparently objective criterion of quality for reviewers. External sources confirm the social capital of good grammar and its association with high culture. In this paper I will argue that criticizing authors’ grammar allowed reviewers both to differentiate themselves from and elevate themselves above authors while simultaneously entertaining purchasers of the periodical and supplying them with the same cultural capital. Identifying bad English in the writings of titled authors, promoting “worth” over “birth”, contributed to the social prestige and commercial value of education generally and of good English specifically. In his ongoing analyses of the ideology of standardization in the period, Watts (2002) has characterized the change as from “polite” to “educated” English. In this paper, I argue that reviewers exploited and furthered the standardization of English in their own quest for professionalization. However, the public display of learning and of verbal criticism was highly problematic (Patey 1997: 11–13). In a society that prized sociability, the display of expertise was impolite: the pedant and the gentleman were often opposed (Klein 1993: 38; Patey 1997: 13–15; Fitzmaurice 1998: 313–314). Pervading contemporary polemic as well as scholarship, verbal criticism was certainly not polite. Often quoted by disgruntled authors, Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot” (1735) linked verbal criticism with ignorance. “Of Verbal Criticism”, a poem addressed to Pope in the wake of his feud with Shakespeare’s other editor Lewis Theobald, reminds us that editing and criticism were often seen as opposed to and destructive of literary creation: Pope was praised for being able to both critique and create (Mallet 1733). Finally, in such other fields as agriculture and medicine, the practical value of “learning” was sometimes questioned. In debates about medical professionalization, for instance (Hamilton 1951; Harley 1990), the mid-century reviews participate in debates about the professional value not only of an Oxbridge education but even of polished English. Even professionalization was problematic, since the process involved both paid labour and a narrowness of perspective seen by some as ungentlemanly or even pedantic (Klein 1993: 38). Given the cultural

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importance of education generally and English grammar specifically in the earlier eighteenth century, mid-century reviewers’ roles as language guardians may seem inevitable to modern scholars. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that the process was neither inevitable nor uncontested.

2.

Grammatical variation in public writing: Salience and significance

Eighteenth-century book reviewers’ roles as language guardians reflected the state of the English language at that time. Both the ideology and effects of standardization were disseminated and entrenched gradually; during this period grammatical variants that appeared saliently non-standard to some people could also appear in print. The slow spread of standardization might be illustrated by the fact that throughout the “long” eighteenth century commentators claimed that attention to correctness was new. In 1672 John Dryden characterized his age as the first to attend to issues of correctness: For all writers have their imperfections and failings but I may safely conclude in the general [sic], that our improprieties are less frequent, and less gross than theirs. One Testimony of this is undeniable, that we are the first who have observ’d them. and, certainly, to observe errours is a great step to the correcting of them.  (Dryden 1672: 163)

Almost ninety years later, in 1759, a reviewer of Samuel Butler’s works also asserted that his attention to accuracy was a relatively recent trend: In a word, with all his faults, [Butler] was a true genius: and had he lived and wrote [sic] in these more polished times, in which accuracy of composition, and neatness of expression are more attended to than they were in Butler’s days, his droll humour, his extensive reading, and his uncommon spirit, would doubtless have rendered him the delight and ornament of the age. (Anon. 1759b)

Standards of grammatical accuracy were established gradually. Although this reviewer was attentive to error, he used a verb form that was among those removed from editions of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) (Eaves and Kimpel 1967: 64). However, past participial wrote was not yet widely or explicitly proscribed and still appeared in the prose of educated writers (Gustafsson 2002: 268–273; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2002: 462–463, 465–467). Like eighteenth-century reviewers, modern critics of published texts can also identify and interpret the presence of typos, unconventional lexis, and of grammatical variants that are felt to be more colloquial than incorrect. However, other non-standard grammatical variants rarely appear in published print because



How book reviewers became language guardians

English has been standardized and because publishers hire editors to ensure that authors meet those standards. With the rise of the internet and associated modes of publication, modern critics do face issues similar to those of eighteenth-century print culture. Publication unmediated by editors means that non-standard language is more likely to become public. It is obviously beyond the scope of this essay to consider whether correspondingly postmodern modes of criticism have arisen and to what extent they are attentive to grammar. But it is useful to keep the internet in mind as a rough analogy for early print culture. Both mediums are vehicles for publication by authors perceived to represent groups previously un(der)represented in public, and for language that is perceived to differ from and thus violate previously established conventions. The language itself can be regarded as a conveniently concrete symbol of the unfitness of a private writer to assume the authority and legitimacy of a published author. Good examples of publications with debatable legitimacy and authority are those hosted on noninstitutional websites. In this paper I am particularly interested in the process by which reviewers came to point out non-standard grammar and to infer from it (or pretend to) an author’s lack of education and professional incompetence. The following extracts epitomize some trends that were typical by the mid-century. The first extract below exemplifies the kinds of conclusions reviewers drew from an author’s nonstandard grammar as they performed their roles as judges for and entertainers to the public. But it would be an insult upon our readers to give farther specimens of a work, every page of which betrays the writer’s deficiency in grammar, stile, judgment, method, spirit, character, composition, and every necessary quality of an historian. It is sufficient, we may venture to pronounce, that whoever has treasured up any of the public news-papers, since the commencement of the rupture with France, possesses a more entertaining and instructive narrative, than what we have here presented, under the pompous title of A Complete History.  (Anon. 1761b)

Demonstrating one author’s self-consciousness about his language, the next extract attests to the influence of reviewers on print culture. Quoting the author, the reviewer italicized such non-standard forms as infalliable and Grammer. With the same means and ends as satire, this implicit criticism works to elevate and ally the reviewer and the reader, who (unlike the author) ostensibly did not need to be told that the forms are non-standard: … Mr Relly … freely owns his defects as a Writer, – which are, indeed, so many and so great, that he does not even ‘pretend to the abilities of falliable Authors.’ – However, if, notwithstanding this plain confession of his weakness – ‘some busy

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Critic, whose genius leads him ever in search of offal,’ – or – ‘the pidling ­Pedant who feeds on garbage,’ – should pretend to detect in his book, not only bad Grammer, (of which there is plenty) with inaccuracies in phrase, but even errors in judgment also; yet, he says, he has ‘an infalliable remedy in silence:’ to which we shall leave him, with our advice, never to break that, and Priscian’s head, at the (P. 1761) same time again.

I will consider elsewhere the grounds on which an author’s language was deemed – implicitly or explicitly – to be non-standard. Here I would like to emphasize that Mr Relly’s preemptive attack on linguistic critics not only confirms reviewers’ cultural influence but also reminds us that their roles were not unchallenged (Forster 1994). The first extract also hints at the cultural vulnerability of the periodical reviews. With the reference to newspapers, the reviewer quite typically distinguished and elevated the new reviews above other kinds of periodicals. That such qualities as permanence and elegance were at stake in contemporary print culture can be illustrated by the denigration in other reviews of the “temporary subjects” and linguistic “vulgarisms” characteristic of newspapers (Griffiths 1763; Anon. 1767a). Relly had preemptively attacked linguistic critics as “pidling Pedants”, and, as I will demonstrate below, he was not alone. Published authors’ anxiety about public criticism is utterly unsurprising. But his criticism of linguistic critics crystallizes some issues about the status of the book reviewer in the early 1750s, and why what we might think of as the full-blown linguistic criticism exemplified above did not develop immediately. Although the bookseller Griffiths’ Monthly Review appeared in 1749, in its early years most of its reviewers said relatively little about authors’ grammar. Indeed, scholars have argued that it was the Scot Tobias Smollett, the first editor of the Critical Review (1756), who introduced particularly detailed and lengthy grammatical criticism into the review genre (Spector 1966: 324–326; Basker 1988: 76–84; Donoghue 1996: 25). That there was indeed a market for what we might charitably call the public dissemination of linguistic standards can be confirmed by the speed with which the Monthly Review followed suit (Donoghue 1996: 26). Some scholars attribute what Spector describes as the Monthly’s initially more liberal stance to religious and political differences between the reviews: Spector contrasts the Monthly’s more “commercial” concerns with the Critical’s conservatism; Donoghue argues that the nonconformist Monthly initially promoted an ideology of reading based on information-gathering as opposed to clarifying social hierarchies (Spector 1966: 324; Donoghue 1995: 59–60; but cf. Forster 1994: 179–180). In this paper I would like to contextualize and synthesize scholarly explanations for the relatively muted linguistic criticism in the first volumes of the pioneering Monthly Review. By doing this, I will not only enrich the



How book reviewers became language guardians

description of the linguistic critic but also explain some relationships between the quintessentially eighteenth-century phenomena of satire and prescriptivism.

3.

Linguistic criticism in book reviews

3.1

The status of vernacular publications in English review periodicals

The fact that mid-century reviewers found a great deal of English to criticize reflects one of their self-professed roles: in the words of Griffiths, the first editor of the innovative Monthly Review (1749–1844), to provide for readers “a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out, that are worth notice” (Forster 2001: 173). In these mid-century review periodicals, reviews of books written in English outnumbered those in foreign or classical languages. According to Bloom (1957: 547), the public demand for contemporary literature explains the immediate popularity of the Monthly Review and its successful imitation by the Critical (1756–1817). That there was already a market for mediating modern literature is evident from some key features of the earlier Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907): new books had been listed since its inception (McIntosh 1998: 183), and reviews of some of them were reprinted from such other sources as newspapers. For instance, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1749, Albrecht von Haller’s review of Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), published in French in the Bibliothèque raisonée was printed in English (von Haller 1749; Dussinger 2004/2008). Indeed, Richardson’s Pamela (1740) had been reviewed in the earlier Works of the Learned (1737–1743), where in an otherwise descriptive summary of its plot, its language was described as “not altogether unexceptionable, but in several Place sinks below the Idea we are constrained to form of the Heroine who is supposed to write it” (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 29). However, as an object of critical interest both Pamela and her language were atypical: in these periodicals that preceded the Monthly and the Critical, relatively few vernacular texts of a popular kind had been considered (Donoghue 1996: 126–127). For instance, the review of the popular Pamela in the Works of the Learned was according to Keymer and Sabor “remarkable”, likely reflecting Richardson’s connections with its publisher. As its title indicates, that periodical generally “showed relatively little interest in contemporary literature, and largely ignored prose fiction. Its stock in trade was the approving summary of new works by (as the editors liked to put it) ‘the most eminent Writers’ of philosophy, science, divinity, history, and the like” (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 28). The low status of English relative to both Latin and French might be inferred both from the title of The Works of the Learned and by the fact

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that its title was a translation of Journal des sçavans. The great popularity of English might be inferred from the relatively short life of The Works of the Learned. In the mid-century, the content and tone of reviewers’ linguistic criticism indirectly reflected what the reviews confirm was intense anxiety about the influence of the market on contemporary English publication. We can infer that there was a market both for “low” books and for guides to them from Griffiths’ rephrasing of his mission statement a few months after the first number of the Monthly Review: the reviewers would “register all the new Things in general, without exception to any, on account of their lowness of rank, or price” (Forster 2001: 173). However, literature that was too “low” overtly offended the reviewers’ sense of professionalism: the fictional History of Betty Barnes (1753) was dismissed as “written for the kitchen”, while reviews of both Ann Shackleford’s Modern Art of Cookery Improved (1767) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755) were delegated to the “printer” by the reviewer (Anon. 1752; Anon. 1767c; Anon. 1755). The reviewers were particularly dismissive of newspapers and their “temporary subjects” and linguistic “vulgarisms”, perhaps reflecting the tenuous claim of periodicals to permanence in print culture (Anon. 1767b; Griffiths 1763). Reviewers were also keen to identify and expose “catch-penny scribblers” hired by booksellers and to distinguish them from “authors”. Doubly epitomizing this obsession is a pamphlet called The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated with Regard to ­Booksellers, The Stage, and The Public and its assessment by a Critical Reviewer: “this piece is not the production of a hackney’d writer” (Anon. 1758a).

3.2 The status of reviewers in the new reviews Reviewers’ scorn of scribblers was self-defensive, as Donoghue (1995: 64–65) has argued. Already a stigma in the literary republic, the association of money with criticism specifically undermined its claim to neutrality. Moreover, the review was a new genre, and especially given the regional and social marginality of many of the reviewers their position did not automatically come with cultural authority. While the Critical Reviewers were attacked as a “Cabal of refugee Scotchmen” (Forster 1994: 39) in a period of intense anti-Scotticism (Colley 1992: 117–132), the reviewers in the Monthly were dangerously close to Grub Street, being pieceworkers hired by the bookseller and former watchmaker Griffiths. One exchange that provides a snapshot of the period illustrates both the rivalry between the two periodicals and the role played in that rivalry by linguistic criticism, which could be interpreted as both superiority and pedantry. Perhaps questioning the ability of the British to write good English, an attack on the Critical Review denigrated the linguistic errors in its first number’s “lead article”, a review of ­Sheridan’s



How book reviewers became language guardians

British Education (1756) (Murdoch 1756a; Basker 1988: 53). A rebuttal by its editor ­ Smollett attributed the attack to a pedantic Monthly Reviewer, a “low-bred, pedantic Syntax-monger, retained as servant or associate by any bookseller, or bookseller’s wife, who may have an interest in decrying their performance” (Smollett 1756d). Because reviewers’ linguistic criticism sometimes reflects contemporary debates about literature as a “trade” and “profession”, in this paper I will sometimes epitomize the broad array of print culture with reviews of medical and agricultural works. As well as subtly thematizing the idea of improvement, both medical and agricultural works contrast the professional value of classical and practical learning. Did an apothecary’s practical training give him more authority than a physician in assessing the properties of spa waters? Was a learned physician’s gentlemanly air of more value in securing wealthy clients? The concurrent dispute over the restrictions on fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians raised issues about professionalism that resonate with the new “profession” of book reviewer (Hamilton 1951; Harley 1990; Corfield 1995; Burnham 1996).

3.3 The new reviews: (Re)forming the public taste? As Donoghue and others have argued, some reviewers attributed the popularity of vulgar authors to the influence of uneducated consumers: the figure of the chambermaid could epitomize bad readers and bad writers alike (Donoghue 1996: 42). Reviewers’ linguistic criticism must thus be contextualized within their self-professed roles not only of judging contemporary literature but also of improving contemporary literature by educating authors and readers alike. In suggestively defensive rhetoric, the reviewers define their roles as directed by the need for an improvement in public taste. In the Monthly Review, Goldsmith was to define “the true Critic’s province” as “To direct our taste and conduct the poet up to perfection” (Forster 2001: 181). The Critical Review claimed to “contribute towards the Formation of a public Taste, which is the best Patron of Genius (Donoghue 1996: 143)”, to “reform the taste of mankind”, expose the fraud of “every author who writes without talent”, and “heal the wounds they have made should his improvement entitle him to their favour” (Smollett 1756e).

3.4 Ascertaining linguistic and literary standards in the new reviews Reviewers used verbal criticism in their self-proclaimed mission to improve public taste. I will not relay the debates about (to use Hume’s phrasing in 1757) “the Standard of Taste” (Marshall 1997: 633–657; Patey 1997: 14–15): whether there were rules for good literature and (if there were) whether readers could or should

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be taught those rules so that good literature would be more popular. More relevant to this paper are other issues – whether there was a standard of language and (if there were) whether a text’s language could be used as a direct index of its content. Both the standard and its ideology were under development: “bad grammar” generally or poor language generally did not have the same significance for every reviewer or in every context. Moreover, as Meyers has observed, the perceived connections between language and content had been complicated by Locke’s assertion of the arbitrary connection between words and their referents (Meyers 1997). In some reviews there is little correlation between the quality of a text’s language and its content. Indeed, in less learned genres, poor grammar is potentially a sign of authenticity: as quoted by Corfield, “one Admiral in 1773 excused his errors in grammar with blunt pride: ‘A Man of War was my University’” (Corfield 1995: 189). As we will see below, reviewers often held lower class authors to lower standards: for instance, in both the Critical and Monthly Review the valuable content of Thomas Hitt’s agricultural writings is described as separable from its style. Moreover, even in the case of a more learned author, one reviewer claims to distinguish his “solid and deep thoughts” from his language: although his thoughts seem to be solid and deep, his expression is so embarrassed and confused, that we are at a loss, whether we have catched [sic] his real meaning. … In short, were this work cleared of some rubbish, were its excrescences reduced, its luxuriancies lopt off, and the whole brought into a neater and more commodious form, we needed not scruple to recommend it as the best system of the anatomy and physiology of the eye, that we have seen.  (Anon. 1759a)

However, despite these assertions of the relative independence of linguistic and literary merit, another review insists on the “inseparable connection betwixt truth and beauty, betwixt deformity and falsehood in writing, as well as every other art”, and “that as good sense will always express itself in good language, so inaccurate tautology or false grammar are the constant literary vehicles of nonsense” (Griffiths 1751). Other reviewers, quoted below, also used syntax that linked bad grammar with mediocre content. Of course, all of these comments must be contextualized within the dynamics of the individual review – a reviewer determined to denigrate a book could justify the bad review by finding some questionable language. Nevertheless, the fact that bad grammar could justify a negative review is one sign of its significance. Moreover, the fact that these contrasting opinions were articulated publicly and forcefully reflects both the topicality and the intensity of the subject of bad grammar.



How book reviewers became language guardians

3.5 Verbal criticism in the early Monthly Review:  Descriptive or prescriptive? Verbal criticism was relatively sporadic and muted in the first volumes of the Monthly Review. Nevertheless, its presence and its features confirm the observations of Forster and others – that from the beginning the Monthly Reviewers saw themselves as judges and educators, despite Griffiths’ claim in the periodical’s first issue that “we shall not, in the language of critics, pretend to describe, in terms of the art, the beauties or imperfections … of the production before us” but “extract from the work itself a few of such passages as we shall judge proper to give a tolerably adequate idea of the whole” (Forster 2001: 174). From Griffiths’ motivation to make a proclamation at all and from its quick inconsistency with practice, we might infer that the reviewers’ roles were both new and contested. The inconsistency also highlights the conflicting roles for readers: capable producers or anxious consumers of criticism? With respect to both language and content, select elements of the early Monthly Review appeared more descriptive than prescriptive. In the long reviews that began each month’s number, extracts typically comprised about 70–80% of the review (Basker 1988: 66–67) and were often framed by a sentence like “‘a few passages from the work will give the reader the best idea of it’ (MR 1, 1749: 461) or ‘we leave the reader to form his own judgment of it on others’” (MR 2, 1749– 1750: 331; Forster 2001: 180). When there is a linguistic judgment to be made, occasionally readers were left to make it themselves. For instance, in the first volume of the Monthly, a great number of words and phrases were italicized in an extract from William Duff ’s self-published serial history of Scotland: the reader might infer these to include concord errors, a contraction, nonemphatic do, not ... nor and no ... nor (Griffiths 1749a). The reader must also infer the error in what the reviewer describes as the “uncouth, ungrammatical title” of an agricultural essay: The Preparation of water for sprinkling the trees and the plants in which the seeds may be settled before they are sown and planted, until they swell (P. 1754). These reviews to some extent implicate the reader as a philological critic: it is the reader who must interpret the significance of the italics and identify the bad grammar of the title. In both cases, the reader’s involvement diffuses what might well be construed as the reviewer’s undue attention to detail. However, because it was the reviewer who added the italics to the first review and described as “uncouth” and “ungrammatical” the title of the second, even these reviews reveal the reviewers in what must have been their contested role of verbal critics. Betraying an immediate discrepancy between the journal’s precept and practice, the review of Duff was “almost certainly” written by Griffiths (McIntosh 1998: 182–183). Editors’

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­annotations have disclosed the identities of otherwise anonymous reviewers in both the Monthly (Nangle 1934) and the Critical (e.g. Roper 1959; Basker 1988). More typically, even in the early years of the Monthly, its reviewers articulate their judgments quite explicitly. For instance, by introducing a long excerpt with obviously ironic phrasing the reviewer might simultaneously entertain, flatter, and educate readers by subtly directing their judgment. In spite of describing A Dialogue between the Gallows and a Free-thinker as “this excellent” and “learned work” and a slang word in it as “Another of this writer’s elegancies”, the further definition of elegancies as “the language of Jonathan Wilde” (a criminal) clearly confirms the reviewer’s negative opinion (Griffiths 1749b). Similarly, after being presented with a heavily-italicized extract from a controversial religious pamphlet, the reader is invited to judge the writer’s “genteel manner of writing, and some of those elegant and polite phrases made use of by this worthy presbyter of the church of England”. Among the examples are such terms of abuse as “insolent schismatic, skeptical trifler, paultry sneerer” and “impertinent caviller”, making it very clear that the author is not to be thought of as polite or genteel (Rose 1752a). It should be pointed out that invective pervaded the reviews despite reviewers’ ostensible disapproval of it. The functions of insults are discussed further below, when I explain why reviewers and satirists had much in common. Reviewers and authors were aware of the bad reputation of verbal criticism (see Section 1 above). One early review refers to Pope’s “Word catchers” (Griffiths 1749c), another author quotes his friend Lord Bolingbroke’s contempt for “antiquaries, chronologers, critics, grammarians, compilers of dictionaries, and reviewers and publishers of manuscripts” (Rose 1753). Indeed, Pope was frequently quoted – by hostile authors as well as by reviewers keen to portray themselves as opposed to Grub Street (Donoghue 1996: 37). Particularly popular were the lines from Arbuthnot describing verbal critics: “Each Wight who reads not, and but scans and spells, / Each Word-catcher that lives on syllables” (Forster 1989: 85). Indeed, reviewers criticized authors who criticized each other’s language: following a dispute between rival editors of Buchanan’s history of Scotland, the reviewer describes one book as “a long and tedious detail of particulars, many of them very minute and trifling” and another as “a number of criticisms, many of them very trifling ones, on nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, &c.” (Rose 1755). In his response to the Critical Review’s verbal criticism of his own work (Smollett 1758), the angry author (and Monthly Reviewer) William Kenrick directly and publicly correlates linguistic criticism and critical incompetence: reviewers are accused of “pick[ing] out a few inaccuracies of stile; to make a parade of philological learning with” in order to disguise their lack of “time”, “inclination”, or “comprehen[sion]” of the work at hand (Forster 1994: 40). Indeed, as McIntosh has observed, the



How book reviewers became language guardians

very extensive italicization in the review of Duff ’s (anti-Buchananite) history was atypical of the early years of review criticism (McIntosh 1998: 183).

3.6 Critics’ social inferences from linguistic criticism:  Education and region Nevertheless, despite the cultural stigma of pedantry we find many kinds of linguistic criticism in the early Monthly Review. In some of the very brief reviews necessary for the broad coverage of contemporary publications, reviewers used parallel syntax to correlate bad language with unsatisfactory content: a “layman” is dismissed by Flexman as ignorant equally of “the idioms of the language he writes in”, “the common rudiments of grammar” and “the subjects on which he professes to treat” in his Moral Discourse on the Attributes of God (Flexman 1754a), while the author of a political pamphlet is dismissed by Tourneyser (1755) “as ignorant of the historical facts which he pretends to quote, as he is defective in argument, and illiterate in respect to grammar”. The fact that all of the reviews were printed anonymously undoubtedly incited the critics to candour. According to Forster (1989: 66; 2001: 18) and Donoghue (1996: 37), the anonymity of individual reviewers contributed to the sense of the reviews as (in Forster’s words) “giant personified figures” or institutions. As verbal critics, reviewers often marked boundaries in the “literary republic” by implying that there were standards for works published in England. Their rhetoric made the knowledge and mastery of “good English” an index of professionalism for themselves. As exemplified in a review of a medical treatise, in a variation of a frequently-used formula Kirkpatrick (1758a) both denigrates Stevens’ language and thematizes professionalism: “We recommend it to him, to prescribe rather than to publish”. The formula was flexible: some posthumous letters are described as “more worthy of being circulated among private friends than being published (Anon. 1757a)”, while a clergyman’s sermons are described as “written rather for the Pulpit than the Press, with an Air of Familiarity that is very excuseable between old Acquaintance (as we may suppose a Rector and his Parish to be) but which must be disagreeable to a stranger” (Francklin 1756). The structure implicitly associates the reviewers, as judges, with language that is fit for publication. Reviewers implied that standards were violated very often from beyond or from below – by writers born outside England or lacking a proper education. Bad grammar might be found in texts by authors who were Irish or Scottish or, in the case of the medical writer Diederick Wessel Linden, German. While Linden’s reviewer acknowledges the foreigner’s apology for “any blemishes in style” and pardons his want of “elegant, or very apt expression”, the “many ­ungrammatical

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abuses” are beyond the pale and “in decency to his readers, should have been corrected by some friend before publication” (Kirkpatrick 1751). Reviewers also represented the English of some Scottish and Irish authors as non-standard. As we have seen, William Duff ’s self-published history of Scotland attracted the most prominent verbal criticism in the early years of the Monthly. Many Irish and Scottish medical writers were also among the targets of reviewers’ verbal criticism. According to the review, in his Dublin-printed New Treatise of the Glaucoma [1750], the Irish Catholic surgeon Sylvester O’Halloran “often wants English idiom and grammar, whence his sentences are sometimes irrelative and scarcely intelligible” (Kirkpatrick 1753). William Scott’s Dissertation on the Scrofula (1759) contains or rather than nor and would rather than should: the reviewer adds that “These, with several other expressions that might be referred to, are not English idioms; neither are we certain that all of them are Scotch” (Kirkpatrick 1759b). The Critical Reviewer of the work assumes that Scott is “a young practitioner from the college of Edinburgh, brim-full with reading and theory” (Anon. 1759c). Indeed, while reviewers could correlate lexical variation with regional variation, they more often correlated grammatical variation with education. Better language is expected of well-educated authors. Reviewing The Secret Expedition [1757?] by an author describing himself as both “a commissioned officer” and “graduate of the university”, the reviewer claims that “though slips in language will be pardoned in a military man, the reader will expect good grammar and orthography in the productions of a graduate of the university” (Anon. 1757b). In a 1770 review of a supposedly verbatim transcript of the Grosvenor divorce case [1770], the presence of contractions and confused forms of lay and lie allows the reviewer to insult hairdressers, newspaper writers, and Lord Mansfield simultaneously (Anon. 1770). Reviews which draw attention to a well-born writer’s bad grammar underline reviewers’ investment in education and in “worth” over “birth”. Lord Mansfield illustrates the social importance of education: though the son of a viscount, his earldom was the consequence of his legal brilliance (Oldham 2004/2008). The career of the Monthly’s Owen Ruffhead attests to the cultural importance of education: his father, a royal baker, invested his lottery winnings in his son’s legal education (Jones 2004/2008). In a 1759 review of an edited memoir, Ruffhead claimed to judge leisured authors by higher standards than professional authors: They, who are born to ease and affluence, who enjoy otium cum dignitate have time to be accurate. They may correct at their leisure and publish when they . Dates of publication have been taken from the English Short Title Catalogue.



How book reviewers became language guardians

please; but writers whose talents, perhaps constitute all their fortune, cannot always command such correctness. They may be obliged to publish to the world what they have not sufficiently revised in their closets. Errors in them are more venial, and their writings should be viewed with a more indulgent eye.  (Ruffhead 1759)

Although the well-born editor had recently started to draw a government pension, his previous and longstanding financial distress reminds us that there is often not a connection between birth, education, wealth, and status (Smith 2004/2008). By prioritizing education and displaying their own, reviewers enhanced their standing in the literary republic. Typically, reviewers claimed that language is an index of an author’s education and a work’s quality. A Letter from a Physician in the Highlands [1752?] “does not appear to have been wrote [sic] by a physician; the style and expression being too mean and inaccurate to render it digestible by readers who have any tolerable acquaintance with medicine” (Kirkpatrick 1752). Its language was deemed unacceptable to readers not because the author was “in the Highlands” but because it was “mean”, unbefitting a physician. Indeed, in his review of the Irish O’Halloran, it is possible that the anonymous reviewer was amusing himself by representing the author’s language as “scarcely intelligible”: “if the English is not his vernacular language, great allowance must be made for it” (Kirkpatrick 1753). This particular reviewer knew that a Celtic medic could write good English: the author of all of the reviews I have quoted in the preceding paragraphs was the Irish medical writer James Kirkpatrick, who as a reviewer in the early years of the Monthly was more attentive to grammar than many of his colleagues. Quoting Leonard’s (1962: 174) assertion that linguistic battles were “fought most hotly by persons who had had to earn and prove their gentility”, Sorensen (2000: 106, 111) has argued that regionally-marginal reviewers secured cultural authority by emphasizing class and education, “rewriting spatial dichotomy in social terms”. While the Critical Review had been co-founded and was largely staffed by Scots, Smollett made a particular point of trying to hire educated Scots (Basker 1988: 55–56). The increased attention to language by the Critical Review (e.g. Smollett 1756b, 1756d, 1756f; Armstrong 1756a) had an immediate impact on the Monthly: more reviewers attended to grammar and long lists of errors become another prominent form of verbal criticism.

3.7 Verbal criticism of professional writing: Medical authors and reviewers Although reviewers certainly correlated bad English with a lack of a “learned” education, in tension with the ideology of a “standard” is the fact that good

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g­ rammar was not necessarily expected in more “practical” contexts. As noted above in Section 3.3, some anxious authors pre-empted linguistic criticism by prioritizing their practical expertise: for instance, one military writer claims that he was unable to study “polite literature” and acquire “correctness of stile” because of the demands of his early “military genius” (P. 1755). In contrast to the higher linguistic standards expected of the better-born Robert Maxwell’s treatise on husbandry (P. 1759; Smollett 1759), both the Monthly and the Critical Review have similar responses to Thomas Hitt’s Treatise of Husbandry (1760): Mr Hitt, though no Scholar, is a very sensible man, and seems to understand the nature and proper culture of different sorts of land perfectly well. It is a pity, indeed, that he has not a more agreeable method of communicating his knowledge; for his stile is frequently inaccurate, and too often ungrammatical. But as it seldom happens that your learned Clerks know much of husbandry, we ought to think ourselves obliged to Mr Hitt for giving us the result of many years experience on a subject of no small importance, even in a national view. We could wish, however, that if this piece should happen to arrive at a second edition, (as his former, upon Fruit-trees, has done) he would be so just to himself and the public, as to get it revised by some person better acquainted with the rules of writing, than a mere practical Gardener or Husbandman can be supposed to be.  (P. 1760; see also Anon. 1760)

Like the special treatment of women authors, which I have discussed elsewhere (Percy 2000), these lower expectations of certain classes of writers mark particularly prominent boundaries. I would argue that the implication that not everyone can write well enhances the social capital of good grammar for reviewers in their quest for professional legitimacy. As critics of an author’s grammar, reviewers were often making a point about the author’s education and thus about the content more generally of his or her writing. Very occasionally a specific grammatical variant is criticized because it obscured a work’s content. From Linden’s Treatise on … Medicinal Medical Waters (1756), Kirkpatrick enumerated examples whereby “some of his medical notions are either essentially wrong, or so expressed as to seem such”: the only grammatical example, “an obstruction in the nervous fluid” to “of the nervous fluid”, is perhaps more an issue of lexis (Kirkpatrick 1755b). In works of religious controversy, a phrase like “that God” might confuse the argument of The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Asserted and Defended [1755] (Flexman 1754b); the subjunctive verb in the phrase “Cursed be Canaan” would be better rendered in the indicative, as a prediction (Rose 1752b). Historians are criticized for using inappropriate or inconsistent verb tenses (e.g. shifting from is to was…) (P. 1755; see also Griffiths 1749a).



How book reviewers became language guardians

However, any connection between good grammar and professional writing is usually more general. From my reading, the issues are brought into fine focus with respect to medical writing. According to some reviewers, medicine’s connections with Latin and Latin’s with grammar implied that good physicians should write good English. For instance, reviewing Reflections on Slow and Painful ­ Labours [1755] by the “young” medical writer Giles Watts, the reviewer claimed to have found some errors in his Latin and some “ungrammatical escapes in his [­English]” then redefined as “a few peculiarities of idiom, which may be right elsewhere, tho’ they rarely occur in good English books”, “which surprize us the more from a gentleman who deals in Greek and Latin” (Kirkpatrick 1755a). Elsewhere we find even more explicit connections between good English and good medicine. After criticizing the grammar of Stevens’ Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of Bath-Waters (1758), Kirkpatrick spelled out why “a physician in print” should attend to his English: “Very seriously, people of the best reflection will find it difficult to conceive, that any person who, in a learned profession, manifests an ­ignorance of his mother-tongue, in which he daily converses, should attain an essential knowlege of diseases, and a certain method of curing or mitigating them, in their utmost complexity and extent”. Perhaps justifying his pedantry, ­Kirkpatrick then quoted from “a modern writer”: Though it is not really necessary for a physician to have all the flowers of an orator, nor the critical correctness of a philologist; yet, to appear with the least suitable dignity, he should be qualified with sufficient reason and erudition to write (if he must needs write) with perspicuity at least; and should have such an intimacy with his own language, especially where he affects to meddle with Latin, as to make him grammatical and above contempt.  (Kirkpatrick, Barrowby and Schomberg 1746; Kirkpatrick 1758b)

That Kirkpatrick provides textual support for his pedantry suggests that at some level he was defensive. That the source was one contribution to a pamphlet war spells out the similarities between periodical criticism and aggressive polemic. That Kirkpatrick had to draw on a source of which he was likely a co-author (Brunton 2004) suggests that standardizing medical language was a relatively new issue. Certainly it was a vexed one.

3.8 Authors’ responses to linguistic criticism From responses to the reviews and from the reviews themselves, it would seem that some authors did not expect their English to be held to high standards (­Forster 1994). Like the military writer Thomas More Molyneux (quoted by Berkenhout 1759), one medical writer argued that the genre’s practical

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­importance demanded more speed than elegance in publication. As quoted in the Monthly Review of his Treatise of Midwifery [1754], Benjamin Pugh argued in his preface “that every new discovery, how small soever, ought to be made public without fear of censure or criticism, if tending to the general good of mankind” – in other words, that saving newborn babies with large heads was more important than polishing one’s style (Kirkpatrick 1754). That another scientific author published a letter in the General Evening Post and that Smollett responded to it in the Critical Review is a good indicator that the existence and importance of a “standard” was contested. Pretending that the letter signed by J. Parsons was so ridiculous that it must have been submitted maliciously, Smollett reported one of its elements of “strange doctrine”: The next strange doctrine which this disguised enemy of Dr. Parsons advances, is, that a man, who writes of matters of importance, ought not to trouble his head about diction: that is to say, if your intention is to communicate knowledge, no matter whether you be, or be not, understood: for, we apprehend, that diction is the vehicle in which an author’s meaning is conveyed; and if no regard is to be paid to this vehicle, it may be conveyed in Arabic as well as in English.  (Smollett 1756g)

Smollett’s two references to the Irish in the course of his response continue his digs at “the Doctor’s own extensive knowledge”; though English-born, James Parsons had been brought up in Ireland (Hudson 2004).

4.

Reviewers’ use of satire

4.1

Introduction

Periodical reviewers are and were journalists as well as critics. The sustained mockery of Parsons by the novelist Smollett is a good example of how eighteenthcentury reviewers used satiric techniques to entertain as well as to instruct. Like the formula that directed physicians to prescribe rather than to publish, extended metaphors often linked an author’s bad writing to his or her identity or professed profession. For instance, in a notably but by no means uniquely nasty review of a novel called Memoirs of a Young Lady of Family [1758], the reviewer undermined the novel’s pretensions to gentility and conflates what he figures as the “chamber-maid” reader and author, the not-so-genteel “young lady who tells the story”, and a hen: P. 165, ‘I laid in the same room with my benefactress.’ – by which it might possibly be understood, that the young lady who tells the story, had gracelessly laid



How book reviewers became language guardians

an egg in the chamber of her benefactress. Nor is this an accident or error of the press; but the common language of the narrative; for we find the same impropriety in other parts of the book, for instance, page 189, ‘I laid in her apartment:’ – Page 155. ‘She ordered a tent-bed to be put up in her room, for me to lay (Anon. 1758b) upon.’ – A hen might have said so with propriety. 

The reviewer’s extended metaphor connected bad grammar with artless reproduction, and perhaps thus implicitly with the popular print culture that their role was to control. These extended metaphors were not confined to reviews of books by uneducated authors. Medical writing furnished reviewers with colourful analogies. Reviewing Stevens’ Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of the Bath-Waters (1758), Kirkpatrick compared his writing to some of the illnesses he describes and his own reviewerly advice as like a physician’s prescription: But should he fail to amend by this [friendly] prescription [against publishing], we can only advise him to apply himself to the discovery of some mineral water, that may prove as prevalent against a particular cacoethes, as he supposes Bathwaters in a cachexy …  (Kirkpatrick 1758b)

Similarly, reviewing Thomas Neale’s Practical Treatise on the Venereal Disease (1756), Armstrong compared the writing to a discharge: The writing runs as foul as the disease it treats of, and is no better than, to use the author’s words, a gonorrhaea fluor, a gonorrhaea gleet, a fluor gleet, or a ­fluor mucus. A p-x on such writing! And yet, though this author writes without knowledge, judgment, common sense, decency, or language, he may turn out a thriving practitioner in this merit-distinguishing metropolis. But that our readers may judge whether this censure is too severe or not, we shall lay before them a few specimens of Mr. Neale’s erudition, beginning with the title leaf, in which is considered the mischievous consequences of an improper and injudicious manage(Armstrong 1756b) ment.

This is a typical review both in its savage assault on an author and its conflicting representation of readers. Armstrong accused common consumers of culpability in the rise of low writing with his ironic description of the “merit-distinguishing metropolis”, but flatters “our readers” by inferring their ability to spot the concord error. Conflicting representations of readers were common, as Forster observes: “[i]n the earliest days the reviewers … liked at least to pretend that the public … would form appropriate judgements, although there are many indications that they believed nothing of the sort” (Forster 2001: 185). This tension arises from the fact that readers were purchasers of the periodicals as well as students of the reviewers. As Sommerville (1996: 14) has observed of the periodical forms, “[t]he dynamics of periodicity comes from the need to flatter readers” and to portray

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them as having “intelligence, knowledge, and] good judgment”. Readers needed to be flattered and entertained as well as informed and educated. The prevalence of invective in eighteenth-century print culture did not mean that it was endurable to its victims. Both its impact and its potential influence can be gauged by the number and intensity of responses (Basker 1988: 175–178; ­Forster 1994). Outraged authors responded to the reviews: in her survey of the earliest responses, Forster quotes their numerous accusations of reviewers’ “­Malice” and “Malevolence”, attributed often to “envy” and inability to make judgments of more substance (Forster 1994: 40–42). It is important to remember that these new reviews did not automatically secure cultural authority.

4.2 Reviewers as journalists and entertainers These extended metaphors and extensive invective demonstrate how satiric techniques furthered the mid-century reviewers’ simultaneous roles of entertainer, ­ educator, and cultural upstarts. Their sheer nastiness had several functions. One was entertainment. In his anatomy of The News Revolution in England, ­Sommerville (1996: 9) argues that periodical literature necessarily “highlight[s] conflicts” in order to “insure further reports” and greater sales. As quoted by ­Forster (1994: 42–43), the author Thomas Marriott accused reviewers of “printing scurrilous ­Abuses” to “promote the Sale” of the journal by “gratif[ying] some malevolent Readers”. Certainly the need to please the broad audience for the new reviews must have been a factor, as Basker observers. Documenting some of ­Tobias Smollett’s more entertaining reviews, Basker also reminds us that he had first been a novelist, and speculates that he sometimes used satire as “an entertaining alternative to tedious fault finding or plain condemnation” (Basker 1988: 71–75).

4.3 Reviewers as educators Yet satire also had serious functions in society, at least according to its practitioners. To paraphrase Bogel’s paraphrase of one common theory of satire, if satirists publicly exposed and condemned unworthy objects, perhaps readers would learn to recognize and reject them and the satirized figures would have to improve (Bogel 2001: 3). Reviewers’ invective reflected their self-professed mandate to improve public taste by educating authors and readers. Surveying their writings, Forster reports reviewers’ self-descriptions as therefore duty-bound to treat bad authors harshly (Forster 2001: 186). Some reviewers describe it as their professional “duty” to enumerate “inelegancies” or “errors”, despite a “reluctance” undoubtedly related to the reputation of verbal critics as pedants (Berkenhout 1759;



How book reviewers became language guardians

Ruffhead 1760). Their prose was often composed with a seriousness of tone: one Critical Reviewer, for instance, claims that reviewers “look on themselves to be in some measure responsible for the morals as well as the taste of their readers” (Forster 2001: 181–187). Smollett’s attitude to language helps to illuminate the perceived connections between morals and literature. Explaining Smollett’s linguistic “fastidiousness”, Basker (1988: 80) argues that he had a “special view of the role of language in transmitting knowledge and preserving civilization” and thus “acted more out of principle than pettiness”. Such connections between language, publication, and civilization also explain the apocalyptic tone of Pope’s jeremiad against modern print culture, the Dunciad (1728–1743). In their self-professed roles as educators, some reviewers entrenched hierarchies within the literary republic by representing some categories of authors as unable to improve themselves. The foreign physician Linden, the author of a work on mineral water, is redirected from “authorism” to “mines and metallurgy” and reproved for not having had the “ungrammatical abuses” in his work on mineral water “corrected by some friend before publication” (Kirkpatrick 1751; see also Aikin and Bewley 1777). As we have seen, the agricultural writer Hitt is advised by both the Monthly and the Critical Review to “some person better acquainted with the rules of writing, than a mere practical Gardener or Husbandman can be supposed to be” (P. 1760; Anon. 1760; see also N. 1778, N. 1785). Women writers were the object of conflicting rhetoric: their cultural status as bodies conflicted with and undermined their status as symbols of educability. On one hand, when reviewers compared their writing to reproduction (see Section 4.1 above) and their linguistic infelicities to such physical features as freckles, they implied that women’s writing was more the product of nature than of nurture. On the other hand, in an age that celebrated cultural progress and epitomized it with the “taste” of some women “for every branch of polite literature” and ability to “write correctly and elegantly”, some women writers were at least sometimes treated as being capable of improvement. While Anne Penny’s double negation and other infelicities are compared by the Critical Review to “freckles in a fine face”, it is Penny’s “little performance” they use to epitomize women’s abilities (Anon. 1761a); moreover, a Monthly Review of a later publication of Penny’s advises her to “finish her future productions with greater care; as we really believe her capable of more correctness and elegance than she has manifested on the present occasion” (Anon. 1762). In short, the social categories of class and gender were highlighted by reviewers’ predictions of future improvement; these representations in turn often reinforced reviewers’ elevated status as educated males. Reviewers sometimes “schooled” authors whose profiles were very similar to their own. One obvious reason for this is their own expertise in the author’s field: as we have seen, in his reviews of medical books the medical writer ­Kirkpatrick

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was attentive to their authors’ grammar. However, it is worth emphasizing the particular vigour with which Smollett and the Critical Review criticized the ­language of Scottish authors. Because of widespread anxiety about the influence of Scots on English culture, Scottish authors found themselves the object of vigorous criticism (Basker 1988: 83; Beal 2004: 96–97). But it is well documented that the most vitriolic attackers of Scotticisms were Scots themselves. For instance, ­David Hume published a list of Scotticisms in 1752 and included it in what Moody notes was “only some copies” of his Political Discourses (1752), in editions of his oft-revised Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), and (reprinted with additions) in the Scots Magazine (1760) and the Aberdeen Magazine (1761) (Basker 1988: 82–83, 297; Moody 1974: 68 n. 4). According to Basker, Smollett’s “unflagging attentiveness to language” “verg[ed] on obsession” and “the use of ­Scotticisms” was “[t]he real bugbear of Smollett’s campaign to purify and preserve the English language” (Basker 1988: 76, 82). From the first volume, he and the other Critical Reviewers provided long lists of linguistic details (e.g. ­Smollett 1756b, 1756d, 1756f; Armstrong 1756a) and correlated many with Scottish authorship. For instance, Smollett argues that an English reader will be at a loss to understand the Scottish words and technical terms in Francis Home’s Experiments on Bleaching [1756] (Smollett 1756a). These correlations were not always correct: despite such tell-tale signs as the verb adduce, the anonymous author of Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope [1756] was not a Scot but Joseph Warton (Smollett 1756c; Basker 1988: 82–83). Reviewers proclaimed themselves as educators of their peers for several reasons. As McIntosh has observed, many guides to the English language were written both for and from the “margins” (McIntosh 1998: 178). Given the evidence that we have already seen of the difficulties that writers of all nations faced in writing correct English, it is not surprising to find a Scot like Smollett keen to publicize linguistic standards to fellow Scots. Indeed, what Basker describes as the “lead review” in the first number of this new periodical, of British Education (1756) by the Irishman Thomas Sheridan, features a text whose title thematizes the desirability and possibility of the English language to be standardized and mastered by British citizens (Basker 1988: 53, 76). The misclassification of Warton is proof that the boundary between Scottish and English writing was certainly permeable. So too was the ability of some Scottish authors to write good English, proved by the employment of Scots as proofreaders (e.g. Sher 2006: 124–125, 617) and by favourable reviews in both the Critical and the Monthly. Such other Critical Reviewers as Murdoch and Derrick find the language of other Scots needing “very little indulgence” and “in general sterling” (Murdoch 1756b; Derrick 1756). A Monthly Reviewer, suggesting some corrections for the next edition of Maxwell’s Practical Husbandman (1757), argues that Scotsmen can write English:



How book reviewers became language guardians

“how difficult soever it may be for a North-Briton to speak good English, we have lately had the pleasure of being thoroughly convinced, that many of them can write it with great ease, as well as elegance” (P. 1759). Of course, these positive statements of potential often appeared in negative reviews.

4.4 Reviewers as self-defensive satirists Satiric theory supports a final reason for some reviewers’ particular criticism of their peers – Kirkpatrick of medical men, Smollett of Scots. Because reviewers were hired to assess books in their areas of expertise, they had much in common with authors. Whatever authority they possessed derived more from their anonymity and from their journals’ consequent status as “institutions”. However, although the review genre was popular, it was relatively new and potentially low in its links with the market. In order to secure authority, reviewers needed to differentiate and elevate themselves from their subjects (Donoghue 1996: 34–37). With the Monthly accused of being tainted by the market and the Critical of being staffed by and biased towards Scots, it is not surprising that reviewers attacked “hireling” and “North British” authors for deviating from perceived standards. Their attacks on authors can be interpreted as acts of self-definition, a scenario supported by Bogel’s “revised scenario” of Augustan satire. Satire “does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference:” The crucial fact is not that satirists find folly or wickedness in the world and then wish to expose that alien something. Instead, satirists identify in the world something or someone that is both unattractive and curiously or dangerously like them, or like the culture or subculture that they identify with or speak for … (Bogel 2001: 41) something, then, that is not alien enough.

“Good grammar” is among the ostensible standards from which certain authors are represented as deviating. Thus, reviewers’ potentially pedantic verbal criticism had a positive function in the context of their self-presentation as educators and as reformers of print culture. Some reviewers tempered the negative connotations of their verbal criticism by presenting it as a suggestion for the author’s next publication. Some tutelage was abusive: for instance, in the context of the very negative review that compared Stevens’ medical publications to diarrhea, Kirkpatrick mockingly enumerated the author’s errors: We hope too, as a proof of his future progress in the rudiments of literature, that in his next public exercise … he will shew himself a master of the first concord, or

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agreement in the nominative case and the verb in number and person, which he has failed to do in some of his present pages: in expectation of which ­amendment, we suppress several hundred instances of this great fault, or discord. … He is not altogether so happy in a proper application of relatives to their antecedents, which generally referring to brutes and inanimate things, who to persons; but we find ‘persons which bathe,’ p. 74, ‘hysterical women which labour,’ p. 114. There occur besides several other faults in the regimen of our language: we have hinted at one in the dedication: and we are told, p. 97. ‘We should not lay all the blame for this (Kirkpatrick 1758b) (i.e. sterility) to the females.

However, in other reviews, corrections are sometimes suggested in a somewhat less patronizing tone: Hence, as we may possibly see some other publications from this gentleman, in his profession, we would take the friendly liberty of advising him to a little more accuracy in his expression, which though not often improper, as our citations may evidence, will here and there admit of some improvement. For instance, we should rather have wrote [sic] nor, after neither, p. 11. l. 13 than or, l. 17, as the last member of that period manifestly contains a negative assertion. … We have also been obliged sometimes in reading this little tract, to supply a few words, that seemed necessary to preserve the sense and the Syntax, as at p. 47–55–101. And as none of these ellipses are [sic] mentioned among the errata of the press, we suppose they were little escapes in the copy, which may be very easily avoided upon another occasion, as they can be owing solely to inadvertency on this.  (Kirkpatrick 1761)

Other reviews supply similar instruction in the light of the likelihood of “a second edition of [the author’s] valuable work” (Kirkpatrick 1759a), or “a future edition” (Langhorne 1761). According to Trolander and Tenger (2007: 15, 19), private criticism from a friend was acceptable as it pre-empted humiliation in public. “Even satiric modes of censure sought to justify themselves as though they were sanctioned by some personal connection to the author in question[.]” By presenting public verbal criticism as a “friendly” suggestion for later revision, perhaps reviewers might have preemptively deflected charges of pedantry and impoliteness. By illustrating and taking credit for authors’ subsequent improvement, reviewers ‘proved’ their own worth. Reviewing yet another treatise by Stevens, Kirkpatrick (1760) pronounced rather grudgingly that “his orthography, and his Grammar, in general, tho’ not yet fully correct, are less reprehensible in this than in his former performances: to which, we think, our strictures on them must have contributed”.



5.

How book reviewers became language guardians

Conclusion: Summary and implications

Many scholars have observed that when “pedantic” criticism became a key feature of mid-century English grammars, the production of grammar books became important to educators (Fitzmaurice 1998; Watts 1999, 2002). This paper, acknowledging the previously dubious status of verbal criticism in English print culture, has described how the ideology of standardization was appropriated by anonymous critics in the new periodical reviews. Although reviewers often used language as a seemingly objective index of a book’s quality and its writer’s education, such criticism was sometimes relayed in subjective, satirical tones. The satiric perspective in part reflected reviewers’ self-proclaimed roles as educators, publicly punishing individuals in order to raise the general standards of both writing and reading in a market that has been described as increasingly socially heterogeneous. Reviewers’ public humiliation of authors also reflected their status as periodical journalists, expected to entertain their readers and purchasers. Indeed, reviewers may also have mocked authors in order to differentiate and elevate themselves; according to Bogel (2001: 21), satire creates difference as much as registers it. That the criticism of language in the Monthly and the Critical Review was anonymous may have helped to transform verbal critics from petty pedants into more influential institutions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the extent to which the reviews might have influenced the proliferation of prescriptive grammars in the next decades. Elsewhere (Percy 2009) I have argued that reviewers’ use of quotations as negative examples predated those in Lowth’s very influential grammar of 1762. Moreover, although the reviewers hold up good grammar as an ideal they often imply that it is an elusive one. Reflecting the role of education as a determiner of social position, some reviews construct good English as attainable. However, certain socially-defined groups of authors are described as unable to write good English without help. In part the elusiveness of good English might reflect what has been described as the “permanent mode” of “longing” that is supposed to characterize consumer culture generally and periodical literature specifically (quoted by Donoghue 1995: 71). Perhaps more relevantly, the rarity of good grammar added to its value and thus to the social capital of those people who had it – such as the periodical reviewers.

References Aikin, John and Bewley, William. 1777. “Review of Metallurgic Chemistry, Being a System of Mineralogy, by Christlieb Ehregott Gellert, trans. J. Seiferth.” Monthly Review 56: 12–14.

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Anon. 1752. “Review of The History of Betty Barnes.” Monthly Review 7: 470. Anon. 1753. “Review of Canning’s Magazine.” Monthly Review 9: 146. Anon. 1755. “Review of The Printer’s Grammar, by John Smith.” Monthly Review 13: 80. Anon. 1757a. “Review of Letters on Several Occasions, by the Late Sir William Freeman.” Critical Review 4: 311–318. Anon. 1757b. “Review of The Secret Expedition Impartially Disclos’d ... By a Commissioned Officer on Board the Fleet, and Graduate of the University.” Critical Review 4: 551–552. Anon. 1758a. “Review of The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated with Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public.” Critical Review 5: 175. Anon. 1758b. “Review of Memoirs of a Young Lady of Family.” Monthly Review 18: 182–183. Anon. 1759a. “Review of Treatise on the Eye, the Manner, and Phenomena of Vision, by William Porterfield.” Critical Review 7: 206–216. Anon. 1759b. “Review of The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose, of Mr. Samuel Butler, Author of Hudibras, ed. R. Thyer.” Monthly Review 21: 171–172. Anon. 1759c. “Review of A Dissertation on the Scrofula, by William Scott.” Critical Review 8: 303–304. Anon. 1760. “Review of A Treatise of Husbandry and the Improvement of Dry and Barren Lands, by Thomas Hitt.” Critical Review 9: 373–378. Anon. 1761a. “Review of Anningait and Ajutt: A Greenland Tale, by Anne Penny.” Critical Review 11: 291–293. Anon. 1761b. “Review of A Complete History of the Present War, From Its Commencement in 1756, to the End of the Campaign, 1760.” Critical Review 12: 108–113. Anon. 1762. “Review of Select Poems From M. Gessner’s Pastorals, by Anne Penny.” Monthly Review 27: 393. Anon. 1767a. “Review of An Address to the Public, Concerning the Business Between the Government and the East-India Company.” Critical Review 23: 157. Anon. 1767b. “Review of The Happy Life: Or, the Contented Man, by Mme. de Vernage.” Critical Review 23: 316–318. Anon. 1767c. “Review of Modern Art of Cookery Improved, by Ann Shackleford.” Monthly Review 37: 147. Anon. 1770. “Review of The Whole Proceedings at Large, in a Cause on an Action Brought by the Right Hon. Richard Lord Grosvenor Against his Royal Highness Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland; for Criminal Conversation with Lady Grosvenor.” Monthly Review 43: 321– 322. Armstrong, John. 1756a. “Review of The Natural History of Aleppo, and Parts Adjacent, by Alexander Russell.” Critical Review 1: 360–364. Armstrong, John. 1756b. “Review of A Practical Treatise on the Venereal Disease, and the Art of Bleeding, by Thomas Neale.” Critical Review 1: 303–309. Ault, Norman. 1941. “Pope and Addison.” Review of English Studies 68: 428–451. Basker, James. 1988. Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist. Cranbury, NJ/London, UK/Mississauga, Canada: Associated University Presses, Inc. Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times 1700–1945. London: Arnold. Berkenhout, John. 1759. “Review of Conjunct Expeditions, by Thomas More Molyneux.” Monthly Review 21: 185–192. Bloom, Edward A. 1957. “‘Labors of the learned’: Neoclassic book reviewing aims and techniques.” Studies in Philology 54: 537–563.



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Bogel, Fredric V. 2001. The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading From Jonson to Byron. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Brewer, John. 1995. “‘The most polite age and the most vicious’: Attitudes towards culture as a commodity, 1660–1800.” In The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), 341–361. London/New York: Routledge. Brunton, Deborah. 2004. “Kirkpatrick, James (1696–1770).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55901, accessed 1 September 2008. Burnham, John C. 1996. “Garrison lecture: How the concept of profession evolved in the work of historians of medicine.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1): 1–24. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Corfield, Penelope J. 1995. Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850. London/New York: Routledge. Derrick, Samuel. 1756. “Review of The History of Croesus King of Lydia, by Walter Anderson.” Critical Review 1: 138–141. Donoghue, Frank. 1995. “Colonizing readers: Review criticism and the formation of a reading public.” In The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), 54–74. London/New York: Routledge. Donoghue, Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dryden, John. 1672. “Defence of the epilogue: Or, an essay on the dramatique poetry of the last age.” In The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards in Two Parts: Acted At the Theatre Royall Written by John Dryden, 160–175. London: In the SAVOY, Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman. http://eebo.chadwyck.com, accessed 1 September 2008. Dussinger, John A. 2004/2008. “Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/23582, accessed 1 September 2008. Eagleton, Terry. 1984. The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso. Eaves, T. C. Duncan and Kimpel, Ben D. 1967. “Richardson’s revisions of Pamela.” Studies in Bibliography 20: 61–88. English Short Title Catalogue. 2008. http://estc.bl.uk, accessed 1 September 2008. [ESTC] Fitzmaurice, Susan. 1998. “The commerce of language in the pursuit of politeness in eighteenthcentury England.” English Studies 79 (4): 309–328. Flexman, Roger. 1754a. “Review of A Moral Discourse on the Attributes of God, by J. B.” Monthly Review 10: 315–316. Flexman, Roger. 1754b. “Review of The Divinity of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ Asserted and Defended.” Monthly Review 11: 477–478. Forster, Antonia. 1989. “Mr. Pope’s maxims.” In The Age of Johnson, Paul Korshin (ed.), 2: 65– 89. Forster, Antonia. 1994. “‘The self-impannelled Jury’: The reception of review journals, 1749– 1760.” In Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 1993 Annual, Michael Harris (ed.), 27–51. Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press. Forster, Antonia. 2001. “Review journals and the reading public.” In Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, Isabel Rivers (ed.), 171–190. London/New York: Leicester University Press.

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Francklin, Thomas. 1756. “Review of Several Sermons Preached in Newcastle Upon Tyne, by Anthony Munton.” Critical Review 2: 379–380. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749a. “Review of Number I. Of a New and Full, Critical, Biographical, and Geographical History of Scotland; Containing the History of the Succession of Their Kings, From Robert Bruce to the Present Time ... By an Impartial Hand, by William Duff.” Monthly Review 1: 270–276. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749b. “Review of A Dialogue between the Gallows and a Free-Thinker, by Simon Berington.” Monthly Review 2: 9–11. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749c. “Review of An Examen of the History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by ‘Orbilius’.” Monthly Review 2: 93–94. Griffiths, Ralph. 1751. “Review of Cursory Remarks on Mr. Warburton’s New Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works, by John Gilbert Cooper.” Monthly Review 5: 466–475. Griffiths, Ralph. 1763. “Review of History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation In Indostan, From the Year MDCCXLV, by Robert Orme.” Monthly Review 29: 299–305. Gustafsson, Larisa O. 2002. Preterite and Past Participle Forms in English 1680–1790: Standardisation Processes in Public and Private Writing. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. Hamilton, Bernice. 1951. “The medical professions in the eighteenth century.” Economic History Review, New Series 4 (2): 141–169. Harley, David. 1990. “Honour and property: The structure of professional disputes in eighteenth-century English medicine.” In The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), 138–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Giles. 2004. “Parsons, James (1705–1770).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21461, accessed 1 September 2008. Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, N. G. 2004/2008. “Ruffhead, Owen (c. 1723–1769).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24258, accessed 1 September 2008. Keymer, Thomas and Sabor, Peter. 2005. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkpatrick, James. 1751. “Review of An Experimental Dissertation on the Nature, Contents, and Virtues of the Hyde Spaw-Water, by Diederick Wessel Linden.” Monthly Review 5: 525–527. Kirkpatrick, James. 1752. “Review of A Letter From a Physician in the Highlands, to His Friend in London, on the Subject of a Consumptive Habit.” Monthly Review 7: 399–400. Kirkpatrick, James. 1753. “Review of A New Treatise of the Glaucoma, or Cataract, by Silvester O’Halloran.” Monthly Review 8: 120–124. Kirkpatrick, James. 1754. “Review of A Treatise of Midwifery, by Benjamin Pugh.” Monthly Review 10: 241–243. Kirkpatrick, James. 1755a. “Review of Reflections on Slow and Painful Labours, and Other Subjects in Midwifery, by Giles Watts.” Monthly Review 13: 244–246. Kirkpatrick, James. 1755b. “Review of A Treatise on the Three Medicinal Mineral Waters At Llandrindod, by Diederick Wessel Linden.” Monthly Review 13: 382–388.



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Kirkpatrick, James. 1758a. “Review of An Essay on the Diseases of the Head and Neck, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 19: 145–150. Kirkpatrick, James. 1758b. “Review of A Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of the Bath-Waters, in Three Parts, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 19: 371–379. Kirkpatrick, James. 1759a. “Review of A Treatise on the Three Different Digestions, by Edward Barry.” Monthly Review 21: 403–417. Kirkpatrick, James. 1759b. “Review of A Dissertation on the Scrofula, or the King’s Evil, by William Scott.” Monthly Review 21: 427–429. Kirkpatrick, James. 1760. “Review of A Practical Treatise on Fevers, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 22: 441–454. Kirkpatrick, James. 1761. “Review of Essays Physiological and Practical, by Hugh Smith.” Monthly Review 25: 220–224. Kirkpatrick, James, Barrowby, William and Schomberg, Isaac. 1746. A Letter to the Real and Genuine Pierce Dod, M.D. Actual Physician of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. London. http:// galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO, accessed 1 September 2008. Klein, Lawrence. 1993. “‘Politeness’ as linguistic ideology in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.” In Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800, Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds), 31–50. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langhorne, John. 1761. “Review of Purity of Heart: A Moral Epistle, by James Scott.” Monthly Review 25: 465–466. Leonard, Sterling A. 1962. The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700–1800. Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1929. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell. Mallet, David. 1733. Of Verbal Criticism: An Epistle to Mr. Pope. Occasioned by Theobald’s Shakespear, and Bentley’s Milton. London: for Lawton Gilliver. http://galenet.galegroup. com/servlet/ECCO, accessed 1 September 2008. Marshall, David. 1997. “Taste and aesthetics: (I) Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the public taste.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), 633–657. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Carey. 1998. The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meyers, Carole. 1997. Language is the Dress of Thought: Stylistic Literacies and Social Categories in Eighteenth-century Great Britain. Ph.D. dissertation. Emory University. http: //prometheus.cc.emory.edu/cfm/academic/Intro.html, accessed 1 September 2008. Moody, Patricia A. 1974. “Shall and will: The grammatical tradition and dialectology.” American Speech 49 (1/2): 67–78. Murdoch, Patrick. 1756a. “Review of British Education, by Thomas Sheridan.” Critical Review 1: 1–9. Murdoch, Patrick. 1756b. “Review of A Harmony of the Four Gospels, by James Macknight.” Critical Review 1: 23–41. N. 1778. “Review of A Treatise on Practical Seamanship, by William Hutchinson.” Monthly Review 58: 427–432. N. 1785. “Review of Discursory Thoughts on the Late Acts of Parliament, by Francis Spilsbury.” Monthly Review 73: 62–63. Nangle, Benjamin C. 1934. The Monthly Review. First Series, 1749–1789. Indexes of Contributors and Articles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Oldham, James. 2004/2008. “Murray, William, first earl of Mansfield (1705–1793).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/19655, accessed 1 September 2008. P. 1755. “Review of The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, by Alexander Gordon.” Monthly Review 13: 348–358. P. 1754. “Review of Select Essays on Commerce, Agriculture, Mines, Fisheries, and Other Useful Subjects.” Monthly Review 10: 321–329. P. 1759. “Review of The Practical Husbandman, by Robert Maxwell.” Monthly Review 20: 577– 582. P. 1760. “Review of A Treatise of Husbandry, by Thomas Hitt.” Monthly Review 23: 166. P. 1761. “Review of Union: Or, a Treatise of the Consanguinity and Affinity Between Christ and His Church, by James Relly.” Monthly Review 24: 87–88. Patey, Douglas L. 1997. “The institution of criticism in the eighteenth century.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), 3–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Percy, Carol. 1997. “Eighteenth-century book reviewers’ attitudes towards language: A database project.” In Tracing the Trail of Time: Proceedings from the Second Diachronic Corpora Workshop, Raymond Hickey, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds), 215–231. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Percy, Carol. 2000. “‘Easy women’: Defining and confining the ‘feminine’ style in eighteenthcentury print culture.” Language Sciences 22: 315–337. Percy, Carol. 2009. “Periodical reviews and the rise of prescriptivism: The Monthly (1749–1844) and Critical Review (1756–1817) in the eighteenth century.” In Current Issues in Late Modern English, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff (eds), 117–150. Bern: Peter Lang. Pope, Alexander. 1735. An Epistle From Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot. London: printed by J. Wright for Lawton Gilliver. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO, accessed 1 September 2008. Redwood, John. 1976. Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750. London: Thames and Hudson. Roper, Derek. 1959. “Smollett’s ‘Four Gentlemen’: The First Contributors to the Critical Review.” Review of English Studies New Series 10: 38–44. Rose, William. 1752a. “Review of Remarks upon a Treatise, Intitled, Free and Candid Disquisitions, Relating to the Church of England, by John Boswell.” Monthly Review 6: 62–69. Rose, William. 1752b. “Review of Remarks on Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History: So Far as They Relate to the History of the Old Testament; And Especially to the Case of Noah, Denouncing a Curse Upon Canaan, by James Harvey.” Monthly Review 7: 365–369. Rose, William. 1753. “Review of Reflections on the Late Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, by John Leland.” Monthly Review 8: 105–116. Rose, William. 1755. “Review of Anticrisis; Or, a Discussion of a Scurrilous and Malicious Libel, Published by One Mr. James Man of Aberdeen, Intitled, a Censure and Examination of Mr. Thomas Ruddiman’s Philological Notes on the Works of the Great Buchanan, by Thomas Ruddiman.” Monthly Review 13: 150. Ruffhead, Owen. 1759. “Review of Memoirs of the Life of Robert Cary, Baron of Leppington, and Earl of Monmouth. Written by Himself, and Now Published from an Original Manuscript in the Custody of John Earl of Corke and Orrery.” Monthly Review 20: 250–257.



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Ruffhead, Owen. 1760. “Review of A Dissertation on Ancient Tragedy, by Thomas Franklin.” Monthly Review 23: 1–9. Sher, Richard B. 2006. The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Lawrence B. 2004/2008. “Boyle, John, fifth earl of Cork and fifth earl of Orrery (1707– 1762).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3129, accessed 1 September 2008. Smollett, Tobias. 1756a. “Review of Experiments on Bleaching, by Francis Home.” Critical Review 1: 106–114. Smollett, Tobias. 1756b. “Review of Maxims, Characters, and Reflections Critical, Satirical, and Moral, by Fulke Greville and Frances Greville.” Critical Review 1: 220–226. Smollett, Tobias. 1756c. “Review of An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, by Joseph Warton.” Critical Review 1: 228–240. Smollett, Tobias. 1756d. “Review of Aphorismata Medica, by Richard Manningham.” Critical Review 1: 242–246. Smollett, Tobias. 1756e. “Reply to To the Public.” Critical Review 1: 287–288. Smollett, Tobias. 1756f. “Review of An Essay on Waters. In Three Parts, by Charles Lucas.” Critical Review 1: 321–342. Smollett, Tobias. 1756g. “Reply to Letter in the General Evening Post, Tuesday 21 September, by James Parsons.” Critical Review 2: 188–192. Smollett, Tobias. 1758. “Review of Epistles Philosophical and Moral, by William Kenrick.” Critical Review 6: 439–453. Smollett, Tobias. 1759. “Review of The Practical Husbandman, by Robert Maxwell.” Critical Review 8: 148–154. Sommerville, C. John. 1996. The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorensen, Janet. 2000. The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spector, Robert D. 1966. English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion During the Seven Years’ War. The Hague/Paris: Mouton & Co. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2002. “Robert Lowth and the strong verb system.” Language Sciences 24 (3): 459–469. Tourneyser. 1755. “Review of An Answer to a Pamphlet, Called, “a Second Letter to the People of England” in Which the Subsidiary System Is Fairly Stated, and Amply Considered.” Monthly Review 13: 505–506. Trolander, Paul and Tenger, Zeynep. 2007. Sociable Criticism in England 1625–1725. Newark: University of Delaware Press. von Haller, Albrecht. 1749. “Review of Clarissa; Or, the History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson.” Gentleman’s Magazine 19: 245–246, 346–349. Watts, Richard J. 1999. “The social construction of Standard English: Grammar writers as a ‘discourse community’.” In Standard English: The Widening Debate, Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds), 40–68. London/New York: Routledge. Watts, Richard. 2002. “From polite language to educated language: The re-emergence of an ideology.” In Alternative Histories of English, Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds), 155–172. London/New York: Routledge. Williams, Aubrey L. 1990. “Alexander Pope.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 95, Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, John Sitter (ed.), 169–201. Gale Group.

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“if You think me obstinate I can’t help it” Exploring the epistolary styles and social roles  of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott Anni Sairio

University of Helsinki

This paper discusses the formality of epistolary spellings in the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott, eighteenth-century sisters of similar backgrounds yet different social positions. I examine their use of full vs contracted auxiliary verb forms, preterite and past participle spelling variants, and other epistolary contractions and abbreviations in four decades of correspondence.   Contractions and abbreviations indicate the level of informality and intimacy in eighteenth-century epistolary spelling. Montagu’s social prominence appears to show even in intimate and familiar communication, whereas Scott’s less significant social standing might have provided more linguistic flexibility. Scott’s style was significantly more informal and leaning towards oral mode than ­Montagu’s, which suggests that her relative exclusion from the fashionable polite society in London influenced the level of formality in her spelling.

1.

Introduction

The Robinson sisters, Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) and Sarah Scott (1720– 1795), were born into a moderately distinguished Kentish lower gentry family. Their relationship was close, they were of very similar age, and they were educated to a fairly similar extent, even if Elizabeth’s schooling may have been more extensive. Both women eventually became published authors and “irrepressible builders of community” (Rizzo 2003: 194), but otherwise their lives took somewhat different routes (see Myers 1990; Pohl and Schellenberg 2003; Tavor Bannet 2005). Elizabeth Montagu became a wealthy and influential woman of letters, one . The research reported here has been funded by the graduate school “Meaning, Language and Changing Cultures” and the project “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (University of Helsinki).

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of the eminent social hostesses and patrons of London, and a notable business woman. She is known particularly for her role in the literary Bluestocking circle of accomplished men and women, dedicated to intellectual conversation. Sarah Scott published both original and translated works, but unlike her sister and distinguished ladies in general, she wrote for money. Financially she also had to depend on her sister’s generosity, and after Mr Montagu’s death in 1775, Elizabeth Montagu granted Scott an annuity. Furthermore, Scott had separated from her husband in 1752 after only ten months of marriage, which added to the social distance between her and Montagu. Their letters nevertheless suggest that their private relationship was equal and intimate despite these economic and social discrepancies. In this paper I examine the spelling variation in Elizabeth Montagu’s and ­Sarah Scott’s correspondence as a possible indicator of their respective social roles. The implications of the suggested dual spelling system of the eighteenth century (Osselton 1984) are considered, and the focus is on possible indicators of the so-called epistolary style of spelling. This refers to spellings that in the course of the eighteenth century were no longer fully accepted in print but continued to be used in private spelling, including contractions, abbreviations, and other than standard use of capitals and verb inflections. Auxiliary verb forms (could, should, and would and cannot, shall not, will not, and do not and their contractions), preterite and past participle spellings (-ed, -’d, -d, -’t, -t), and other epistolary contractions and abbreviations are investigated in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence during a time span of four decades. Previous research (Sairio 2008) indicates that unlike Montagu and her Bluestocking friends, Montagu and Scott did not seem to share similar linguistic patterns in the use of, for example, preposition stranding. Montagu’s letters display language use that suggests awareness of what contemporary language authorities considered to be correct usage, whereas for Scott, who had distanced herself from the demands of polite society, such implications are less clear (see e.g. Mendoza-Denton 2002 on language variation and identity). First I will present my analysis of Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s social roles, then give a brief account of the developments in eighteenth-century spelling and the language variables under investigation, and finally present my results.

1.1

Material

The research is based on a selection of letters in the Bluestocking Corpus of my own compilation (Table 1), discussed in more detail in Sairio (2009a and 2009b). The Bluestocking Corpus currently consists of 203 transcribed letters from the



Epistolary styles and social roles

Table 1.  The Bluestocking Corpus: word counts in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters Writers

1738–43

1757–62

1766–71

1775–78

Total

Elizabeth Montagu Montagu to Scott Sarah Scott*

  23,285    2,618 728

34,917   6,690   4,729

37,440   5,067   3,471

22,282   3,360   4,173

117,924   17,735   13,101

*The time periods in the corpus are based on the dates of the entire material: the actual dates of Scott’s letters are 1740, 1758–1761, 1768–1769, and 1777.

­Montagu Collection (MO) in the Huntington Library and Add. 40663 in the ­British ­ ibrary, and 24 letters from Eger’s (1999) edition, which draws from the Montagu L Collection and is in terms of modern editorial standards by far the best edition of this material. All the letters in the corpus are autograph, and they amount to c. 154,000 words. The selection of Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence consists of c. 30,800 words, and all of it is transcribed from manuscript sources. The method of transcription has been to reproduce the original text as closely as possible, which enables studies in spelling variation. The letters in Eger (1999) have been edited according to good editorial principles: ampersands, apostrophes, and underlinings have been retained, apostrophised variants of preterites and past participles have been retained, detailed notes indicate (among other things) when the letter has not been preserved intact, and address and subscription formulae are included. Superscripts seem nevertheless to have been lowered; they do not appear at all in the edited material, whereas the autograph letters generally abound in them. The material is categorised into four time periods from the late 1730s to the late 1770s.

2.

Social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott

Brewer and Gardner (1996: 84) distinguish between three levels of self-representation: individual, relational, and collective. The individual level refers to one’s own concept of self, the relational self represents the self-concept derived from interpersonal connections and role relationships with significant others, and the collective self is derived from significant group memberships. This entails that Montagu’s and Scott’s social roles can be examined in terms of their own perceptions of themselves, their connections with other people, and their membership in social circles and networks. In this paper my focus is on social connections and group memberships in a broader sense; a larger-scale study could be carried out as a thorough analysis of self-expressions and other signals of identity. Meyerhoff (2002: 539) points out that the notion of, for example, “being a woman” is constructed differently across a person’s life span through participation

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in different practices. In Vickery’s (1998: 8–11) discussion of the functional roles of eighteenth-century genteel women, women’s lives are described as a “stately progress through recognized stations [...] with different duties and liberties attached to each role”, which could range from being a maid to being a wife, mother, widow, dowager or grandmother (1998: 8). The genteel women’s own perceptions of their social and emotional roles might mean being a “kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess and member of polite society” (1998: 10). Marriage was a particularly critical turning-point in a woman’s life, as it introduced the active new role of wife and the subsequent responsibilities which entailed the administration of a household (1998: 8). Many of these roles are relatively permanent, static, and imposed from above, and they carry particular expectations as to the behaviour of the individual. For eighteenth-century women, kinship appears to be the primary category of functional roles. According to Rizzo (2003: 195), Sarah Scott’s salon in Bath was more inclined toward discussion on social reform than Elizabeth Montagu’s resplendent Bluestocking assemblies in London; “[i]t focused on the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged, on giving rather than receiving, on selflessness rather than egocentrism” (2003: 198). Montagu appears to have attempted to include Scott into her society, but Scott was not inclined to do so, although they did have several friends in common. Scott was very well connected in the high society (Tavor ­Bannet 2005: 26), but apparently she was determined not to be more involved in the activities of Montagu’s Bluestocking circle, the elitism, competitiveness, and affluence of which she disapproved (Rizzo 2003: 195). In the 1760s Scott was involved in an eventually failed utopian project to set up a women’s community, which Montagu helped fund. Rizzo (2003: 196) contrasts the two in a way that does not flatter the older sister: “In succeeding years Montagu was [...] indicted by everyone for her vanity, if not her selfishness, while Scott applied herself to serious, selfless matters”. From a functionalist point of view, Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott occupied the primary social positions of sisters, daughters, and wives (in practice, Scott the last of these only for a short period of time). These ascribed, relatively static and non-negotiable roles were extremely family-oriented. Montagu was nevertheless a more powerful figure in her family than Scott was. In addition to the functionalist approaches, social roles can also be considered as hybrid and changing, constantly negotiated events of role-taking. The various aspects of Montagu’s and Scott’s lives over the years introduce other, more fluid and negotiable social roles. Montagu’s marriage in 1742 to the wealthy MP and landowner Edward ­Montagu made her status considerably more important in terms of wealth and social opportunities, whereas Scott’s ten-month union and its swift ­conclusion,



Epistolary styles and social roles

even though the marriage and its outcome did provide her with a certain i­ ndependence from her parents and her sister (whose companion she had been), was an embarrassing affair. Montagu undertook the role of a business woman, and her personal responsibility in supervising the Montagu family’s coal mines and other properties increased considerably over the years. Her prominence as a social hostess and a published author, which strengthened her reputation as a learned woman, increased her social influence and the expectations imposed upon her. Scott, on the other hand, was actively involved in philanthropy, but her salons (or “anti-salons”, as Rizzo (2003: 195) characterises them) were focused on social reform and charity. She published anonymously, but her circle knew of her authorship. These activities were more private and smaller-scale than ­Montagu’s respective pursuits. Simmel (1950; quoted in Wasserman and Faust 1994: 292) argues that an individual’s multiple group affiliations (with, for example, family, voluntary organizations, or occupational groups) have a fundamental significance in defining social identity. Memberships in and friendships with groups and networks such as the extended Robinson and Montagu families, Bath philanthropists, upperclass business venturers, and learned women writers added additional elements to Montagu’s and Scott’s social roles and identities. To compare the respective roles and positions of Montagu and Scott, some basic juxtapositions would be benefactor/beneficiary, upper-class author/professional writer, member of Bluestocking elite/Bath philanthropy, and member of London polite society/Bath polite society. There seems to be an element of greater privacy and perhaps a pursuit of independence in Sarah Scott’s life, reflected in her determination to live outside London and the immediate sphere of influence of Montagu. In terms of hierarchy and power relations, Montagu was Scott’s superior, and therewith perhaps more bound by the norms of polite society.

3.

The dual spelling system in the eighteenth century

The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new attitude towards language: one that attempted to purify it, to define accurately the meaning of each word, to fix the grammatical rules, and correct and preserve the language from further decay (Vorlat 1975: 23–24). Spelling had been codified in print by the mid-seventeenth century, and printers’ norms were subsequently imposed on published texts . Scott’s main circle of friends included Lady Barbara Montagu (no relation), Elizabeth Cutts, Miss M. Arnold (probably an illegitimate daughter of her brother Morris), and Sarah Fielding (Rizzo 2003: 202–204).

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(­Nevalainen 2003: 138). Private writing, however, continued to display spelling variations which were on their way out of printed texts. These included a number of contractions (&, wch), final double consonants in monosyllabic words with a short vowel (cutt, fitt), the old -all spellings as opposed to the new -al (generall vs general), and apostrophised and contracted preterite and past participle inflections of weak verbs (sav’d, savd) (Osselton 1984: 132–136; Görlach 2001: 79). Abbreviations such as ye and yt were no longer used even in the first manual of printing, Moxon (1683–1684), although particularly ye was very common in epistolary spelling (Haugland 1995: 167). That eighteenth-century spelling did not consist of a homogeneous set of rules was first tentatively suggested by Osselton (1984) on the basis of the differences between Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and his personal correspondence, and subsequently by Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998, 2005) based on the different public and private styles of several other authors. Osselton (1984: 123–125) compares Johnson’s accounts of spelling in the Dictionary and the spelling variations in his private writing and shows that Johnson’s letters contain a much larger scale of variant spellings than which he admitted to the Dictionary, and that many of his epistolary spellings are not included in the Dictionary at all. It would seem, therefore, that the Dictionary presented a public standard, which was largely based on printers’ conventions, whereas a private standard might be observed in Johnson’s epistolary spelling. According to Osselton (1984: 125), [A]t least at this stage in the development of English, epistolary spelling is a graphic system which leads its own linguistic life: it has its own rules and tendencies; it is independent of, though it stands in a clear relationship to, the system used by the printers. Furthermore, this graphic system is a part of the educated English of its day.

The dual standard appears to have been widespread and acknowledged by eighteenth-century writers, and it has also been observed in the differences between the private and public writings of Sarah Fielding, Robert Lowth, and Laurence Sterne (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005: 255). Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998: 460) notes that the more intimate Sarah Fielding’s friendship with the recipient, the less her epistolary use of extra capital initials resembled the printers’ practice of capitalization. There were also fewer epistolary spellings in Robert Lowth’s letters when the style was more formal and the relationship between writer and recipient more distant (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 256, 259). Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s (2006: 238–240) analysis of Lowth’s correspondence shows that almost . -’d, -t, and -y’- (carry’d) as weak verb and past participle forms, spelling of plural nouns in -y (copys), single or doubled final consonants (gott, admitt), adjectives ending in -ful (successfull),



Epistolary styles and social roles

everything could be abbreviated in epistolary spelling. Abbreviations were used most frequently in letters in which “appearance is subordinate to contents”, such as drafts and formal notes (2006: 244). The revisions in Sterne’s Memoirs (written in 1767, published eight years later) indicate the extent to which Sterne’s private spelling differed from printer practices (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1998: 458, 463–464). The manuscript could be assumed to represent fairly unpolished and informal written language.

4.

Contractions and abbreviations: Attitudes and practices in the eighteenth century

4.1

General observations

The main types of contraction that concern the eighteenth century are (1) phonetic transcripts of speech variants (gee’t’um – give it him), (2) synchronic variants of an alternative full form both in pronunciation and in print (I will – I’ll), and (3) contractions that represent a later stage of pronunciation where the full orthographic variant is no longer phonetically available (would – wou’d) (Haugland 1995: 166). Many contracted forms had been accepted as “non-literary, formal prose forms” in the late seventeenth century, particularly verbal inflections -’d and -t, tho’, the proclitic it (’tis), and the enclitic is (there’s) and will (I’le) (Haugland 1995: 171–172). The use of contractions in letter-writing seems to have been at its highest in the early eighteenth century: this frequent usage probably resulted from the need to write quickly and the physical circumstances of letter-writing, but may also have eventually become an epistolary fashion or custom (Osselton 1984: 130).

nouns ending in -ic (politicks), his spelling of ‘immediately’ (immediatly), and contractions (won’t, can’t, don’t, I’ll, tother) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 254). . Abbreviations were used in eighteenth-century letters for names of months, titles and forms of address, personal names and placenames, general nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, words typical of letters (Compts.), words typical of the written medium (ibid., i.e.), words referring to scholarly matters (MS), titles of books, and money units (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006). . In the printing process, all the extra initial capitals in the manuscript were removed; ­contractions (tho’, wch, Sept, OS, thro) were expanded; the use of genitive -s (Wifes) was normalised; preterite and past participle endings in weak verbs were normalised to -ed; ­compounds, place-names, and “unacceptable” spellings were standardised and corrected; and the long -s was normalised.

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The growing acceptance of contractions took a turn when Swift and ­Addison, who were bothered by the inelegant consonant clusters brought by deletion, ­attacked contractions in the 1710 and 1711 issues of the Tatler and the Spectator (Haugland 1995: 172). Addison complained that the common omission of e in drown’d, walk’d, and arriv’d “has very much disfigured the Tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest Words into so many Clusters of Consonants” (1711; quoted in Haugland 1995: 172). Haugland (1995: 173, 174) notes, however, that given the continued use of contractions in early prose and even in grammatical works, Swift’s and Addison’s writings were not immediately effective. The appearance of a variety of contracted forms in the grammars and spelling books of this period is an indication that these forms were not considered entirely colloquial, epistolary or poetic, but were being established as legitimate variants even in scholarly prose.  (Haugland 1995: 179)

A decade or so later, grammatical writers also began to voice criticism. The eventually notable influence of Addison and Swift can be detected in the numerous arguments presented in grammatical writing (Haugland 1995: 174). Some writers advised against using abbreviations and contractions for reasons of politeness and clarity (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 230–231). Anne Fisher proscribed against apostrophes used elsewhere than with genitives, for contractions and abbreviations (where they would otherwise be employed) are “very destructive to Language” and “unnecessary” (1753: 117n). Schoolteacher John Carter recommended in Practical English Grammar (1773: 140) that “Contractions, except for private Use, should be as much as possible avoided. They argue Disrespect to Superiors, and are puzzling to others” (also in Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 230). Campbell (1776) condemned wasn’t, didn’t, shouldn’t, and couldn’t as “intolerably bad” contractions, but allowed the use of I’m, ’em and the preterite -’d as “elision whereby the sound is improved” and states that contractions should be allowed in the familiar style, because they are “natural” in conversation (quoted in ­Haugland 1995: 176). Perceptions of politeness with regard to contracted spellings were witnessed also in book reviews (Percy 2002). Reviews of the 1770s suggest that enclitic contractions such as don’t and won’t had negative connotations: for some writers, they spoke of impoliteness, vulgarity, and a lack of education, and their usage were attributed to “such hyperbolically stereotypical social climbers as the ‘hair dresser’, the ‘valet’, and especially the ‘milliner’” (Percy 2002). Despite the criticism, contractions became considerably more frequent in published material during the Late Modern English period and particularly the nineteenth century (López-Couso 2007: 302), and for example Robert Lowth’s usage of contractions indicates that these forms were common in the private



Epistolary styles and social roles

­ ritings of educated people (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 253–254). And when w particularly Carter’s and Campbell’s views are considered, it also seems that the proscription was not targeted towards private, familiar correspondence as much as more formal types of writing.

4.2 Preterite and past participle endings Apostrophised contractions were a common feature of printing styles in the early years of the century, and the most common types of contraction at that time were the contracted verb inflections (Haugland 1995: 179). Preterites and past participles had five variant spellings: the emerging standard -ed, the -’d variant commonly used by early printers, -d of more private spelling styles, and the more uncommon -’t and -t variants. Between 1680 and 1710, published authors like Addison and Defoe frequently used -’d forms in their private writing (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 54–58), even though Addison himself prominently advised against contractions. Oldireva Gustafsson’s (2002: 56–57) comparisons of published texts of 1680– 1710 and 1760–1790 demonstrate the standardization process of the -ed variant as it increased from 56% to 93%, and the near disappearance of -’d from 43% to 6.5% in the course of the eighteenth century. The -d variant was practically nonexistent in both periods, and -t decreased from 1.5% to less than one percent. Early eighteenth-century printers and authors appear to have used the apostrophised variant nearly as often as the full variant, but towards the end of the century they began to switch entirely to -ed. According to Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 228, 260), the increasing disapproval of abbreviations greatly influenced the suppression of -’d, which had been the most frequent contraction in public writing of the early eighteenth century, and eventually triggered the levelling of spelling variation and led to the dominance of -ed towards the end of the ­eighteenth century. Table 2 presents Oldireva Gustafsson’s results for private letters and diaries of 1680–1710 and 1760–1790. Evidently the variables were still in the process . The percentages are counted from the total sums of preterite and past participle forms in Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 56–57). . Oldireva Gustafsson’s research on late eighteenth-century private writing is based on letters of Laurence Sterne, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Richard Sheridan, Betsy Sheridan, Lady Sarah Lennox, Samuel Crisp, and Fanny Burney, extracts of the diaries of James Beattie and Thomas Campbell, travelogues by George Robertson, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and Thomas ­Pasley, and poetry (according to Oldireva Gustafsson, applicable to private texts) by Christopher Smart (2002: 23).

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Table 2.  -ED forms in private letters and diaries in Oldireva Gustafsson  (2002: 94, after Table 3.2) 1680–1710 1760–1790

-ed

-’d

-d

-t

-’t

60% (1,778) 76% (2,598)

22% (669) 18% (626)

11% (330) 5% (187)

4% (113) 0 (13)

3% (75) 0

of being fixed: there was a clear increase of the -ed variant, a moderate decrease of -’d, a marked decline of -d, and the -’t and -t variants disappeared from use. During the late eighteenth century, the absence of -’d and the consistent use of -ed indicated awareness of the current trend towards uniform printing styles and thus good education, and for example Fanny Burney’s carefully spelled letters contain practically only -ed forms (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 117–118). Oldireva ­Gustafsson (2002: 260) considers this consistent absence of -’d to be the “hallmark of the new spelling style”. The -d variant on the other hand seems to have been characteristic of private writing and to have carried a specific informal message. Edmund Burke’s letters contained only -ed and -d variants, and Oldireva ­Gustafsson (2002: 172) interprets the presence of -d as an exclusive signal of his informal spelling. The -d variant appeared hardly at all in public texts (0–2%), whereas in private letters and journals it made up a total of 8% of the -ED forms (Oldireva ­Gustafsson 2002: 56–57, 94). It was nevertheless infrequent even in private writing and continued to decrease. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998: 461) discusses apostrophised spellings in ­Sarah Fielding’s letters of 1751–1767 and notes that approximately 10% of the spellings are apostrophised, which is considerably less than in Oldireva ­Gustafsson’s material of the 1760–1790 period. In Samuel Richardson’s letters written in 1741, 27% of verb forms are spelled with -’d, whereas Samuel Johnson did not use the apostrophised form after 1738. Tieken-Boon van Ostade hypothesises that these authors might have been, in fact, ahead of printers’ practice in their private spelling (1998: 466).

5.

Features of the private spelling system in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters

Contractions and abbreviations in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence from the late 1730s to the late 1770s are next examined as features of private and informal language use, or as markers of the proposed private spelling system of the eighteenth century. The more contractions these letters contain, the more informal the style can perhaps be claimed to be, and the less attention the writer perhaps



Epistolary styles and social roles

paid to contemporary prescriptivist notions. Clearest evidence of private spelling could be a high frequency of contractions (both in itself and with regard to the corresponding full spellings) and the continuing use of -d in preterite and past participle forms. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the use of contractions and abbreviations in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters, suggesting that their epistolary style seems to have been rich in these features. (1) [...] those Virgin dancings sure cou’d not offend the most scrupulous, tho’ a modest woman might be exceedingly asham’d at the indecorum of giving her hand to a Man & not be able to conquer her modesty so far as to look him in the face all night  (Sarah Robinson (Scott) to Elizabeth Montagu, c. 1740) (2) Mrs Boscawen tells me she saw our Bror Charles ride by her gate as he was returning from Guilford, she call’d him, made him eat some peaches, wd fain have perswaded him to have stayd all night, but he wd not so much as go into her House.  (Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, c. 1768)

In Section 5.2, contractions are examined in the use of the (tentative) central modals could, should, and would and their contractions, which are formed independently within the lexeme, and the negative auxiliaries cannot, shall not, will not, and do not and their respective enclitic contractions. Do not is not a modal, but it is contracted following the same rule of encliticisation as the negative modal auxiliaries and is therefore included. The ratio of could/should/would not and cd/ shd/wd not and the enclitic negatives is also considered. Shall and will as such are excluded: unlike the other auxiliaries, which can be contracted regardless of word order, shall and will are contracted depending on the position of the subject, and their contracted forms (’ll) are also indistinguishable from each other, as is shown in examples (3a)–(4b). (3) a. I will do it. > I’ll do it. b. Shall I do it? > *’ll I do it? (4) a. I could do it. > I cou’d/coud/cd do it. b. Should I do it? > Shou’d/shoud/shd I do it?

. Some eighteenth-century printers’ guides suggest that the apostrophised contractions of could, should, and would may have been acceptable in mid-century public texts, at least if the master-printer and the author approved. The printer could thus omit the letter l from could, should, and would: “the absence of the mute l can no-ways lessen the credit of an elaborate Essay; but may help a Printer to lengthen his Letter”, there often being a shortage of the l font (Smith 1755: 107; in Haugland 1995: 167).

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Other common contractions and abbreviations (bror, ’tho, yr), simple clitics (’m, ’ll, ’re, ’s, ’ve), the contracted negator n’t, and the connectors and and its abbreviation & were also retrieved from the corpus. In Section 5.2 I discuss the use of -ED variants. Examples (1)–(2) and (5)–(6) include Montagu’s and Scott’s use of different variants. All the preterites, past participle verbs forms, and past-participial adjectives (see Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 77–79) were retrieved from the corpus.

5.1

Modal auxiliaries and epistolary contractions in Montagu’s  and Scott’s correspondence

In this section I consider the ratio of full and contracted spellings of a selection of modal auxiliaries and the negative auxiliary do not. In Present-day English, negative contractions are considered to be characteristic features of spoken language (Mazzon 2004: 105). In Huber’s (2007) study of the proceedings of London’s Central Criminal Court between 1674 and 1834, compiled into the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC), negative contractions were shown to be a speech-based feature of also Late Modern English. All the negative contractions in the speech passages of the OBC from 1732 to the 1830s amount altogether to 6.4% (20,473), whereas in the prose passages of the same period the figure is 0.1% (5). In her study of the 1750–1799 section of ARCHER, López-Couso (2007: 305) shows that the uncontracted negative forms of be and have seem to have been the unmarked variants in the written language of the LModE period. These full spellings cover over 90% of the cliticised–uncliticised words in all the data.10 The difference in Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s spellings of modal auxiliary verbs is statistically significant (p < 0.001) in the use of both contracted and full spellings. In Montagu’s letters to Scott, 45% (90) of the modal auxiliary spellings are contracted and 55% (110) are full. In Scott’s letters to Montagu, the contracted auxiliaries are much more frequent: contractions make up 74% (113) of the items, while 26% (39) are full forms. Table 3 shows that Scott used contracted verbs consistently more than Elizabeth Montagu in every time period from the late 1730s to the late 1770s. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate these diachronic developments in their epistolary spelling. The samples are small in the first time period, but the other periods offer more reliable evidence. . OED Online was consulted in determining ambiguous cases, which usually concerned differentiating between past-participial adjectives and adjectives proper. 10. López-Couso (2007: 303) notes that the results are probably influenced by the fact that ARCHER is not specifically designed for the analysis of orthographic variation.



Epistolary styles and social roles

Table 3. Contracted and full spellings of modals in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters Montagu

1738–43

1757–62

1766–71

1775–78

contracted full Total

  21% 2.3 (6)   79% 8.4 (22) 100% (29)

  35% 5.1 (34)   65% 9.3 (62) 100% (96)

  72% 8.7 (44)   28% 3.4 (17) 100% (61)

  67% 5.4 (18)   33% 2.7 (9) 100% (27)

Scott contracted full Total

1740   87.5% 5.5 (7)   12.5% (1) 100% (8)

1758–61   66% 8.3 (39)   34% 4.2 (20) 100% (59)

1768–69   71% 7.2 (25)   29% 2.9 (10) 100% (35)

1777   84% 10.1 (42)   16% 1.9 (8) 100% (50)

     

GVMM TQFMMJOHT

 

DPOUSBDUFE TQFMMJOHT

   m

m

m

m

Figure 1.  Full and contracted modal auxiliaries in Montagu’s letters to Scott

    GVMM
TQFMMJOHT

 

DPOUSBDUFE TQFMMJOHT

     

m

m



Figure 2.  Full and contracted modal auxiliaries in Scott’s letters to Montagu

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There is a clear diachronic increase in Montagu’s use of contractions from 21% to 67%. The 1760s seem to have been an important time period in this respect, for sometime during the mid-decade Montagu began to favour ­contractions over full ones. This change is not, however, statistically significant. Scott’s letters show some fluctuation in the ratio of contracted vs full spellings, but the contractions are always more frequent. Overall, both sisters appear to have used relatively informal spelling. ­Montagu’s spelling even became more informal as years went by, although it was generally more formal than Scott’s. This would seem to suggest that a more public and superior social role resulted in more formal language use even in very familiar communication. However, when Montagu’s overall epistolary use of contracted and full forms of modal auxiliaries was examined, the full spellings were seen to be considerably more frequent in her general style than in her correspondence with Scott. 72% (919) of the spellings in Montagu’s other letters are full forms and 28% (354) are contracted. The letters to Scott were in this respect more informal and familiar in terms of spelling than what Montagu’s style usually was. The intimate social role of a sister appears to have been more influential than the formally more demanding role of a learned hostess and author. However, contractions increased also in her overall spelling system from 21% to 38% between 1738 and 1778. In the first time period the frequencies in her letters to Scott and in the other material are basically the same (21% vs 20%, respectively), but after that the contractions were much more common and increased more considerably in the letters she wrote to Scott (35% vs 14%, 65% vs 42%, and 67% vs 38%). Montagu’s spelling seems to have been more formal and literate and perhaps closer to the public standard, but over the years her style may have become generally more relaxed and perhaps drifted towards a more oral mode. This change might be an indication of the establishment of her social standing into a more stable and secured position, which might subsequently have provided her with more leeway with regard to linguistic norms. Tables 4 and 5 present the verb-specific variation in Montagu’s and Scott’s use of the contracted and full variants of could, should, and would. The contracted forms range from the apostrophised (cou’d) to the simplest variant (cd). In Montagu’s letters, the full spellings of these verb types amount to 44% (62) and the contractions to 56% (79), whereas in Scott’s letters the ratio is 27% (9) of full and 73% (104) of contracted spellings. These contractions are significantly more frequent in Scott’s letters (p < 0.001), whereas the larger number of full spellings in Montagu’s letters yields a similarly significant difference (p < 0.001). Table 4 shows that the majority of could and should in Montagu’s letters are full spellings, whereas would is spelled considerably more as a contraction (73% vs 27%). In Scott’s letters, on the other hand, all these modal auxiliaries appear in



Epistolary styles and social roles 101

Table 4.  Type variation in Montagu’s letters: tentative modal auxiliaries Type

1738–43

1757–62

1766–71

1775–78

Total

could contraction should contraction would contraction

5 0 5 1 7 2

14  4 18  8  9 22

 3  5  0  3  0 18

0 5 0 6 1 5

22 61% 14 39% 23 56% 18 44% 17 27% 47 73%

Table 5.  Type variation in Scott’s letters: tentative modal auxiliaries Type

1740

1758–61

1768–69

1777

Total

could contraction should contraction would contraction

0 2 0 1 0 2

 2  8  4 15  2  9

 0  1  1  8  0 16

 0 13  0 14  0 15

  2 8% 24 92%   5 12% 38 88%   2 5% 42 95%

a predominantly contracted form (Table 5). As to the choice of contracted variant, Scott preferred the fuller spellings (especially cou’d, shoud, and woud), whereas from the second time period onward Montagu used only the simplest variants cd, shd, and wd. This suggests that for Montagu, contractions probably served an economical purpose as a means to enable quick writing. It could also be noted that in addition to avoiding the simplest variants, Scott did not superscript her contractions, which Montagu occasionally did. Could/should/would + not and their non-clitic contractions are included in the figures of Tables 4 and 5. In Montagu’s letters to Scott, there are altogether 14 instances of the full modal + not and 16 instances of the contracted modal + not, and over time the contracted negatives became more common. Scott systematically preferred contractions + not (24 vs 2), and there are no instances of the full spellings should not and would not in her letters. These results seem to correspond with the overall type variation in their letters. No instances of the enclitics couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t were found. Tables 6 and 7 present the negative auxiliaries in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence. These are generally rarer than the tentative modals. In Montagu’s letters to Scott, 81% (47) of the negative auxiliaries are full spellings and 19% (11) contractions, and in Scott’s letters the respective figures are 77% (30) and 23% (9). The chi-square test shows that these differences are not significant.

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Table 6.  Type variation in Montagu’s letters: negative auxiliaries Type

1738–43

1757–62

1766–71

1775–78

Total

cannot contraction do not contraction shall not contraction will not contraction

2 0 1 1 0 0 1 2

7 0 6 0 4 0 4 0

8 0 1 6 2 0 3 0

2 0 0 2 1 0 5 0

19 100%   0 0%   8 47%   9 53%   7 100%   0 0% 13 87%   2 13%

Table 7.  Type variation in Scott’s letters: negative auxiliaries Type

1740

1758–61

1768–69

1777

Total

cannot contraction do not contraction shall not contraction will not contraction

1 0 0 2 0 0 0 0

6 3 0 4 1 0 5 0

2 0 3 0 0 0 4 0

4 0 1 0 0 0 3 0

13 81%   3 19%   4 40%   6 60%   1 100%   0 0% 12 100%   0 0%

Both informants clearly avoided contracting the negative auxiliaries. The auxiliary don’t makes an exception as a contraction which in Montagu’s letters is almost as common and in Scott’s letters more common than the full form do not. However, the total uses of do not/don’t altogether amount to only 12 and 15 instances respectively. Examples (5)–(7) illustrate the use of these verbs. (5) I don’t believe we shall have any difficulties but William’s tender fears & anxious cares foresee millions.  (Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, c. 1760) (6) Dont mention this as I dont love to quarrel with any set of people; but I detest these proceedings or properly speaking Measures.  (Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, c. 1768) (7) I am greatly vexd at ye disorder in yr bowels do not write more than a line of a post just to say how you do.  (Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, c. 1768)

Negative contractions had been criticised in grammatical writing as well as in book reviews as “intolerably bad” (Campbell 1776) and as markers of low education and social climbing (Percy 2002). Perhaps Montagu and Scott were aware of



Epistolary styles and social roles 103

Table 8.  Other epistolary contractions Investigated items Bror,

Brr,

Brs Bror, ’tis ’tho wch wth yr, yr, yrs, yrself yt Total

EM to others

EM to SS

SS to EM

  21      8 143      0    1 200      1 374  

12    0 24    0  0 48    0 84  

16   1.2  0 33   2.5  1  0  5  0 55   4.2

0.2 1.2

1.7 3.2

0.7 1.4

2.7 4.7

Absolute and normalised figures (>10) per 1,000 words.

the stigma which the not-contractions carried and used them sparingly, ­regardless that they were used also by educated upper-class writers as shown in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2003: 253). The clitics ’m, ’ll, ’re, ’s, ’ve, and n’t did not yield particular results. A search through all of Montagu’s letters brought one instance of n’t (couldn’t) in addition to the negative contractions covered in Tables 6 and 7, and one instance of ’s (that’s), neither of these in the letters to her sister. Nothing was found in Scott’s letters. Montagu and Scott did not seem particularly prone to use contractions of this category, and comparisons with López-Couso’s (2007) results of auxiliary (he is > he’s) and negative (is not > isn’t) cliticisation in ARCHER could not be made. The figures for other contractions and abbreviations are given in Table 8. These cases were retrieved from the corpus by searching for apostrophes and superscripts, private spellings charted in Sterne’s and Lowth’s writing (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1998, 2003), and by a cursory reading of the letters. These spellings in Montagu’s letters to other recipients (em to others) are included in Table 8 as a means to further distinguish between her recipient-based epistolary styles. Overall, Montagu and Scott used these spellings in very similar frequencies when they wrote to each other (4.7 vs 4.2 per 1,000 words), whereas in Montagu’s general style they were significantly less common (3.2, p < 0.001). Again, the intimate role of a sister appears to be linked to more informal language use than the various roles present in Montagu’s other relationships with friends and relatives. Finally, a comparison of the connectives and vs & shows that the abbreviation categorically dominated in epistolary spelling. Scott did not use and at all, whereas the ampersand was used altogether 275 times in her letters. In Montagu’s letters to Scott, 98% (494) of these connectives are ampersands and 2% (10) are and’s. The frequency of & is roughly the same as in Montagu’s general spelling (93% &, 7% and), so register did not influence the use of ampersand considerably. It appears to have been the foremost choice in epistolary spelling.

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In terms of the total number of contractions and abbreviations (Tables 4–8), Scott used contracted modal auxiliaries and other epistolary spellings significantly more than Montagu (p < 0.025), with the respective normalised frequencies of 12.8 (168) and 9.8 (174) per 1,000 words. Even in this very informal communication between two family members, Montagu’s public prominence and superior social position may have encouraged her to use relatively more formal spelling. Nevertheless, she was more inclined to use familiar spellings in her letters to Scott than elsewhere. Correspondingly it would seem that Sarah Scott’s position as a provincial philanthropist and author and a relative outsider to the London literary elite simplified her choice of informal spellings.

5.2 The -ED variation in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence The emerging standard -ed was the most common spelling form of preterites and past participles in both Montagu’s and Scott’s letters, as shown in Tables 7 and 8. However, their spelling did not become uniform in style, as they also continued to use the -’d and -d variants throughout the years. The percentage of -ed (65.5%) is also lower than those in the private letters and journals of 1760–1790 in ­Oldireva Gustafsson (2002) (76%). The results nevertheless seem to confirm Oldireva ­Gustafsson’s (2002) assessment of -d as a feature of private spelling and further prove that -ED forms were used differently in epistolary spelling. Table 9 shows that Montagu favoured -ed the most, and that it was the most common variant in her letters every time period. She also clearly preferred -d over -’d in every time period but the first, which suggests that she may have considered -d to be more suitable in epistolary spelling; perhaps -d was also somewhat quicker and simpler to write. The -d variant seems to have been a later introduction in her spelling, as it was not really used at all in the letters of the first time period. Montagu also spelled predominantly with the simplest modal contractions (cd, shd, wd), which indicates that she favoured economical spelling Table 9.  -ED forms in Elizabeth Montagu’s letters to Sarah Scott 1738–43 1757–62 1766–71 1775–78 Total

-ed

-’d

-d

-t

69.6% 14.9   (39) 64.1% 12.6   (84) 61.4% 13.8   (70) 69.2% 13.4 (45) 65% 13.4 (238)

28.6% 0.6 (16) 15.3% 3.0 (20) 10.5% 2.4 (12)   4.6% 0.9 (3) 13.9% 2.9 (51)

(1) 20.6% 4.0 (27) 28.1% 6.3 (32) 24.6% 4.8 (16) 20.8% 4.3 (76)

– – – (1) (1)

Percentages, normalised figures (per 1,000 words), absolute figures.



Epistolary styles and social roles 105

Table 10.  -ED forms in Sarah Scott’s letters to Elizabeth Montagu 1740 1758–61 1768–69 1777 Total

-ed

-’d

-d

-t

36.4% 5.5 (4) 82.8% 17.3 (82) 57.3% 13.5 (47) 69.1% 20.4 (85) 69.2% 16.6 (218)

63.6% 9.6 (7) 11.1% 2.3 (11) 19.5% 4.6 (16) 14.6% 4.3 (18) 16.5% 4.0 (52)

–   6.1% 1.3 (6) 22.0% 5.2 (18) 16.3% 4.8 (20) 14.0% 3.4 (44)

– – (1) – (1)

Percentages, normalised figures (per 1,000 words), absolute figures.

variants. While the apostrophised variant decreased considerably in her letters, the use of -d was fairly stable, if not increasing. The -t variants on the other hand were non-existent. Table 10 shows that -ed was the most common variant also in Scott’s letters, but as it shows some fluctuation over the years (perhaps due to the relatively low figures), it is not clear whether -ed was actually increasing. In comparison, ­Montagu’s usage of -ed was fairly stable and consistent. In the first time period Scott used the apostrophised -’d more than -ed, but the sample for that period is very small. Of the contracted variants -’d and -d, Scott preferred the apostrophised one, but a clear pattern does not emerge; there are perhaps too few items. The -t variants are non-existent. The results suggest that Montagu’s spelling was somewhat closer to standard than Scott’s, which coincides with her preference of the more formal spellings of modal auxiliaries and epistolary contractions. Montagu nevertheless used -d more than Scott in every time period, which speaks of more informal (or perhaps economical) style, whereas Scott used the early public spelling -’d nearly always more than Montagu, possibly for stylistic reasons. These differences, however, are not statistically significant. The only clear indication of change towards standard spelling is the development in the use of -’d, which shows definite signs of disappearing from Montagu’s epistolary spelling. When Montagu’s and Scott’s patterns of -ED spellings are compared to ­Oldireva Gustafsson’s letter-writers of 1760–1790, it appears that the older generation, particularly Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and David Hume (1711–1776), share similar epistolary spelling styles with these women, who were roughly speaking their contemporaries.11 Although Burke did not use -’d at all in his letters of 1775–1782, the instances of -d amount to 21%, which is approximately the same as in Montagu’s letters of 1775–1778 (25%). 11. Incidentally, Laurence Sterne was related to Montagu and Scott by marriage, and his daughter was Montagu’s goddaughter (Blunt 1923: i, 196). Edmund Burke was part of the ­Bluestocking circle.

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Hume used -d fairly often (15%). In Sterne’s letters the -ed forms make up 68% and the -’d forms 21%. By contrast, Fanny Burney’s (1752–1840) letters written in 1774–1775 are almost uniformally dominated by -ed (98%), and Lady Sarah ­Lennox’s (1745–1826) letters to her sister written between 1781–1784 contain 94% of the -ed variants and 6% of the -’d variants (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 116– 117). Especially Lennox’s familiar epistolary spelling differs considerably from Montagu’s and Scott’s in this respect. This probably results from the emerging uniform spelling and the social demands of late eighteenth-century polite society, but also from their respective age differences and the periods when they had received their education. Montagu and Scott, as well as Burke, Hume and Sterne, had learned to read and write in the early 1700s, at which time contracted verb inflections were still common in published texts. According to Meyerhoff (2002: 534), “[l]inguistic style is part and parcel of speakers’ work to construct a social identity meaningful to themselves and others”. Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 126) characterises young Burney as an early adopter “who is trend-setting new models of usage”. It is probably the case that in the 1770s the then elderly Elizabeth Montagu, being one of the eminent London hostesses and a renowned literary critic, did not need to bother with all latest linguistic ideals, and Sarah Scott did not seem to consider it necessary either to switch to a levelled use of -ED variants, which young literary trend-setters of London had adopted.

6.

Conclusion

Contractions and abbreviations indicate the level of informality and intimacy in eighteenth-century epistolary spelling. Relatively formal epistolary spelling seems to be linked to the social roles and positions of being a benefactor (vs beneficiary), learned author (vs professional writer), member of Bluestocking elite (vs smaller-scale Bath philanthropy), and member of London polite society (vs Bath polite society). Elizabeth Montagu’s social prominence was reflected even in her intimate and familiar writing, whereas Sarah Scott’s less significant social standing perhaps provided more linguistic flexibility in that same context. Elizabeth Montagu’s letters to Scott nevertheless represent her epistolary style possibly at its most familiar and at its closest to the private spelling system. Still, Scott’s style is significantly more informal and leaning towards oral mode than Montagu’s, which suggests that her relative exclusion from the fashionable polite society in London influenced also the level of formality in her spelling. Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence ­reveals a dynamic spelling style which conveys only a few indications of conforming to new standards.



Epistolary styles and social roles 107

Over time, Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s correspondence shifted towards a more informal style with regard to their increased use of contractions. They became more common also in Montagu’s overall spelling, perhaps resulting from pragmatic reasons of writing a quick and economical hand, surely necessary for a woman obliged to maintain a constant stream of correspondence (the Montagu Collection alone contains approximately 3,500 surviving letters by her). This could also be a reflection of the increased stability and security of her social position. Both women appear to have followed the same norm of avoiding the contraction of negative auxiliaries. Letters from Scott to other recipients would be very helpful in further determining the variation in her epistolary spelling style. In the spellings of preterite and past participle forms, both Montagu and Scott preferred the new standard variant -ed the most, but less than the letter-writers and diarists of the late 1700s, examined in Oldireva Gustafsson’s (2002), whose style was probably more formal and recipients (if applicable) generally more distant. Despite the -ed variant being in the majority, the sisters did not seem to be in haste to adopt a more fixed spelling system. Age also seems to feature as an influencing factor, as older letter-writers used -ed less than the younger writers in Oldireva Gustafsson (2002).

References Blunt, Reginald (ed.). 1923. Mrs. Montagu, “Queen of the Blues,” Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800. Edited by Reginald Blunt from Material Left to Him by Emily J. Climenson, 2 vols. London: Constable & Co. Brewer, Marilynn B. and Gardner, Wendi. 1996. “Who is this ‘we’? Levels of collective identity and self representations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71: 83–93. Campbell, George. 1776. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London. Carter, John. 1773. A Practical English Grammar, with Exercises of Bad Spelling and Bad English: Or, a Plain and Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing the English Language with Accuracy and Correctness. Leeds. Accessed at Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://www. gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm, April 2008. Eger, Elizabeth (ed.). 1999. Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738– 1785, vol. 1, Elizabeth Montagu. London: Pickering & Chatto. Fisher, Ann. 1753. A New Grammar, 3rd edn. London. Accessed at Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm, April 2008. Görlach, Manfred. 2001. Eighteenth-Century English. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. ­Winter. Haugland, Kari. 1995. “Is’t allow’d or ain’t it? On contraction in early grammars and spelling books.” Studia Neophilologica 67 (2): 165–184.

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Huber, Magnus. 2007. “The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English.” In Annotating Variation and Change [Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, vol. 1], Anneli Meurman-Solin and Arja Nurmi (eds). Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/huber, accessed June 2008. Huddleston, Rodney D. and Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of the English Language. London. López-Couso, María José. 2007. “Auxiliary and negative cliticisation in Late Modern English.” In ‘Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso and Esperanza RamaMartínez (eds), 301–321. Bern: Peter Lang. Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A History of English Negation. London: Longman. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2002. “Language and identity.” In Handbook of Language Variation and Change, J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), 475–499. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2002. “Communities of practice.” In Handbook of Language Variation and Change, J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), 526–548. Oxford: Blackwell. Moxon, Joseph. 1683–1684. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing. Ed. by Herbert Davies and Harry Carter. 1962/1958. Second edition. London: Oxford University Press. Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. 1990. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2003. “English.” In Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present, Ana Deumert and Wim Wandenbussche (eds), 127–156. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2008. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com. Oldireva Gustafsson, Larisa. 2002. Preterite and Past Participle Forms in English 1680–1790 [Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 120]. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. Osselton, Noel E. 1984. “Informal spelling systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800.” In English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development [CECTAL Conference Papers Series 3], Norman F. Blake and Charles Jones (eds), 123–137. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Percy, Carol. 2002. “The social symbolism of contractions and colloquialisms in contemporary accounts of Dr. Samuel Johnson: Bozzy, Piozzi, and the authority of intimacy.” Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 2. Available at http://www.let.leidenuniv. nl/hsl_shl. Pohl, Nicole and Schellenberg, Betty A. (eds). 2003. Reconsidering the Bluestockings. San Marino: Huntington Library. Rizzo, Betty. 2003. “Two versions of community: Montagu and Scott.” In Reconsidering the Bluestockings, Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (eds), 193–214. San Marino: Huntington Library. Sairio, Anni. 2008. “A Social network study of eighteenth-century Bluestockings: The progressive and preposition stranding in their letters.” Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 8. Available at http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl.



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Sairio, Anni. 2009a. “Methodological and practical aspects of historical network analysis: A case study of the Bluestocking letters.” In The Language of Daily Life in England, 1400– 1800, Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds), 107–135. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sairio, Anni. 2009b. Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network: Sociolinguistic Issues in Eighteenth-Century Epistolary English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Compiled and translated by Kurt Wolff. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Smith, J. 1755. The Printer’s Grammar. London. Accessed at Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm, April 2008. Tavor Bannet, Eve. 2005. “The Bluestocking Sisters: Women’s Patronage, Millenium Hall, and ‘The Visible Providence of a Country’.” Eighteenth-Century Life 30 (1): 25–55. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 1998. “Standardization of English spelling: The eighteenthcentury printers’ contribution.” In Advances in English Historical Linguistics (1996), Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (eds), 457–470. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2003. ”Lowth’s language.” In Insights into Late Modern English, Marina Dossena and Charles Jones (eds), 241–264. Bern: Peter Lang. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2005. “Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular.” Linguistica e Filologia 21: 113–146. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2006. “‘Disrespectful and too familiar’? Abbreviations as an index of politeness in 18th-century letters.” In Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500–2000 [Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication 39], Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds), 229–247. Bern: Peter Lang. Vickery, Amanda. 1998. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Vorlat, Emma. 1975. The Development of English Grammatical Theory 1586–1737. Louvain: Leuven University Press. Wasserman, Stanley and Faust, Katherine. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Reporting and social role construction in eighteenth-century personal correspondence Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala University of Helsinki

Choosing who and what to report, writers adopt a position in interaction that serves their needs and expectations of the situation as well as the addressee’s expected needs. In this paper, we study reporting from a socio-pragmatic perspective with the aim of understanding the function of reporting in the communicative situations in which it occurs in eighteenth-century personal letters. Our analysis pays attention to the role of the reporter vis-à-vis the addressee, the reporting situation, the subject matter of the report, the identity of the person whose speech is reported, and the form of the reporting frame. The results suggest that reporting in eighteenth-century personal correspondence exhibits genre-specific characteristics but also relates to the writer’s role in the situation.

1.

Introduction [W]hen we shift from saying something ourselves to reporting what someone else has said, we are changing footing. And, so, too when we shift from reporting our current feelings, the feelings of the “addressing self,” to the feelings we once had but no longer espouse.  (Goffman 1981: 151)

The process of reporting what was previously said, written, or thought allows letter writers to create varying positions for themselves, as they can bring in other speakers as well as their earlier “self ”. Choosing who and what to report, the

. The research reported here has been supported by the “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (SoReaL) project (University of Helsinki), the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Academy of Finland funded project on “We and Others: The Socio-pragmatics of Referential Terms and Expressions in Early and Late Modern English 1500–1900”.

112 Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala

writer adopts a position that serves his or her needs in interactions and expectations of the situation as well as the addressee’s expected needs. In the process of reporting, the reporter, moreover, often alters the original speaker’s wording and even expresses an attitude to what is being reported, which makes it clear that reporting serves the purposes of the writer in the current interaction. Reporting usually takes place in situations in which it is somehow meaningful to incorporate the words of others to the writer’s own text. Such a situation might occur, for instance, when the writer needs to provide evidence to confirm the story by stating the source of the information (see Holt 1996, 2000; Buttny 1997). In this article, we study the occurrence of reporting from a socio-pragmatic perspective with the aim of understanding the function of reporting in the communicative situations in which it occurs in eighteenth-century personal letters. More specifically we focus on Charles Burney’s reporting practices, comparing them with the use of reporting in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s and Fanny ­Burney’s personal correspondence (Palander-Collin and Nevala 2006; Nevala and ­PalanderCollin forthcoming). Our analysis pays attention to the relationship of the reporter vis-à-vis the addressee, the reporting situation, the subject matter of the report, the identity of the person whose speech is reported, and the form of the reporting frame. The material used for this study comes from the eighteenth-century extension of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEECE). The letters included in the analysis are addressed to various types of recipients including family members, friends and acquaintances. This allows us to observe the informants’ reporting practices in their various social roles in somewhat different social and situational contexts (such as “father”, “friend”, “music expert”) and to test whether such role changes affect reporting practices. In our discussion we establish a model for describing the major functions of reporting in the informants’ correspondence, where reporting often serves contextual personal and interpersonal purposes rather than more general functions. Our earlier findings on reporting in the letters of two eighteenth-century literary figures, Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney, show that reporting, direct reporting in particular, is more frequent in letters to close recipients, and the sayings of the nearest are most often reported. In Piozzi’s letters, for example, women correspondents clearly received more reporting than men, and men were more often reported than women; in Fanny Burney’s letters, however, the gender of the recipient or the reported person was not important. Our findings on Charles Burney corroborate some of these findings so that it seems that there may be . For information on CEECE, see Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin (2009), or http://www. helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC.



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 113

general tendencies in the nature of the writer-addressee relationships in which reporting, and particularly direct quotations, occur and in the functions they serve in ­personal correspondence. But, strikingly, reporting in Charles Burney’s letters often establishes his public role as a music expert rather than, for instance, his private role as a family man.

2.

Reporting and social roles

We are interested in the significance of reporting as a means of constructing social roles for the writer vis-à-vis the recipient and believe that language users select from the available linguistic resources in a meaningful way that is appropriate for them both on the macro-societal and micro-interactional level (cf. Layder 2003/1997). As educated and highly literate intellectuals belonging to the same social circle, our informants Hester Thrale Piozzi, Fanny and Charles ­Burney can be expected to have behaved according to the norms and practices of that social sphere. It is likely that informants with a less literate background, for example, would show somewhat different reporting practices, perhaps producing reporting patterns closer to spoken language. At the same time, the writers are active agents creating social meanings in their letters by using reporting for various discourse functions. On the macro level, there is relatively little sociolinguistic research that would correlate the frequency of reporting or particular reporting practices with social categories like class or gender. Much of this research deals with the quotative form be like and its distribution and spread in various Present-day English speech communities mostly in the United States but also in Canada and the United Kingdom (Romaine and Lange 1991; Ferrara and Bell 1995; Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999; Dailey-O’Cain 2000; Macaulay 2001). Discussing patterns of variation and change in the quotative system, these studies have shown, for example, that the sociolinguistic variables age and gender correlate with the choice of the quotative forms, but correlations seem to be somewhat different from one community to another and also depend on the current phase of the change in progress. Ferrara and Bell’s (1995: 274) analysis suggests that young women between the ages of 18–25 use more direct speech than men, as 74% of women’s and 61% of men’s narratives contained direct speech. According to our results, the female informants Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney also use more reporting than the male informant Charles Burney, but Fanny Burney seemed to change her reporting practices over the years so that she reported more often in the letters she wrote in her forties than in the ones she had written earlier in her twenties (Palander-Collin and Nevala 2006; Nevala and Palander-Collin forthcoming).

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Although the significance of macro-social factors in the use of reporting is far from clear, we know that the use of reporting varies on a situational basis, i.e., reporting is a register- and genre-specific phenomenon. According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 444) present-day spoken English favours direct reporting (“paratactic projection of locutions”) over indirect reporting (“hypotactic projection of locutions”). Other studies have also revealed that spoken language in general seems to favour direct reporting. Lappalainen (2005: 155) found out that direct quotes cover c. 90% of all the instances of reporting in her spoken Finnish data produced by a group of young adults, and in Vincent and Perrin’s (1999: 305) Canadian French spoken interview data 87% of reporting was direct. In news media, on the other hand, indirect reporting is the norm and direct reporting the exception, as e.g. Bell (1991: 209) has shown. In our correspondence data, direct reporting (12%–23%) is far less common than indirect reporting, although personal correspondence has otherwise been shown to contain many linguistic features similar to spoken or speech-based data (e.g. Biber and Finegan 1997; Biber 2001). Preference for direct or indirect reporting strategies can naturally be subject to change. Interestingly, Collins (2006) has found that a diachronic change has taken place in the use of direct and indirect reporting in Russian trial transcripts. In the fifteenth century, trials were primarily oral confrontations, and so direct reporting was preferred in the transcripts. By the seventeenth century, trial documents written by professional clerks were mostly transcripts of direct testimonies given earlier and then verified at a court hearing. Collins (2006: 286) argues that for this reason direct speech reporting proved to be no longer necessary and indirect reporting was preferred instead. Functional differences between direct and indirect reporting have also been discussed and direct reporting is said to focus on the original speaker’s point of view and speech situation, while indirect reporting relates the utterance to the current speaker and speech situation (Coulmas 1986; McGregor 1997). Indirect reporting may be chosen for background information and direct reporting to recall utterances that are the focus of a telling (Holt 2000: 430). From the perspective of evidentiality, direct and indirect reporting may carry different truth claims, as in direct reporting the reporter gives the impression of expressing both the content and the wording of the original utterance, whereas in indirect reporting the reporter appears only to paraphrase the meaning of the reported utterance as she or he understood it (Baynham 1996: 64). Many studies of talk-in-interaction have looked at reporting in naturally occurring sequences of conversation and focussed particularly on the functions of direct quotations. These studies have found that direct speech characterizes the climax of the story (Baynham 1991, 1996; Buttny 1997, 1998; Holt 2000; Clift and Holt 2007: 2) and is particularly common in making complaints and recounting



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 115

amusing incidents (Holt 2000). Direct reporting may also give an air of objectivity to the account (Holt 1996: 230) and provide evidence (Holt 1996, 2000; ­Buttny 1997). In our material the topics reported with direct quotations are often emotionally laden and important to the writer, and they seem to occur almost exclusively in letters addressed to close recipients. Our analysis concentrates on the informants’ situated activity in the social setting of eighteenth-century personal correspondence. In our approach, we have been influenced by ideas about stylistic variation presented in audience design (Bell 2001) and accommodation theory (e.g. Giles and Coupland 1991), which roughly assume that the speaker adapts his or her style to suit the audience. Many discourse studies have identified the following situational parameters listed in Biber and Conrad (2001: 175) as important components of speech situations that can be used to define registers, for example: the participants, their relationships and their attitudes toward the communication; the setting, including factors such as the extent to which time and place are shared by the participants and the level of formality; the channel of communication; the production and processing time (e.g. amount of time available); the purpose of the communication; and, the topic or subject matter. Other factors being roughly equal in correspondence, linguistic variation may be the result of the participants’ changing attitudes and relationships as well as the purpose and the topic of communication. Our earlier findings on reporting in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s and Fanny Burney’s letters suggest that (direct) reporting relates to intimacy and familiarity between the correspondents, highlights emotionally important topics, and creates involvement between the correspondents.

3.

Charles Burney (1726–1814): A man of many roles

Our informant Charles Burney was a music historian, composer and author. He was born in 1726 in Shrewsbury, and educated at Shrewsbury School; later in the public school in Chester. In Shrewsbury, Burney continued his musical studies under his half-brother, James Burney, who was organist of St. Mary’s Church. Although his work at Shrewsbury did not rise above a low level, Burney’s experience of organ recitals appears to have been the impetus for his musical enthusiasm and ambition. In 1744, when Dr Thomas Arne visited Chester, Burney was brought to his attention, and subsequently became his apprentice in London. Burney’s job included giving lessons to Arne’s pupils and writing out scores for the orchestra of . Any biographical information is taken either from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition; see Wagstaff 2004/2006) or from Ribeiro (1991) (see References for further details).

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the Drury Lane theatre. At a personal level Burney did not like Arne very much, since he despised Arne’s selfishness and womanizing traits. So, when in 1746 he met Fulke Greville, it was not long before Greville adopted Burney as his musical companion and finally paid Arne £300 to release Burney from the remainder of his apprenticeship in 1748. Burney’s health compelled him to leave London in 1751, and he accepted the post of organist of St. Margaret’s Church in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. During the almost ten years he spent there, Burney began to entertain the idea of writing a general history of music. He decided to travel abroad and collect materials that could not be found in Britain, and so he left London in June 1770 and travelled across Europe. The results of his observations were first published in The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771). In July 1772 Burney again visited the continent to do further research, and later published his tour under the title of The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773); the same year, he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society. The first volume of his History of Music appeared in January 1776. The General History of the Science and Practice of Music by Sir John Hawkins appeared the same year. Even though Burney did not finish his own history until 1789, his work became more popular among the readers than Hawkins’ General History. Burney’s role as a family man began in the 1740s, when he met Esther Sleepe, who soon became pregnant with their first child, Esther, born before the couple married in 1749. Their family grew fast: sons James and Charles were followed by the birth of Frances (Fanny), Charles, Susanna, another Charles, and ­Charlotte. Both Charles 1 and 2 died in their infancy, and in 1762 Burney’s wife Esther ­Burney died following a long illness. Burney remained a widower for about five years before marrying Elizabeth Allen at Westminster in 1767. Burney’s teaching was enough to care for his growing family: Richard Thomas was born in 1768 and ­Sarah Harriet in 1772. Burney appears to have had a particularly close relationship with his daughter Fanny, as she followed her father’s footsteps into the literary world and published several novels during her lifetime. Fanny constantly sought her father’s approval, and their letters to each other, as well as to other correspondents, included long discussions on the success of her own books and those of her father’s (see e.g. Section 5.3). Burney also belonged to the same network as our previous informant, Hester Thrale Piozzi, whose salon was also frequented by the likes of Samuel ­Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. ­Burney’s profound friendship with Samuel Johnson began in the mid-1750s with his subscription to six copies of Johnson’s Dictionary, and it continued until Johnson’s death in 1784. Johnson also wrote the dedicatory preface to Burney’s History, and Burney gained access to Johnson’s Literary Club. Later in the 1800s he was



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 117

grieved by the death of his old friends, particularly his long-time correspondent Thomas Twining, who had helped him with the first volume of the History (see also Nurmi and Pahta in this volume). In 1807 Burney himself suffered a stroke that paralysed his left hand. For the remainder of his life he was confined to his rooms at Chelsea College, where he died in 1814.

4.

The material and method

4.1

Charles Burney’s letters and his correspondents

The material used for this study comes from the eighteenth-century extension of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEECE). We have used 50 letters written by Charles Burney during the years 1762–1784. These letters were addressed to 13 different recipients, including family members, friends and acquaintances. Family recipients are Burney’s second wife Mrs Allen, who at the time of writing was not yet married to Burney, daughters Fanny Burney and ­Susanna Phillips, his son Charles Burney, and daughter-in-law Sarah Burney. There are letters to friends Samuel Crisp, Lord Sandwich, Thomas Twining, Mrs Thrale, Reverend Montagu North, and acquaintances like Reverend Charles Davy. Table 1.  Charles Burney’s correspondents 1762–1784 Recipient

Relationship to CB

Word count

No of letters

Future wife Daughter Daughter Daughters (& son-in-law)

  1,174   4,053   3,011   1,062

 2  8  3  2

Son Daughter-in-law

  2,711   1,490

 4  3

Friends Samuel Crisp Lord Sandwich Thomas Twining Mrs Thrale (Piozzi) Montagu North

Friend Friend Friend Friend Friend

  3,552   2,746 10,772   6,840   1,159

 5  4  4 11  2

Others Charles Davy

Acquaintance

   881

 2

39,451

50

Family Mrs Allen Fanny Burney Susanna Elizabeth Phillips Fanny Burney & Susanna Elizabeth Phillips  (& Mr Phillips) Charles Burney Sarah Rose Burney

Total

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4.2 Reporting sequences and their functions Traditional grammatical accounts on reporting tend to distinguish between indirect reporting and direct reporting as shown in stereotypical examples (1) and (2) respectively. Although clear-cut examples like these do not capture the variety and complexity of naturally-occurring reporting structures, studies on reporting in context usually recognize that in most cases it is possible to distinguish between the two constructions (e.g. Tannen 1989: 98; Holt 2000: 427). In our material this categorization was possible to the extent that we were able to count frequencies of indirect and direct reporting in Section 5.1. However, the salience of the indirect vs direct distinction in interaction has also been questioned as different forms can perform similar functions (see Clift and Holt 2007: 11; Calsamiglia and López Ferrero 2003: 154). Discussing reporting functions in Section 5.2, we focus on indirect and direct constructions simultaneously, as both are used for similar functions and may be employed within the same passage (see e.g. example (19)). (1) He confessed to me that he had not been at an opera these 20 years  (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773, Ribeiro 1991: 125) (2) Ld S. said – ‘you intend giving the profits of this Acct to the Fund, Dr B. – don’t you?’  (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 427)

The traditional categories of direct and indirect reporting are said to differ in their closeness to the original wording: “indirect reporting” reports only content, not the original words, whereas “direct reporting” is supposed to report the exact original wording. But, in the process of reporting, the reporter often alters the original speaker’s wording and even expresses his/her own attitude to what is being reported irrespective of the reporting construction. In this sense, reporting sequences are highly selective in what they take along from the original event (cf. Clark and Gerrig 1990). For instance, the writer’s attitude is expressed in the underlined manner adverbials in example (3) and in the choice of the reporting verb in example (4). (3) for he very kindly & good-naturedly, after praising Ned’s drawings in a tone of wonder, desired me to bring him to dine with him  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 440) . In the examples, the reporting frames are in italics and the report itself in bold. Any evaluative remarks either before or after the reporting sequence are underlined. . The reference after each letter example shows the writer and the recipient, the year when the letter entry was written, and the reference to the page in the printed edition.

d



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 119

(4) he [Sir Joshua Reynolds] & Miss P. now, more than ever, cry out for yr writing a Comedy.  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney and  Susanna (Burney) Phillips, 1782, Ribeiro 1991: 343)

Charles Burney, like Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney, also uses sentenceexternal evaluative remarks, as in example (5). This discourse strategy is often used to make the recipient more clearly understand what the purpose of reporting is in a particular context (cf. Buttny 1998: 49). Burney’s comments most often follow reporting sequences which foreground his own positive and negative feelings of the person or situation in question. (5) I must bestow a few words on the Knight, who, par Parenthese, has borrowed of Worgan the Book of Books, El porque della Musica; but declared to me that d he found nothing extraordinary in it; he sh have added, except the difficulty g of read it.  (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773, Ribeiro 1991: 146)

In example (6) Burney directly quotes his son’s verbal mannerism as a topic boundary that serves the structure of his own text. In this example, Burney is not referring to a specific earlier instance of his son’s utterance but to all earlier instances generically, i.e., the son’s habit of saying avast (cf. Clark and Gerrig 1990: 773). We have categorized similar cases as direct reporting. (6) but you know him when he is off the great Horse, & condescends to tittup on a little Welsh Kephel – But avast! as my son w d say – I must go to Christchurch – & moreover cease talking Nonsence or I shall have my Tongue and Pen hacked off, & my Gown stripped over my Ears –  (Charles Burney to Hester Thrale, 1778, Ribeiro 1991: 261)

In general we have identified instances of reporting on the basis of the reporting frame that overtly indicates that words or thoughts previously uttered are being reported; the frame is complemented with the reported words or content. In addition to the type of reporting constructions shown in the previous examples, indirect reporting includes cases where the reporting frame is in the passive as in example (7), or the writer has heard the report but does not necessarily specify the source as in example (8). Or, the reporting frame may contain a noun of reporting rather than a reporting verb as in example (9). (7) I am told that he has lived abroad a good deal  (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1781, Ribeiro 1991: 319) (8) I am glad to hear Dr Johnson is so well  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1782?, Ribeiro 1991: 355–356)

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(9) The melancholy acct you gave of your own health in the 1st page of your letter  (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1783, Ribeiro 1991: 388)

In order to analyse the discourse functions of Burney’s reporting segments, we have divided the instances of reporting in his letters into two main categories according to the topic-induced functions, namely, general and contextual. The general function category includes instances which concern information about e.g. news and events, historical and/or contemporary facts, literary quotations and general topics such as the weather, as in example (10). These reports are used in a general and non-personal manner, although if accompanied by Burney’s manner adverbials and other evaluative remarks, they may be contextualized for personal or interpersonal involvement. (10) tho’ they say it was for 3 weeks before we came as cold at Paris & all over France as it cd be any where in the Months of May & June.  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1764, Ribeiro 1991: 42)

The contextual function category can further be divided into personal and interpersonal categories. As can be seen in example (11), writer-oriented reporting which functions for self-involvement includes cases in which Burney himself is at the initiating or receiving end. In other words, the reported clause concerns something that has been said or written to him and/or about him, or e.g. his books, appearance, health or, as in this case, his portrait. Personal reporting supports the writer’s own emotions and opinions, promotes his/her own gain, and emphasizes e.g. a certain (communicative) event important to the writer. (11) Ned is now making two Copies of my picture, (wch every body says is very like, & the Judges are of opinion that it is higher finished than any one of Sr Jos.’s Works) (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1781, Ribeiro 1991: 321–322)

Contextual involvement can also be interpersonal, including those instances which are oriented towards the recipient or the person reported, and in which Burney repeats something that has been said or written about either the recipient or a third person or persons, like in example (12). (12) All I have yet heard of his Lp is good – I am told that he has lived abroad a good deal – My Friend Seward knew him in Italy – & spoke well of him – as being a person of a grave & studious cast  (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1781, Ribeiro 1991: 319)

Interpersonal reporting can mean quoting, for example, descriptions of events which have involved other interactants in the correspondence, but it can also be used to express politeness, courtesy, or impoliteness to the recipient or the ­reported



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 121

person. By reporting something positive about the recipient/reported person, the writer aims to strengthen the relationship to other interactants in some way, as well as to receive confirmation of his/her own opinions from the recipient. When repeating negative comments about the recipient, the writer usually evaluates the situation for his/her own benefit, expecting the recipient to agree to keep the reported person in the out-group.

5.

Reporting in Charles Burney’s letters

5.1

Reporting frequencies

As we already pointed out there are both similarities and differences in Charles Burney’s reporting practices as compared to those of Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney examined in our earlier studies. First, reporting was less common in Charles Burney’s letters than in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s or Fanny Burney’s letters, as shown in Table 2, but just like Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney, Charles Burney used indirect reporting far more frequently than direct reporting (88% vs 12%). However, individual differences between the three informants are also considerable, so that both female informants use relatively more direct quotations than the only male informant (Table 2). Although gender differences in communicative styles might eventually explain these figures, it is also possible that the varying frequencies of direct quotations reflect the informants’ individual styles in story telling, as suggested by Lappalainen (2005). Direct reporting in Charles Burney’s, Fanny Burney’s and Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters also relate to topics that are dramatic or emotionally important to the writer, and they may be told in the form of a story. Table 2.  A comparison of reporting frequencies in Charles Burney’s, Fanny Burney’s and Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters* Informant

N

Fq/1,000

Fq/letter

% of direct reporting

Charles Burney Fanny Burney Hester Thrale Piozzi

194 329 355

4.9 6.5 9.2

3.9 5.1 5.4

12% 18% 23%

*Fanny Burney’s figures are based on Nevala and Palander-Collin (forthcoming) and Hester Thrale Piozzi’s figures on Palander-Collin and Nevala (2006).

. In Finnish conversational data, those informants who used direct reporting the most included both men and women, and the men in particular were also known in the community for their personal way of telling funny stories (Lappalainen 2005: 156). For a discussion on narrative style, see also Tagliamonte and Hudson (1999: 164–166).

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Table 3.  The frequency of reporting in Charles Burney’s letters to various recipients Recipient

Indirect reporting

Direct reporting

Total N (Fq/1,000)

   4   15   18

 0  1  7

   4 (3.4)   16 (3.9)   25 (8.3)

Family Mrs Allen Fanny Burney Susanna Phillips Fanny Burney & Susanna Phillips (& Mr Phillips) Charles Burney Sarah Rose Burney

  14

 1

  15 (14.1)

  12    3

 0  0

  12 (4.4)    3 (2.0)

Friends Samuel Crisp Lord Sandwich Thomas Twining Mrs Thrale (Piozzi) Montagu North

  12   13   47   29    1

 5  0  7  3  0

  17 (4.8)   13 (4.7)   54 (5.0)   32 (4.7)    1 (0.9)

Others Charles Davy

   2

 0

   2 (2.3)

Total

170 (88%)

24 (12%)

194 (4.9)

As can be seen in Table 3, reporting frequencies vary in Charles Burney’s letters to different recipients, but the subject matter of the reports also affects reporting frequencies. For instance, the letters to his daughter Susanna Phillips and the joint letter to Susanna and Fanny contain a lot of reporting, as Charles Burney gives Susanna a dramatic account of Dr Johnson’s last words on his death bed and tells Fanny and Susanna jointly about the praise he has heard concerning Fanny’s literary work. Whereas Hester Thrale Piozzi and Fanny Burney seemed to employ reporting as a means of creating lively accounts of everyday incidents they had experienced telling what their husbands, children and relatives had said, this is not a common strategy in Charles Burney’s letters. All in all, he refers to some 70 different persons, but only a few are mentioned more than once or more than just to one recipient (Table 4). These include Charles Burney himself, the recipient, and Burney’s friends Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson, and Lord Sandwich. The sayings of Reynolds and Johnson are reported to several recipients, but the words of Sandwich only to Thomas Twining. It is also quite common for Burney to use the passive or I hear-frames and not to mention the reported person at all. Moreover, Charles Burney very rarely reports on women’s sayings: the daughter Hetty is the most reported woman and she is referred to twice. All in all, only



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 123

Table 4.  The most frequently reported persons in Charles Burney’s letters Reported person

N of mentions

% of total 194

Charles Burney Recipient Not mentioned Sir Joshua Reynolds Dr Johnson Lord Sandwich

28 21 20 19 13 6

15% 11% 10% 10%   7%   3%

16 instances of reporting are attributed to women, which is 14% of the cases that can clearly be attributed to either men or women. The reported women include Burney’s daughters, his wife, Mrs Thrale, a neighbour, some acquaintances, and Lady Susan Strangways, whose marriage Burney comments on to his future wife. Women’s sayings are mostly reported to women recipients, although Burney’s son Charles learns what daughter Charlotte had said, and a close family friend Samuel Crisp is told about what Fanny had said. Judging by his use of reporting in the material, Charles Burney seems to be more focused on the circle of his male friends and his own public role as a music expert than his family members or his own family role as a father or husband. This conclusion is also supported with the analysis of reporting topics and functions in the following section.

5.2 Reporting topics and functions As already shown in Section 4.2, reporting in Burney’s letters includes instances of both general and contextual involvement in the topic of the reporting sequence. It is not surprising that Burney uses reporting more for contextual than for general purposes, since our earlier studies show that it is a common strategy also in both Fanny Burney’s and Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters. Burney’s references to, for example, the weather and local elections, are very rare in the material, and it seems that numerous literary quotations from Shakespeare, Pope, and Greek mythology play a more central role in boosting up his own status as a learned man than as a general reporting strategy. This is shown, for example, in (13), where Burney refers to Shakespeare’s Tempest when talking about the general topic of weather. (13) I rather Hope to find you in London if I shd ever get there: – but at present there is but little likelihood of it, for such infernal Winds have continued for many Days past, that one wd think wth Trinculo that ‘Hell was broke loose & all the Devils were here.’  (Charles Burney to Samuel Crisp, 1770, Ribeiro 1991: 70)

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It could be argued that even the general function can often carry elements of personal involvement, as can also be seen in the sentence which immediately foregrounds the reporting sequence in example (14). Here the source of the report is undefined, and the reporting frame is in the passive voice. The report may be hearsay, or Burney may have read it in the newspaper, and it is used in the context to underline that Burney is arguing for the freedom to vote for whomever he wants. (14) But it is, & will be so hard a run thing, that I fear for my little prefermts – as it is sd an order will be sent to all the Household to vote for Sr C. Wray  (Charles Burney to Susanna (Burney) Phillips, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 412)

A more distinctively personal quote can be seen in example (15), where Burney reports the words of the Dean of Christ Church. The entire reporting sequence works here as a device boosting up Burney’s expertise in the field of music, and, simultaneously, as a means to bring forward the fact that he is acquainted with socially upper-class people who favour him. (15) Before I knew his person, while he was Dean of Xt Church Oxford, he did me the honour to send a Message by Ld Bruce, now Earl of Aylesbury, & Chamberlain to the Queen, ‘that there was a great Collection of Anct Music at Xt Church, wch had been bequeathed to it by Dr Aldrich, & wch if I wished to examine, he wd give orders for my admission’  (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1781, Ribeiro 1991: 319)

Like his daughter Fanny, Charles Burney often uses quotations which work for mixed purposes, although more often combining the personal/interpersonal sub-functions than the general/contextual functions as a whole. His reporting sequences are most often interpersonal, like Fanny’s, but are yet somehow linked to the topic of his own persona, health, music, or portrait being painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Those reporting instances in which Burney would selflessly compliment the recipient or the reported person, are relatively uncommon, unlike in Fanny’s or Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters. Example (16) is an excerpt from Burney’s letter to his son, in which he writes about his daughter Charlotte seeing a balloon, a recent invention by the French, about which Burney seems to have been quite excited. The passage conveys Charlotte’s great enthusiasm on the matter, which is boosted by a direct reported clause of her exact words. (16) The 1st intelligence of Lunardi’s safe arrival on Earth came from Charlotte, who at abt 4 o’Clock walking with Mr & Mrs Hoole in their Garden ‘never thinking of nothing at all’ saw the Baloon just over their heads at a great height – & afterwards saw it descend abt 4 or 5 Miles off. Geo. Cambridge folld it on horseback – & at Ware conversed with the Aerial Traveller. Charlotte



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 125



saw him, & was more delighted than if the Man in the Moon had quitted his satellite to visit the neighbourhood of Amwell. (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 442–443)

The frequency and topic of reporting differ according to the recipient, and often Burney seems to choose the people he thinks are “deserving” of a particular subject. For example, Burney’s letters to his friend Thomas Twining or to his son and daughters contain frequent reporting on various ego-related topics like his work and music in general. Letters to Montagu North, Charles Davy and daughter-in-law Sarah Burney, on the other hand, contain hardly any reporting at all and are of a very different nature than, for example, the reports to the daughters or Twining. In letters to his daughter-in-law Sarah Burney in particular, Burney uses reporting merely to refer to Sarah’s words in her earlier letter and incorporates the report into his own thanks for this information (example (17)). These letters do not contain any instances of reporting about the sayings of friends, acquaintances, or relatives. (17) at present all I can add is to thank you for your intentions, for your enquiries after health, & for not only letting me know that your own is better, but that you are all happy, & that time does not hang heavily on your hands.  (Charles Burney to Sarah Rose Burney, 1783?, Ribeiro 1991: 366)

In many contexts reporting the recipient’s words as well as self-reporting can also be viewed as intertextual devices, as they serve to situate the current letter in the context of an earlier discussion or simply refer to the recipient’s earlier letter in order to allow the writer to comment on it, as in example (18). In these instances the content of the report may be minimal, as was the case in example (9), as the reporting sequence merely reminds the recipient of the topic and functions as the starting point for the writer’s own comment. (18) You ask my opinion of the Commemoration Performance – have a little patience, my dear friend, & you shall have it in print. Wd you believe it, that after expecting little more than noise & confusion, as I believe I told you in my last letter, things went so much better, & afforded me so much more

. It is worth noting that in Pahta and Nurmi’s (2009) study on code switching in the same set of Charles Burney’s letters the same correspondents who received reporting and direct quotes more than the others in our analysis also received more code switched segments. Pahta and Nurmi suggest that in some cases Burney knew that the recipient did not know foreign languages and consequently avoided code switches, but it is also possible that the lack of intimacy in the relationship may have caused Burney to avoid switches. Following this line of interpretation, both reporting and code switching could be part of familiar style in Burney’s case.

126 Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala



pleasure & satisfaction than I expected, that in a kind of Rodemontade gratitude I told Lord Sandwich I had some notion of writing an acct of the Commemoration Performances for immediate publication, & shewed him the sketch of some such promise wch I intended putting into the Papers, to prevent others from spitting i’th’ Porridge? (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 423)

5.3 Literary roles of Charles and Fanny In Burney’s letters, one of the frequent topics reported on at the personal and interpersonal level is the literary pursuits of both himself and his daughter Fanny. The contexts in which he reports what has been said about his own books or Fanny’s novels contain the clearest examples of reporting which function for either authority enhancement and/or emotional involvement. When referring to his own books and writings, Burney often “flaunts” how the character of the reported source is respectable and civil, and, more importantly, knows the right people to Burney’s advantage, as in example (19). (19) I have seen Mr Davidson 2ce – he’s quite a Gentleman in appearance & behaviour – says his Frd wishes still through Delicacy to lie concealed, but interests himself so much abt my Publication that he cares not what it costs him, provided I carry the work into execution – told me that he was a young Man of Family & large independant Fortune – and upon my telling at Xmas the real state of the subscription wch then barely amounted to 400, & saying that I had promised the Public to advance or retreat at that Time, & might be called on – ‘well, Sr you have an answer ready – we are impowered to beg you to go on’ – ‘but Sr, I shd be sorry to be a weight upon any Frd, whose partiality may over-rate my abilities [’] – ‘Sr replied Mr D: he does not care if it was the whole – Pray advertise – I shall wait on you very soon’  (Charles Burney to Samuel Crisp, 1774, Ribeiro 1991: 162)

In example (20), Burney writes about his History of Music, which he intended for “polite literary audience”. Burney mentions that Dr Arne’s letter has been “full of Flomery” concerning his manner of writing, but he also remembers to point out that his work has been praised by others as well. What might be called false modesty comes through in the phrase “my Nonsense”, which most probably are his own words instead of a part of the original report. Again, he makes an evaluative comment after the reporting sequence, referring this time to the profits he will be getting from the book. . The word flomery means here flummery, ‘flattery’ or ‘an empty compliment’ (OED).



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 127

(20) I have many Folks still on my Hands – & know not when I shall be able to get to Ches[sington] – or to work seriously at my History. – Except Dr Arne’s Letter, wch is likewise full of Flomery as to my Manner of Writing &c – I hear Nothing but praise – & all agree in finding my Nonsense Entertaining. – This will probably sell the Book & get Subscribers.  (Charles Burney to Samuel Crisp, 1771?, Ribeiro 1991: 90)

Example (21) in turn concerns Burney’s proposition to write a brief account of the 1784 Händel commemoration festival. The matter is seemingly (emotionally) important to him, hence the long passage of reporting of what Lord Sandwich had spoken with the King on the subject. He adds an evaluative comment after the reported passage, in which he once again shows false modesty by saying that he could not break his promise even though he would have wanted to. Yet, it is clear to the reader that he had no intention of letting that happen, since it would have harmed his reputation. (21) in a kind of Rodemontade gratitude I told Lord Sandwich I had some notion of writing an acct of the Commemoration Performances for immediate publication, & shewed him the sketch of some such promise wch I intended putting into the Papers, to prevent others from spitting i’th’ Porridge? He jumpt at the Idea – said it was just what he & the rest of the Directors wished – & desired that he might put my slip of Paper in his Pocket, to shew his Collegues. But not contented with this he carried it up into their Majesty’s Box in the Abbey, where it was 1st mentioned, & upon the King saying that all went so well that they shd get an historian to write an acct of it, Ld S. told his Majesty that it was what he had been just talking of, & shewed him & the Q. the slip of paper – The K. was pleased to say he was glad it wd be in such hands; & wished to see it, when written, in MS. – Here you see I was bound ‘with Styx nine times round me’ – & there was no getting loose if I had wished it.  (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1784, Ribeiro 1991: 423–424)

There are a few cases in which Burney lets go of his self-praise for the sake of others. As can be seen in examples (22)–(24), Burney’s communicative goal is merely to compliment his daughter Fanny by reporting to her how others have praised her novel Cecilia, not to bring his own learned, know-it-all persona into the situation. The purpose is also to reveal how excited and proud, or as he ­himself ­comments in example (24), “very glad”, he has been to find out that Fanny’s second book is as successful as her first. . Charles Burney refers here to Greek mythology: the River Styx was said to run nine times around the regions of Erebus.

128 Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala

(22) Sr Josh – had the 5th vol. in his Painting-room – in wch he is now abt 1/2 way. He intends sending you in a Bill – for damages – the Bk has already Cost him at least £100. Well, he is so full of it – & absorbed by the Characters that he can think of nothing Else […] Sr J. says he never yet read a book in wch the Characters are so supported, & discriminated. He sd something good of them all, separately – but particularly Albany – who has a Methodistical cast, without disgusting or putting one out of humour with religion – & nothing but religion, says the Kt, cd so totally vanquish the fear of the World, & give courage to oppose its habits. Hobson he says is an admirable alehouse Philosopher – & young Belfield an excellent expansion of a Truth: that, take a man of Genius from his natural bent, & he never pursues anything else with success – Miss la Rolles & Lady Onoria, he finds so like, & so different! – Monkton not an uncommon worldly Man of the World – &c &c &c – this is not a quarter of what was said by him & his niece all dinner & Tea-time  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney and  Susanna (Burney) Phillips, 1782?, Ribeiro 1991: 343–344) (23) Miss B. said ‘she was sure you cd never have acquired so much knowledge of the world & of Characters in the short life you had lived in your present form & figure – it must have been during a preexistent state’ – there! put that in your pocket.  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1782, Ribeiro 1991: 350) r (24) here again Cecilia was instantly of the Party – I was very glad to find M Bull extreamly well acquainted with her – & Mr Skreen said he cd not get a word from his Daughter, Ly C. for a week after the Book came out  (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1782, Ribeiro 1991: 352)

In Fanny’s own letters to her father, reporting naturally concerns her writings in a personal instead of interpersonal function, both for admissive and argumentative purposes. In example (25), Fanny quotes, following her father’s footsteps, some flattering words said about her first novel Evelina, supporting in a way the pride she herself has for her own work. It is important for her to mention “the Great World” and “a most polite Lady” as the original sources quoted by Mr Lowndes. (25) all the Great World, he says, send to him, to Buy it – & a most polite Lady charged him to let her have it, for she was reckoned quite unfashionable for not having read it […] I am so much astonished at this flow of success, that I sometimes think I have taken as long a Nap as the Sleeping Princess in the Wood  (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1778?, Hemlow et al. 1972: 43)



Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 129

Fanny’s use of reporting in emotionally laden contexts can as easily concern more negatively toned comments and situations. In example (26), Fanny quotes Samuel Crisp’s words at the time of her attempt at writing a play, The Witlings, which not only was disapproved by her father but also turned out to be a flop. She repeats Crisp’s words in order to echo her own thoughts on the subject. (26) What my Daddy Crisp says, ‘that it would be the best policy, but for pecuniary advantages, for me to write no more’ – is exactly what I have always thought since Evelina was published;  (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1779?, Hemlow et al. 1972: 347) (27) How grieved I am you do not like my Name! – the prettiest in Nature! I remember how many people did not like Evelina, & called it affected & Missish, till they read the Book, – & then they got accustomed in a few pages, & afterwards it was much approved.  (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1795, Hemlow et al. 1972: 143)

In example (27), on the other hand, Fanny disagrees with her father’s opinion of the name of her novel Camilla and resorts to quote what other people have first said and mistakenly thought of Evelina. By reporting others, she attempts to convince her authoritative father, and herself, that she has made the right choice in choosing the name.

6.

Reporting roles

We can say that reporting in eighteenth-century personal correspondence exhibits genre-specific characteristics like the preference for indirect reporting rather than direct reporting, which in general has been found to be the case in written language. Moreover, reporting in personal letters often concerns topics and people that are close and/or important to the writer. However, it is also possible to detect variation in the reporting practices that the writer adopts vis-à-vis the recipient, which suggests that reporting relates to the writer’s role in the situation. Although the analyses are based on small samples, the frequencies of reporting in different contexts show that this variation may be patterned, albeit in complex ways. For example, reporting in personal correspondence seems to occur in writer-recipient relationships that are close and possibly frequent, such as among family and friends. Especially direct reporting occurs in letters to emotionally important recipients. Of the family members, Sarah Rose Burney received very little reporting from both her father-in-law Charles Burney and sister-in-law Fanny Burney; on the basis of Charles Burney’s letters to her, she seems to have been

130 Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala

an outsider in the Burney family as Burney’s letters are replies to her feelings of loneliness among the Burneys. Reporting also patterns in interesting ways along gender lines in terms of whose words get reported. Both Fanny Burney and Hester Thrale Piozzi reported men’s and women’s sayings and the most reported persons were family members like husbands, daughters, sons and sisters. In the case of Charles Burney, reporting focuses on men’s sayings, the emphasis being on male friends and acquaintances who probably were emotionally important to Burney in many cases but also socially respected “celebrities”. Topic-wise, Burney’s use of reporting mainly concerns literature, music, the weather, and political matters (general functions), as well as his own books, visits, opinions, musical pieces, portrait, and health (contextual functions). He also often reports compliments said about his personal skills or qualities. Direct reporting in particular seems to be used in such contexts which involve his dearest two topics: music and writing. Even quotations from literature, like Shakespeare, Pope, or Greek mythology, appear to be used in connection with Burney’s own health or writing abilities. If we look more closely at the contextual functions that reporting serves in Burney’s letters, we can see that, like in Fanny Burney’s and Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters, the reporting sequences seem to coincide with passages in which Burney seeks emotional or personal involvement from the recipient in the topic at hand. His aim is to ensure that the reader understands the reasons underlying his opinions and eventually shares his views. Burney also wants the recipient to know his side of things emotionally, so that he/she can also, for example, enjoy the enthusiasm or feel the anger along with him. The most visible way in which Burney’s reporting functions differ from those of Fanny’s and Hester’s is that in his letters, reporting often occurs for the purposes of recognizing his authority and expertise as a talented composer, a wellknown historian, and an established author. Burney uses reporting as a means of putting his public social role forward instead of his private role as a father and a friend. In many cases, emotional involvement concerns the fact that his public reputation has either been praised or blamed. He uses interpersonal reporting to compliment the recipient far less frequently than either Fanny or Hester does, although when it comes to the subject of Fanny’s literary career, he seems to make an exception. In that context, Burney takes on the role of a proud and loving father, which he in fact was to all of his children.



7.

Reporting and social role construction in correspondence 131

Conclusion

In our discussion of reporting in Charles Burney’s personal correspondence we have shown that reporting often serves personal and interpersonal functions. Moreover, reporting is more typical in letters to close recipients, and the persons reported are also important to the writer and the recipient. These tendencies corroborate our earlier findings concerning reporting in the letters of Fanny Burney and Hester Thrale Piozzi. Similar findings can also be made concerning direct reporting, as direct quotations tend to be found highlighting emotionally laden topics. It seems then, on the basis of the correspondence of both Fanny and Charles Burney as well as Hester Thrale Piozzi, that there are general tendencies both in the nature of the writer-addressee relationships in which reporting occurs, as well as in the functions it serves in particular contexts. On the basis of our current data, we have been able to draw tentative conclusions on gender variation in the use of reporting, but further research on differences in both the quantity and the quality of the reporting functions need to be done in the future.

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Calsamiglia, Helena and López Ferrero, Carmen. 2003. “Role and position of scientific voices: Reported speech in the media.” Discourse Studies 5 (2): 147–173. CEECE = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension, compiled by Terttu Nevalainen (leader), Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Anni Sairio (née Vuorinen) and Tanja Säily. University of Helsinki. Clark, Herbert H. and Gerrig, Richard J. 1990. “Quotations as Demonstrations.” Language 66 (4): 764–805. Clift, Rebecca and Holt, Elizabeth (eds). 2007. Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Daniel E. 2006. “Speech reporting and the suppression of orality in seventeenth-century Russian trial dossiers.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7 (2): 265–292. Coulmas, Florian (ed.). 1986. Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. Dailey-O’Cain, Jennifer. 2000. “The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (1): 60–80. Ferrara, Kathleen and Bell, Barbara. 1995. “Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be + like.” American Speech 70 (3): 265– 290. Giles, Howard and Coupland, Nikolas. 1991. Language: Contexts and Consequences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, Christian M. I . M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd edition. London: Arnold. Hemlow, Joyce, Boutilier, Patricia and Douglas, Althea (eds). 1972. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. III. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holt, Elizabeth. 1996. “Reporting on talk: The use of direct reported speech in conversation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 29 (3): 219–245. Holt, Elizabeth. 2000. “Reporting and reacting: Concurrent responses to reported speech.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33 (4): 425–454. Lappalainen, Hanna. 2005. “Referointi ja variaatio: Sitaatit yksilöllisen variaation kuvastimina ja resursseina” (Reporting and variation. Citations as reflections and resources of individual variation). In Referointi ja moniäänisyys (Reporting and multiple voices), Markku Haakana and Jyrki Kalliokoski (eds), 150–186. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Layder, Derek. 2003/1997. Modern Social Theory: Key Debates and New Directions. London: Routledge. Macaulay, Ronald. 2001. “You’re like ‘why not?’ The quotative expressions of Glasgow adolescents.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (1): 3–21. McGregor, William. 1997. Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nevala, Minna and Palander-Collin, Minna. Forthcoming. “‘O England! England! She says – my Father – my Sisters – my friends! – shall I ever see you more?’ Reporting in 18th-century correspondence.” In Interactional Discourse, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson, Johanna Karhukorpi and Mia Raitaniemi (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nurmi, Arja, Nevala, Minna and Palander-Collin, Minna (eds). 2009. The Language of Daily Life in England, 1400–1800. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.



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Preacher, scholar, brother, friend Social roles and code-switching  in the writings of Thomas Twining Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

Universities of Helsinki and Tampere

 

no human being talks the same way all the time (Hymes 1984: 44)

The article examines variation in the use of multilingual resources in the verbal repertoire of one individual in different social roles involving various contexts of discourse in eighteenth-century England. We discuss the language practices of Thomas Twining, scion of the tea merchant family, clergyman and classical scholar, in texts representing different genres and registers in the public and private domains. The study shows that the writer’s varying social roles are reflected in patterns of code-switching, functioning as an index of the communicative situation and the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors.

1.

Introduction

Since individuals participate in several socio-cultural relationships during their lives, they are capable of fulfilling or representing multiple simultaneous and consecutive social roles. Some of these multiple roles belong to public and professional domains, such as those of a “writer” or “vicar”, while others, like those of a “spouse”, “sibling” or “friend”, belong to the more private spheres. These roles are part of an individual’s layered, complementary and competing repertoires of identity, and are constructed in semiotic practices that produce, enact or perform . The research reported here has been supported by the Academy of Finland, the “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (SoReaL) project (University of Helsinki) and the Finland Distinguished Professor project on “Multilingualism as a Problematic Resource” (University of Jyväskylä), as well as the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change (VARIENG, University of Helsinki).

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them (Blommaert 2005: 205–207). Among the semiotic practices by which social roles are constructed are verbal repertoires, complexes of linguistic resources, which, according to Hymes (1996: 33), consist of speech styles and contexts of discourse, with relations of appropriateness obtaining between the styles and contexts. In different contexts, particular social roles or identities can be foregrounded by language users drawing upon their verbal repertoires in different ways. The linguistic resources mobilized for the construction of a role depend on a wide range of factors prevailing in the communicative situation, including the setting and scene, participants and their interpersonal relationships, the purpose or genre of the speech act, and the social rules governing the event (see e.g. Hymes 1974 or Biber 1994). The choices made also reflect the language users’ understanding of what is appropriate in the context of discourse, how they see their own role in it or wish their role to be seen by others. The linguistic resources that act as indexicals of social roles in the various contexts of discourse can derive from any level of language. According to some views, all linguistic resources should be considered, at least a priori, as “unpredictably mobile” in terms of their potential for deployment in role-constructing activities (Rampton 1999: 501); as Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) put it, to speak, or not to speak, in a social encounter is always an act of identity (see also Joseph 2004). This also applies to the use of multilingual resources whereby speakers mobilize elements from different languages. In this article, we trace variation in the use of linguistic resources in the verbal repertoire of one individual in varying social roles involving different contexts of discourse in eighteenth-century England. Our focus is on the language practices of Thomas Twining, scion of the tea merchant family, clergyman and classical scholar. We analyze texts that Twining wrote in varying social roles, examining his language practices in both public and private domains and in different genres, i.e. in texts produced within the public registers of science and religion, and in personal correspondence. Our particular object of investigation is his use of multilingual resources, more specifically, his code-switching practices. While Twining was not a member of a bi- or multilingual ethnic community, he was familiar with several foreign languages that in eighteenth-century England were commonly used as tools of communication in science and education and in interaction between members of contemporary literary and social elites, and drew upon these languages to a varying degree in his texts written in different social roles. The study builds on our earlier research on code-switching in the history of English writings, extending from late medieval texts to late modern material (Pahta 2003, 2004a, 2007; Nurmi and Pahta 2004; Pahta and Nurmi 2006, 2007, 2009). A quantitative analysis of code-switching in the Corpus of Early



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English Correspondence Extension (CEECE), a large corpus of eighteenth-century ­personal letters, indicated that Thomas Twining was one of the writers whose use of multilingual resources was more frequent and more versatile than that of most other letter writers in the material (Pahta and Nurmi 2007). The first follow-up study, focusing on the code-switching practices in the correspondence of music historian Charles Burney with different recipients, one of them being Twining, confirmed that multilingual resources were used by eighteenth-century letter writers for negotiating their interpersonal identities in different types of relationships with their correspondents (Pahta and Nurmi 2009). The present study continues and complements this research, shifting attention from Burney to Twining and broadening the scope of analysis to include material from other types of writings, representing different genres and produced in different social roles, including communicative situations in the public domain. The study shows that in varying social roles, reflected in the writings created in different contexts of discourse, Twining indeed exhibits and makes use of his multilingual resources in different ways – he does not “talk” the same way all the time.

2.

Code-switching and social roles

Code-switching, the use of two or more languages within a single communicative episode (Heller 1988), is a common feature in the language use of bilingual speakers, and has been studied extensively from a number of perspectives, particularly in speech. The body of research that has accumulated shows that bilingual speakers use multilingual resources in the negotiation of their social identities and relationships in various ways (for recent work, see e.g. Auer 2005; Li Wei 2005; Bailey 2007; Gardner-Chloros 2009). In this research, the notion of social roles is often explicitly addressed in analyses of interaction in intergenerational talk in diasporic families (e.g. Li Wei and Milroy 1995; Milroy and Li Wei 1995; Zhu 2008; see also Gafaranga 2007). An example is provided by Williams (2005), examining language alternation in the negotiation of social roles in a Chinese-American family dispute between a mother and a daughter. In the course of the dispute, code-switching is used for a variety of purposes by the . For accounts, see Bullock and Almeida (2009); see also e.g. Nurmi and Pahta (2004) or Pahta and Nurmi (2009). The term code-switching is variously defined in earlier research. For us, it is an umbrella term for any identifiable changes from one language to another within one communicative event, which can consist of a single text, e.g. a sermon or a letter, or a sequence of letters between two correspondents. Our definition excludes alternation of expressions from different varieties or styles of one language – a phenomenon which we prefer to call style-shifting.

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interlocutors: for ­marking approval or disapproval, agreement or disagreement, establishing ­authority, challenging the expected role positions, and rejecting attempted challenges. The study demonstrates that social roles and expectations can play a significant role in the interpretation of code-switching in the context of discourse. The roles constructed by these linguistic choices are not, however, static, nor are the correspondences between language and social values or positions simple one-to-one associations: in their family argument, the participants utilize code-switching to negotiate continuously, to form and reconstruct their roles as mother, daughter, adult and child (Williams 2005: 326–327; for similar findings, see also Cashman 2005 and Zhu 2008). Studies on the social motivations and patterns of code-switching show that switching often indexes in-group membership in a range of social contexts of discourse, both in the private and public spheres of life (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1993; Yoon 1996). Several studies suggest that in cases involving a real choice of language, code-switching is more common in communication between peers. For example, a social network analysis of the interaction of individuals with different interlocutors in a Chinese/English-speaking community by Milroy and Li Wei (1995) indicates that different family roles reflect on and are reflected in individuals’ varying code-switching behaviour in intergenerational communication between parents and children and between same-generation peers. A study of social characteristics in French/Alsatian code-switching in Strasbourg by ­GardnerChloros (1991, 1995) shows that social roles and interpersonal relationships are also relevant in bilingual conversations taking place at the workplace. In the analysis of practices in three department stores, code-switching was found to be less frequent in the language use of salespeople in conversations with customers than in conversations with colleagues. Thus, particular social roles can be foregrounded in different code-switching practices in various contexts of discourse (see also Omoniyi 2006). While code-switching can indicate in-group membership, intimacy and togetherness, it can also index out-groupness, exclusion or differentiation from a particular social group, and signal power or prestige (see e.g. Milroy, Li Wei and Ching 1992; Blommaert 1992). From the perspective of social identities, it is similarly noteworthy that switching also occurs in the language use of individuals who could be characterized as monolinguals from a traditional point of view, i.e. not members of particular multilingual ethnic groups or bilingual families. For example, studies by Rampton (1995, 2006) among British school teenagers show that languages that are not generally thought to belong to particular speakers or groups may often be used by them in local negotiations of social, ethnic or linguistic boundaries and positions. Similar findings have been made in



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­several studies examining language use e.g. in youth communities (see Quist and J­ ørgensen 2007). Code-switching can also index social identities in writing, an area of communication which has long been neglected in code-switching research. Recent studies have shown this to happen frequently in the fuzzy area between public and private types of writing in various types of online contexts (see e.g. Androutsopoulos 2007; Laitinen, Leppänen and Pahta forthcoming), but it is also attested in texts clearly belonging to the public domain, such as newspapers (Bhatt 2008). In historical data, our case study of Charles Burney’s switching practices in his eighteenth-century correspondence with several recipients shows that Burney mobilized his multilingual resources in different ways with different interactants (Pahta and Nurmi 2009). In Burney’s language practices a close relationship between the writer and the recipient seems to have been a prerequisite for frequent and multilingual code-switching; in this sense, switching in Burney’s letters is very much an in-group phenomenon, indexing social relationships characterized by shared interests, intimacy and close friendship – contexts of discourse where drawing on multilingual resources was appropriate for him and his correspondents. In more distant role-relationships, Burney did not seem to favour codeswitching to the same degree in his writing. Similar tendencies can be seen in code-switching practices in letters written in earlier periods. A study of the social patterns of code-switching in late-medieval and early modern English letters suggests that it is a sensitive indicator of peer roles among representatives of various social ranks and professional groups, such as merchants, lawyers and the clergy (Nurmi and Pahta 2004). At the same time, various kinds of genre- or domain-specific switching patterns have also been detected in written data, suggesting that particular macrosocial contexts of discourse may be more appropriate for the use of multilingual resources than others. An analysis of the material in the multigenre Helsinki Corpus of English Texts extending over a thousand years from the Old English to the Early Modern period (c. 700 to 1710), indicated that texts connected with religion and science seemed to favour switching more than others (Pahta and Nurmi 2006). Switching was particularly common in sermons, homilies and scientific treatises, i.e. in texts mapping onto the social roles of preachers and scholars of their time.

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3.

Thomas Twining’s life and writings in varying social roles

3.1

Life

Thomas Twining (1734–1804) was the son of tea dealer Daniel Twining. Since it became clear early on that young Thomas was not suited for the mercantile life, his parents supported his pursuit of education, first at Colchester Free Grammar School and later at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, where he was made fellow in 1760. Twining married Elizabeth Smythies in 1764, but the couple had no children. Twining’s young half-brothers stayed at the vicarage and were great favourites of both Twining and his wife. Twining made his living as a clergyman, working in various parts of East Anglia, being preferred to livings through family contacts, until finally settling down as rector of St. Mary’s in Colchester. While Twining was conscientious in his pastoral duties, it was never his great passion in life in the way classical languages and music were. Twining is remembered as a classical scholar and translator, and best known for his translation and original commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, but he is also known for his significant contribution to Charles Burney’s History of Music. It appears that Twining was quite a gifted amateur musician (his violin was a Stradivarius), and made pertinent comments on the early volumes of Burney’s magnum opus. As well as classical languages, Twining was acquainted with several modern ones, including French and Italian. He writes about his language skills in an addendum to the preface of his translation of Aristotle: I take the only opportunity now left me to mention a book … Dramaturgie, ou Observations critiques sur plusieurs pieces de Théatre, tant anciennes que modernes: [Paris 1785] – a translation of the German of the late Mr. Lessing. The notice taken of the original work in Mr. Winstanley’s edition of Aristotle had, indeed, long ago excited my curiosity; but I am unacquainted with the German language, and my inquiries afforded me no reason to conclude that the work had been translated.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, p. xviii)

3.2 Preacher: Sermons While Twining made his living as a clergyman, there is no indication that he had particular ambitions in that area. Twining’s correspondence with family and friends indicates that writing sermons was not one of the duties he particularly . This section is based on the introduction in Walker (1991) and on Lane-Poole (2004).



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enjoyed, and he was not fond of bishops either. For example, when Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, visited St. Mary’s in 1790, Twining did his duty and prepared a sermon “On the Abuse of Reason as applied to the mysterious Doctrine of Revelation”. On the encouragement of the bishop, Twining had no choice but to publish the sermon as well. In his letters he comments on this process: The “bitterness of preaching” is not quite passed, for I must print my Sermon forsooth. The Bp. will have it so; & Messieurs the Clergy too.  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney jr, 1790, Walker 1991: I, 347) I have just received the new Monthly Review. You see they are civiller to my Sermon than they were to my Short History of the Pharisees last month.  (Thomas Twining to Richard Twining sr, 1791, Walker 1991: I, 366) Then, there is my poor Visitation Sermon: Cadell has never given any account; whatever copies may have been sold, not a farthing has yet come into the pocket of the unfortunate author. Though I wrote not for money, I see no reason why, if money be due to me, it should not be paid me.  (Thomas Twining to Richard Twining sr, 1792, Walker 1991: I, 405)

In addition to the sermon “On the Abuse of Reason”, Twining published two other sermons. We have not been able to obtain a copy of the first one, published in 1787, but “The Duty of Allegiance” (1794) is included in this study (Lane-Poole 2004; Rivers 1798: 334; Walker 1991: 16). There are also two slightly more scholarly religious texts, A Discourse on Baptism (1786), published under the name Philalethes, but attributed to Twining by the Bodleian Library catalogue, and A Short History of the Pharisees (1790). These are discussed with the sermons, because they represent Twining’s profession, and do not contain features of academic writing, such as extensive notation.

3.3 Scholar: Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry Although much of Twining’s scholarly life was devoted to the study of ancient music, his main publication is the English translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, ­translated from Greek and published in 1789 under the title Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry. The publication brought him praise and recognition, which, however, he shunned (Rizzo 1993–1994: 349). In the published volume, the actual translation (71 pages) is accompanied by a preface (19 pages) and two studies, called dissertations, on poetical and musical imitation (43 and 17 pages), and followed by an extensive

. The reference after each example from letters shows the writer and the recipient, the year when the letter entry was written, and the reference to the page in the printed edition.

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note-form commentary on the translation and the original (428 pages), and an index. Later research has shown that Twining interpreted Aristotle more accurately than most of his predecessors, and his translation remained a standard text of the Poetics for the next century (Malek 1971: 261). The two dissertations prefixed to the translation constitute a close analysis of the various senses in which poetry and music can be described as imitative arts. They clarify Aristotle’s text and concepts and correct mistaken and inexact applications of terms used by various contemporary writers. As “the most perceptive essays in eighteenth-century British aesthetics”, they also represent Twining’s original thought, for example, on the nature and effects of instrumental music (Malek 1971: 260). We have studied Twining’s multilingual practices across the entire volume. However, our analysis in this study concentrates on the preface and the two dissertations, which reflect Twining’s original language use as a scholar in two genres of the scientific register. The language of the actual translation is largely ignored here, as it is for obvious reasons heavily constrained by the underlying Greek source text. The scholarly apparatus too has a special relationship to the Greek original, expounding and commenting on the meaning of specific Greek lexical items or passages in Aristotle’s text. This makes these sections of the volume less useful for the analysis of Twining’s language use. In the preface, Twining explains his design in translating Aristotle’s Poetics and his thoughts on the nature of translation in general and the translator’s task and challenges in the text in question. He also discusses earlier translations and commentaries on the Poetics in English and other European languages, and addresses some general points in the criticism of Aristotle. In the two dissertations, Twining examines the concept of imitation and its various uses and meanings. In the first dissertation, “On Poetry Considered as an Imitative Art”, Twining expounds the use of the word imitation, specifically “in what senses the word Imitation is, or may be, applied to Poetry” and “in what senses it was so applied by Aristotle” (pp. 3–4). The second dissertation, “On the Different Senses of the Word Imitative, as Applied to Music by the Antients, and by the Moderns”, examines the role of music among imitative arts, and discusses the views expressed on this by ancient authors and eighteenth-century theorists (see Malek 1971).

3.4 Brother and friend: Letters Twining’s more private side is expressed in his personal correspondence. The selection of Twining’s letters we have used for this study is that included in the



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Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE). There are altogether 500 letters of Twining’s surviving; some were edited for publication by his brother Richard’s grandson Richard Twining in 1882. Altogether 65 letters (from the modern edition by Walker), numbering 56,350 words form the sample of ­Twining’s correspondence for our study. Twining has seven correspondents in this selection, all either members of his family or the Burney family. Twining wrote to his two half-brothers, Daniel Twining senior (1748–1765) and Richard Twining senior (1749–1824), as well as Richard’s two sons, Richard Twining junior (1772–1857) and Daniel Twining junior (1777–1853). Twining’s two half-brothers were both educated at Eton. While Daniel, the older, was of delicate health and did not live long enough to enter employment of any kind, Richard left school early after his father’s death and joined his mother in running the family’s tea house. Both brothers were keenly interested in learning, and ­Richard’s correspondence with Thomas shows this interest all through his successful career as head of the tea business. Richard travelled widely on the continent and supplied Thomas with books acquired on his travels. Of the two nephews, after being educated at Samuel Parr’s grammar school, Richard junior followed his father into the family business. Daniel followed his uncle’s path, and studied at Cambridge. After Thomas Twining was widowed, Daniel spent extended periods as his uncle’s companion, sharing an interest in learning and classical languages. The other recipients of Twining’s letters are Charles Burney (1726–1814), the music historian, and his two children, Charles Burney junior (1757–1817) and Fanny Burney (1752–1840) the novelist. Charles Burney and Thomas Twining were friends, and exchanged a great deal of correspondence on the first volumes of Burney’s A History of Music. Twining’s knowledge of Latin and Greek and classical sources, as well as his accomplishments as an amateur musician made him an ideal collaborator for Burney’s volume. In fact, Burney offered to credit ­Twining as a co-author of the work, but Twining declined (Walker 1991). (For a further discussion of the Twining-Burney friendship and the Burney family, see Pahta and Nurmi 2009.) . For information on CEECE, see Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin (2009), or http://www. helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC. . The Twining family had a habit of naming their sons Richard, Daniel and Thomas over the centuries, so that we have had to resort to the soubriquets senior and junior to distinguish the recipients. As far as we know, these monikers were not used within the family. . As with the younger generation of the Twining family, we have resorted to the soubriquet junior simply to keep father and son separate. There is no record of how contemporaries would have distinguished the pair.

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Twining visited the Burney household and became acquainted with the younger generation as well. He was a close enough friend of the family to be allowed to know the details and attempt to help when the younger Charles Burney was sent down from Cambridge after stealing books from the university library. Burney junior went on to become a schoolmaster and a noted classical scholar, and Twining kept up the connection throughout his lifetime. Twining was also on close terms with Fanny Burney, who treated him as a “playful, twinkling uncle” (Walker 1999). Being a woman, Fanny did not have the same access to formal education as the men of her family (or of the Twining family), but she worked as her father’s amanuensis and no doubt picked up a great deal. Her interest in learning is also seen in the fact that she taught herself French.

4.

Twining’s CS practices in varying social roles

4.1

Preacher: Sermons and religious dissertations

Previous research has shown that multilingualism was endemic in sermons written in medieval England. Furthermore, our research on the multigenre Helsinki Corpus, including writings from a range of contexts of discourse over a thousand years, has indicated that, in addition to scientific writing, religion was in fact the domain in which code-switching appeared most frequently. In the Early Modern English period, sermons show a higher frequency of switched passages (3.5/1,000 words) than most other genres. While this is less than in Middle English (5.9), the average length of switches, measured in number of words, is 8.9, a clear increase over the medieval period’s 5.8 (Pahta and Nurmi 2006: 210). While the trend established in our earlier sermon data suggests that some decrease in the frequency of switching might be expected in late-eighteenth century material, the analysis of Twining’s sermon “On the Abuse of Reason” revealed a complete absence of switched passages in the actual body of the published text. In the second sermon, “The Duty of Allegiance”, there is a lengthy footnote on the concept of “friend of the people” (p. 7) which culminates in a longish Greek quotation from Xenophon. The quotation is presented untranslated, and is ­followed by an aside in square brackets addressing “the learned reader” and discussing Xenophon’s meaning in more detail. Twining is here clearly stepping outside his role as a clergyman and addressing the audience as the accomplished classical scholar he was. . For further discussion of code-switching in medieval sermons, see Wenzel (1994), IglesiasRábade (1996) and Schendl (2000).



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The only other instance of a foreign language being used in the sermons is the very last word of the printed versions: FINIS. The two dissertations conclude in a similar way. The use of Latin elements as a text-organizing device to indicate textual boundaries, including endings, is well-attested in various types of English texts from the Middle Ages onwards, so Twining is following here an old writing convention (see e.g. Pahta 2004a, Nurmi and Pahta 2004). However, as this particular word had been in use at the end of publications since at least the fifteenth century (OED s.v. finis gives the first quotation the date ?a1400), it is questionable whether Twining’s use of the word should be regarded as an instance of codeswitching at all, but rather as a well-established instance of lexical borrowing. Of the two other texts in the domain of religion, A Short History of the Pharisees has references to Latin volumes (“See Antiq. Jud. Lib. xvii”, p. 3), and the text itself illustrates the writer’s familiarity with classical sources of all kinds. There is also a brief discussion of the meaning of the Hebrew word scheol in the Old Testament (p. 13), but on the whole the text is wholly accessible to monolingual readers with an interest in theology. The pseudonymous A Discourse on Baptism has a somewhat heavier sprinkling of switched passages. The text is a response to Dr Priestly’s work on the same subject, and is more involved in theological discussion than the other texts. The meaning of the Greek word for baptism is discussed (“βαπτιζω ‘doth not always imply a dipping of the whole body in water’”, pp. 4–5) at length, and a Bible passage is also quoted in Greek (p. 7). Similarly, the meaning of αγιος is discussed (p. 31). The theological concept of Patria Potestas is also mentioned frequently (pp. 24–33), and its feminine equivalent, Materna Potestas, is introduced (p. 33). Finally, there are two Latin phrases which can be related to academic argumentative discourse (argumentum ad hominem, crimen lesæ majestatis). All this brings the text closer to the scholarly range of writing and seems to anticipate a more learned readership than the sermons or the other dissertation. In writing this text, Twining (if he indeed is the author) seems to have worn both his clerical and scholarly caps, as it were. It seems that the shifting religious climate may be an influence on the lack of code-switching in Twining’s sermons. During the eighteenth century, there was ongoing secularisation in England, with religion playing a much smaller role than before (Porter 1990: 169–170). Combined with this relaxation of religious conditions is the increasing vernacularization of religious life, with the corresponding decrease in the use of Latin (see e.g. Pahta and Nurmi 2007). Unlike their ­fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century counterparts (Nurmi and Pahta 2004: 441– 446), clergymen in eighteenth-century England did not particularly stand out as a group with regard to the patterns of switching attested in their correspondence (Pahta and Nurmi 2007: 404–407).

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It can be argued that Thomas Twining was clearly aware of his audience in the code-switching practices in his sermons, taking into consideration what was appropriate in the context. The need to communicate the message of his sermons clearly to a wide audience necessitated the choice of suitable linguistic means. One of the choices Twining made in compiling his sermons was to avoid codeswitching almost entirely. In the other two theological texts, the anticipated audience was clearly more learned, as the nature of the discussion presented in them would also suggest. Both texts can still be mostly understood and appreciated without a command of languages other than English.

4.2 Scholar: Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry Code-switching is a common feature in scientific writings from the Old, Middle and Early Modern English periods, even though individual texts from any one period vary a great deal from one another in the frequency of switching (see e.g. Voigts 1996; Hunt 2000; Pahta 2004a, 2007, forthcoming; Pahta and Nurmi 2006). Much of the research to date focuses on medical texts, in which some formal and functional tendencies in switching are beginning to emerge. The switched segments attested in scientific texts range from single lexical items to embedded texts or extracts consisting of several sentences. The most typical communicative functions of code-switching in the history of English scientific writings are related to register-specific and disciplinary discourses of knowledge, including specialized terminology, and various types of code-switched segments related to intertextuality, such as references to and quotations from earlier literature. Both Thomas Twining’s preface and the two dissertations preceding the translation of Aristotle’s Poetics contain frequent code-switching, as do the notes and commentary on the actual translation. Switching occurs both in the body text of the preface and dissertations and in the footnotes, where Twining provides additional information on the points raised or further evidence to support his arguments in the text. The switched segments are clearly more frequent in the notes to the dissertations. The forms and functions of switching are familiar from earlier research on medieval and early modern scientific writings. The switched segments include single lexemes, various types of phrases, clauses and sentences and sequences of sentences, most of them an integral part of the scholarly discussion of the topic at hand. The most common language that Twining uses in addition to English in his scholarly prose is Greek, but there are also frequent switches into Latin, French and Italian. The predominance of Greek is clearly conditioned by the focus and the subject matter of the volume. In the preface, Twining in fact comments on his



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use of Greek in the notes to the translation, at the same time specifying his readership as Greek scholars, and motivating his abundant use of Greek quotations. (1) It will scarce be thought strange, that notes, intended to explain a Greek author, and supposed, of course, to be addressed to Greek scholars, should abound with Greek quotations. One of my chief objects was, to illustrate Aristotle, wherever I could, from himself, and from Plato, to whose opinions and writings he continually alludes. Another was, to relieve the dryness of so much philological discussion by passages, which at the same time that they throw light upon the author, might also be expected to afford some pleasure to the reader, either as beautiful, or as curious. With the same view, I have now and then ventured to quit, for a moment, my direct path; to transgress Seneca’s rule, “Quò ducit material secundum est, non qùo “invitat,” and to avail myself of some of those many openings, which Aristotle affords, into collateral, though not irrelative inquiries.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Preface, pp. xi–xii)

Most switched segments in the preface and dissertations are quotations derived from a range of classical authors or their translations, and testifying to the breadth and depth of Twining’s reading. They include quotations from Aristotle himself; the Greek historian and geographer Strabo; the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian; Virgil and Ovid; Dante Alighieri; the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso and Aristotelian critic Lodovico Castelvetro; the sixteenth-century Italian humanist and philosopher Alessandro Piccolomini, who translated the Poetics into Italian; Rousseau; the seventeenth-century French classical scholar André Dacier, who translated Aristotle’s Poetics into French; Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, a seventeenth-eighteenth century French author and philosopher; and the seventeenth-century English statesman and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. The switched quotations in Twining’s scientific prose serve multiple functions simultaneously. On the macro-level, they index Twining as a multiliterate member of the highly-educated and well-read social elite of his time, and as a member of his own disciplinary discourse community of classical scholars in particular. In terms of professional discourse, the switched segments are an essential part of professional rhetoric: quotations, including those appearing in the original language, from works of earlier and contemporary authors are known to be a core feature of scientific writing across times and cultures. The ­quotations . For PDE see e.g. Hyland (2000); for EModE and LModE, see Valle (1999); for EModE, see Pahta (2007, forthcoming); for ME, see Voigts (1996), Pahta (2004a, 2004b); and from OE to EModE, see Pahta and Nurmi (2006).

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also occur in a variety of local functions, Twining using them to illustrate and elaborate the points he raises in the text (2)–(5), to amplify the argument by bringing in another, usually authoritative voice for support (6), or to specify and highlight the target of his criticism (7). At the same time, code-switching in all these cases also serves as a text-organising device, separating different levels of text from each other, i.e. marking Twining’s original prose from the text created by others. (2) Next to visible objects, sounds seem the most capable of descriptive imitation. Such description is, indeed, generally aided by real, though imperfect, resemblance of verbal sound; more, or less, according to the nature of the language, and the delicacy of the poet’s ear. The following lines of Virgil are, I think, an instance of this. Lamentis gemituque et fœmineo ululate Tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus æther. Æn. iv. 663. (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation I, p. 11) (3) I cannot produce a finer example of this than the following admirable passage of Dante … as he entered the gates of his imaginary Inferno; – “si mise dentro alle segrete cose.” – Quivi sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai Risonavan per l’aer sensa stele - - - - Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, Parole di dolore, accenti d’ira, Voci alte fioche, e fuon di man con elle. Inferno, Canto III. (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation I, pp. 12–13) (4) I do not know a happier descriptive line in Homer than the following, in his simile of the nightingale: ‘Ητε θαμα τρωπωσα χεει ωολυηχεα φωνην.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation I, pp. 14–15) (5) For anything beyond this, we must trust to our imagination, assisted by commentator, who assures us, that the poet “a cherché à imiter par le son des mots, le bruit que fait UNE ASSIETTE en roulant.” Sat. iii. v. 26.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation I, p. 8) (6) The trouble we are unwilling to take, we easily persuade ourselves to think not worth taking; and plausible reasons are readily given, and as readily admitted, for neglecting, what those to whom we make our apology, are, in general, as



Social roles and code-switching 149





little disposed to take the pains of examining ourselves. And thus, “Difficultas laborque discendi DISERTAM NEGLIGENTIAM REDDIT s .” s Cic. De Divin. I. 47. (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation I, p. 13)

(7) If they are right, we must suppose one of the most strict and methodical of philosophers to have been sometimes almost as careless as old Montagne; who tells us pleasantly, “n’avoit point dáutre sergent de bande à ranger ses pieces que la fortune.”  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Preface, p. ix)

As the examples show, most code-switched quotations are integrated into the English text without translation, which implies that Twining clearly expected similar multiliteracy in all four languages from his target audience. In some cases, Twining provides direct code-switched quotations from original sources in footnotes for expressions that he has given in English and italicized in the body of the text. For example, the passages in examples (8) and (9) are accompanied by a footnote. (8) A Latin commentator, indeed, may lay any wager, that his author wrote this, or that; may assert his emendation to be clearer that light itself, and say to his reader, if you are not a blockhead, you will be of my opinion o, &c. – “Nobis non licet esse tam disertis.” o “Quovis pignore contenderim.” – “Luce meridiana clarius.” – “Tu, si sapis, mecum repone.” – &c. &c.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Preface, p. xi) (9) We live in a delicate and fastidious age, in which learning, even in books, is hardly released from the necessity of observing, in some degree, what Fontenelle calls “the exterior decencies of ignorance p.” p “Les bienséances extérieures de l’ignorance.”  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Preface, p. xi)

In addition to quotations from other authors, Twining frequently cites Greek sample words, phrases or clauses from Aristotle’s original text in passages where he expounds particular concepts and expressions or justifies their English translations, e.g. in the preface (p. vi). (10) P. 3, and throughout, ’ηθη is rendered “morals.” – p. 11, and 16, ’αυτοσχεδιασματα, “self-formed images.” – p. 31. προς μεν τος ’αγανας και την ’αισθησιν – “with regard to the Controversies and the Conception.” – p. 57. ’ατεχνοτεραι – “a degree nearer art.” – p. 89. ’Εχει δε προς το ’επεκτεινεσθαι το μεγεθ πολυ τι ‘η ’εποποιϊα ιδιον. – “Epic has much peculiar for lengthening the greatness.” p. 92. ’αδυνατα και ’εικοτα – “Impossiblities and Suitable.”

150 Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

(11) What Aristotle, in the beginning of his treatise on Poetry, calls ΜΙΜΗΣΙΣ – IMITATION – he elsewhere, in the same application of it, to Music, calls ‘ΟΜΟΙΩΜΑ – RESEMBLANCE. And he, also, clears up his meaning ­farther, by adding the thing resembled or imitated: – ‘ομοιωμα ΤΟΙΣ ΗΘΕΣΙ – ‘ομοιωματα ΤΩΝ ΗΘΩΝ – “resemblance to human manners”  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, pp. 46–47)

Many of the sample words are part of the special terminology of literary studies, but special terms occur in other contexts as well. Greek terms abound in the text, but Twining also uses code-switched Latin, French and Italian special terms in his scholarly text, although not very frequently. In many cases, these too are sample words cited from the authors under discussion. Examples are provided in (12) to (14). (12) from what we know of their Music in general; of their scales, of their genera, their fondness for chromatic and enharmonic intervals  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, p. 51) (13) a Greek Solo on the flute, or the cithara, was not much more than a song without words, embellished here and there with a little embroidery, or a few sprinklings of simple arpeggio, such as the fancy, and the fingers, of the player could supply.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, p. 50) (14) Pliny ... is not sparing of technical terms upon other occasions; as, rhyparographus, anthropographus, catagrapha, monocromata, &c.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, p. 35)

Code-switched references to earlier literature are also frequent in the footnotes. This is logical in view of the fact that Twining quotes samples from original texts in other languages. Some examples are provided in (15) and (16). (15) Of the translations and commentaries written in the Italian language there is one, which deserves particular notice, ... I mean that of Piccolomini w. w Annotationi di M. Alessandro Piccolomini, nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotele; con la traductione del medesimi libro in lingua volgare. In Vinegia. 1575. – Piccolomini was archbishop of Patras. See Bayle. He also wrote Copiosissima Parafrase nel Retorica d’Aristotele. Venet. 1565.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Preface, p. xiv) (16) Yet in his Discours Prel. de l’Encyclop. he not only makes Architecture an imitative art, but even classes it with painting and sculpture.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, p. 60)



Social roles and code-switching 151

As in present-day English scientific writing, references often occur in conjunction with quotations, as in example (17). (17) The story of Fontenelle is well known – “Je n’oublierai jamais,” says Rousseau, “la saillie de celebre Fontenelle, qui se trouvant excedé de ces eternelles symphonies, s’ecria tout haut dans us transport d’impatience: Sonate, que me veux tu?” Dict. de Mus. – Sonate.  (Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, 1789, Dissertation II, p. 49–50, note s)

In sum, the analysis of code-switching in Twining’s scholarly prose shows that in his role as a classical scholar he draws on his multilingual verbal repertoire to create meanings in ways that are very much in line with multilingual practices observed in other studies on the history of scientific writing, thus using a style that is appropriate in the context of discourse.

4.3 Brother and friend: Letters Compared to other genres during the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods, personal correspondence was in the low to medium range of code-switching frequency, with a length of switched passages ranging from average to high (Pahta and Nurmi 2006: 210). There does not seem to be any marked increase in either the frequency of switching or the average switch length in the eighteenth century data (Pahta and Nurmi 2007). What makes personal correspondence such a useful source of information on the code-switching practices of earlier times is the interactive nature of the data. Produced for a particular communicative purpose in a defined reader-writer relationship, personal letters allow us to trace the social and interpersonal aspects of code-switching better than most other genres. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the patterns of code-switching seem to have been more closely tied to the writer’s (and recipient’s) social status than later. Each rank showed a distinctive profile of switching, tied to their own professional and social circumstances. Choice of languages and frequency of switching corresponded to the educational background of each writer. Compared to other social ranks, the clergy favoured Latin in their switched passages, including quotations from the Bible and other religious and theological writings, as well as classical authors. Unlike many other writers, clergymen frequently showed a great deal of fluency in their use of Latin, extending their use of the language beyond pre-formulated chunks (such as the above-mentioned quotations) to free switching in lengthy passages of text (Nurmi and Pahta 2004: 441–444). By the eighteenth century, changes in society had levelled educational opportunities. On the other hand, the importance of Latin had declined, and

152 Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

­contemporary continental languages were more useful and desirable to know for most strata of society. The frequency of code-switching and language choice are more clearly a matter of individual preference, and patterns of reciprocity can be identified. In the letters of Twining’s correspondent Charles Burney, for example, the density of switching seems to correspond to intimacy, while language choices apparently mirror Burney’s knowledge of the linguistic resources of the recipients. While some switching is related to identity-work, much of it is also fully conventionalised, suggesting that foreign language passages signal a particular stylistic choice on the part of the writer more than anything else (Pahta and Nurmi 2009). Similarly to Charles Burney, Thomas Twining expresses his extensive linguistic repertoire in his correspondence. The choice of languages (with the exception of German) is the same as in Twining’s scholarly writings. Here in the private sphere, with a good grasp of the language skills of the recipients of his letters, Twining is able to target specific correspondents with specific switching patterns. Table 1 shows Twining’s switching according to language and recipient. It is immediately noticeable that not only does the frequency of switching vary according to recipient, but variation is also found in the selection of languages and the length of switched passages. Thus, we argue that Twining mobilizes his multilingual resources in different ways to maintain and strengthen the varying social roles between himself and his correspondents. The most frequently used language is French, which appears in letters to almost all recipients. This is not surprising, considering the position of French as the fashionable language of social interaction in the upper echelons of the polite society in the whole of contemporaneous Europe (Colley 1996: 177). There are no French segments in letters to Richard Twining jr, but the number of letters is so small that this is almost certainly a coincidence. In letters to family members and particularly the Burneys, Twining’s French passages seem to reflect their position Table 1.  Code-switching in Thomas Twining’s letters by recipient (number of switched passages with average switch length in parentheses) Recipient/Language French

German

Greek

Italian

Latin

Total

Charles Burney sr Charles Burney jr Fanny Burney Daniel Twining sr Daniel Twining jr Richard Twining sr Richard Twining jr

  97 (2.7)    5 (3.0)    6 (2.0)   13 (7.4)    3 (1.3)   20 (1.6)    0 (0.0)

1 (1.0) 0 (0.0) 0 (0.0) 0 (0.0) 0 (0.0) 3 (1.0) 0 (0.0)

2 (4.5) 3 (2.7) 0 (0.0) 0 (0.0) 0 (0.0) 1 (1.0) 0 (0.0)

43 (2.9)   1 (1.0)   0 (0.0)   0 (0.0)   0 (0.0)   0 (0.0)   0 (0.0)

37 (2.4)   4 (2.5)   2 (1.5)   7 (1.4) 14 (2.5) 28 (3.5)   1 (6.0)

180 (2.7)   13 (2.6)    8 (1.9)   20 (5.3)   17 (2.3)   52 (2.6)    1 (6.0)

Total

144 (2.9)

4 (1.0)

6 (3.0)

44 (2.8)

93 (2.7)

291 (2.8)



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as members of the literate members of polite society, employing the typical politeness formulae as in (18) and (19) for example, but also engaging in free switching, as in (20) and (21). (18) Adieu. Loves & Duties. Best wishes for my sister’s health. Yrs. affec. T.T  (Thomas Twining to Richard Twining sr, 1781, Walker 1991: I, 200) (19) Adieu & pray give me more Bishops, Deans, Heads & Professors, when you can catch them.  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney jr, 1790, Walker 1991: I, 347) (20) Oh – never fear, never fear: when Miss Burney’s Kite has taken its train in the air, it will come down again, & be found, un beau jour, when we are not looking for it.  (Thomas Twining to Fanny Burney, 1783, Walker 1991: I, 254) (21) I expect to find him a knight errant: that is, in facts & in opinions & decisions of taste & judgment; all this. Mais nous verrons.  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney sr, 1776, Walker 1991: I, 107)

In letters to family members, Twining is able to reflect even more subtle nuances of his personal relationship with the recipient, playing out his role as the elder brother or helpful uncle. In (22), Twining refers to his wife as Madame la Curée. Daniel had been paying a lengthy visit to the vicarage, and during his visit, both he and Thomas’s wife Elizabeth had been studying French, sometimes competing to translate a passage more quickly than the other. This reference to Elizabeth Twining in French reinforces that familial connection, and the role of the elder brother as the language master of both brother and wife. (22) By way of domestic news, I must tell you that Madame la Curée’s face is, at this time, a yard long, upon account of a misfortune that has happen’d in her menagerie: three of her ducks are dead, & we fear more will follow  (Thomas Twining to Daniel Twining sr, 1765, Walker 1991: I, 59) Table 2.  Code-switching in Thomas Twining’s letters by recipient  (N of switched passages/1,000 words) Recipient/Language

French

German

Greek

Italian

Latin

Total

Charles Burney sr Charles Burney jr Fanny Burney Daniel Twining sr Daniel Twining jr Richard Twining sr Richard Twining jr

3.7 2.6 3.0 2.8 0.8 1.2 0.0

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.0

0.1 1.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.0

1.6 0.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

1.4 2.1 1.0 1.5 3.6 1.7 1.0

6.8 6.7 3.9 4.2 4.4 3.2 1.0

Total

2.6

0.1

0.1

0.8

1.7

5.2

154 Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

Switching to Latin takes place in letters to all recipients as well, but there are differences in the nature of the Latin passages. Example (23) again illustrates the role of the big brother as his younger brother’s teacher in all manner of things, at the same time referring to mutual memories of Daniel’s visit. (23) When you have an Air-pump, I shall thank my stars that I am not one of the kittens in your neighbourhood! Alas! how many poor, innocent dumb creatures will have their breath sucked out of their bodies, & dye in vacuo, to satisfie your rage of experiment!  (Thomas Twining to Daniel Twining sr, 1763, Walker 1991: I, 36).

Latin quotations could be addressed to all recipients, since Twining was familiar with their Latin skills, and could probably gauge their familiarity with specific passages. Example (24) is also interesting in illustrating the communal nature of the correspondence: the letter is addressed to Richard Twining sr, but his son, Richard jr, is addressed in parentheses. Obviously father and son were both expected to read the letter. (24) (Richard, be decent. It is not for a nephew to laugh at an old uncle!) “Si quid novisti rectius istis, &c.” You will at least admire the novelty of my quotation.  (Thomas Twining to Richard Twining sr, 1798, Walker 1991: II, 505)

While Richard Twining sr was responsible for managing the family business, Thomas shows his understanding and respect for his brother’s constant interest in learning. The other three languages appearing in Twining’s correspondence are more closely targeted to specific recipients. The only instances of German, which Twining according his own words was “unacquainted with” (see p. 140) but determined to learn, are addressed to Richard Twining sr (25), who receives thanks for purchasing some German books while on the continent for business purposes. (25) As for the Göttingenische book by M. Putter, I do not understand a word of it: but what of that? I am, you know, to understand German, & there will be a German buch ready for me to read …  (Thomas Twining to Richard Twining sr, 1788, Walker 1991: I, 287)

Whether either of the brothers actually knew or came to know any German is beside the point: the few words are used to reinforce the connection between brothers. Similarly reinforcing a shared bond is the use of Greek in letters to the younger Charles Burney, a fellow classical scholar (26).



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(26) The Monthly Reviewers […] are quite sure the Professor has hit upon the true meaning of Aristotle’s κάθαρσις [katharsis] which all his predecessors have totally mistaken. ’εγώ δε τις ’ου ταχυπειθής. [But I am not easily persuaded.]  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney jr, 1787, Walker 1991: I, 281)10

The passage includes not only the fairly commonly known term katharsis, but also Twining’s own comment on the discussion in Greek. This enforces not only Twining’s own role as an expert on Aristotle and the Greek language, but also his understanding of his recipient’s language skills, creating an in-group of two classical scholars whose knowledge surpasses that of those feebler minds of the Monthly Review. Finally, Italian is the shared language of Twining and Charles Burney sr, experts and enthusiasts in music and its history. The frequent use of Italian in their correspondence is not surprising, as music had an important role in their letters, and Italian in turn had a special status in music, including its terminology. At the time, Italian musical terms were on their way to becoming a part of the English language. The Italian segments also index Burney’s lifestyle in other ways, including his extensive travels in Italy, and, to a smaller extent, the fashionability of Italian language and culture in the social circle both Burney and Twining inhabit, the latter more marginally than the former. A great many of the switches into Italian in Twining’s letters to Burney are in fact musical terms, as in (27), but there are also other conventionalised terms, such as greetings (28), as well as longer passages, many of them citations from Italian literature (29). (27) These articles will be useful & interesting, not only now, but as long as your book exists: nay, they will give a crescendo to the value of it; & future enquiries & historians will bless the man who had a regard, so rare, to the curiosity & the indolence of posterity....  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1788, Walker 1991: I, 79) (28) No fitter occasion for me to sneak off! & so – addio, ’till I come grinning into your study;  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1777, Walker 1991: I, 133) (29)

& I remember nothing en détail. Come Orsa, che l’Alpestre cacciatore Nella pietrosa tana assalita abbia, Sta sopra i figli con incerto core, E freme in suono di pieta e di rabbia, Ira la invita, e natural furore A spiegar l’unghie, e a insanguinar le labbia: –

10. The translations in parentheses are from the edition of Twining’s letters.

156 Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

Amor l’intenerisce e la ritira A riguardare ai figli in mezzo l’ira.  (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1784, Walker 1991: I, 260)11

Again, the choice of language and the selection of particular items indexes the reciprocal roles of Twining and Burney as friends with mutual interests, as members of the same social circle, and as men of some considerable learning. Burney’s switching patterns in his letters to Twining are fairly similar to the ones attested here in Twining’s letters to Burney (Pahta and Nurmi 2009). The examples above illustrate the various discourse functions which codeswitched passages in all languages have in Twining’s correspondence. It is evident that the relationship between sender and recipient is more relevant to the choice of language, but also to some extent to the role of the switched passage in the correspondence. Table 3 shows the distribution of discourse functions of switched passages in Thomas Twining’s letters. Altogether 63% of switched passages show no clear local function. In many cases it seems that these switches do not in fact serve a particular discourse function in the traditional sense, but are used in the more broad function of identity building. The passages where the discourse function of switching is easy to identify are typically prefabricated chunks, such as quotations. The most frequently identified function, quotation, appears in almost any language, but typically only when Twining has some idea that the recipient is able to understand or recognise the passage quoted. The names of books and songs appear when Twining discusses matters of mutual interest with his correspondents, and serve to reinforce the reciprocal roles as friends or family members. Letterwriting conventions, most frequently leave-taking terms such as adieu or addio are more tied to the conventions of contemporary polite society, and indicate the wider social circle both writer and recipient are members of. Terminology is perhaps most tightly tied to the recipient, since it refers to matters of mutual interest, whether music, as in the case of Charles Burney sr ((27) above), or physical experiments, as with Daniel Twining sr ((23) above). The most conventional of all switched passages are perhaps some of the text-structuring devices. In fact, many of the switched one- or two-word passages have become conventionalised to the extent that they have an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Table 4 illustrates the distribution of such items. It turns out that nearly a third of

11. “So a she-bear, brought to bay by hunters in her rocky den, stands over her cubs irresolute, growling both in pity and rage. Angrily she stretches her claws and bites her lips till they bleed; but love, mingling with her wrath, melts her heart and holds her back in concern for her little ones.” Translation from Walker (1991).



Social roles and code-switching 157

Table 3.  Discourse functions of code-switching in Thomas Twining’s letters Function

% of total

Quotation Names of books and songs Letter writing conventions Terminology Text structuring Other

11  8  7  6  5 63

Table 4.  The appearance of one- and two-word foreign language passages  in the OED (date of first citation in relevant sense) Time

Types

Tokens

pre-1500 16th century 17th century 1700–1749 1750–1799 19th century

12  7 15  8 16  7

19 11 19 10 28  7

all switched passages appear in the OED and 20% have a first citation before 1750. Most of them are expressions relating to Christianity (Agnus Dei, Nunc Dimittis) or are established text-structuring devices (ergo, et caetera, imprimis, viz, vide). Some terminology also appears (chiaroscuro, andante). The first citations in the OED during the eighteenth century are interesting, since it turns out some come from the writings of Twining’s correspondents or their social circle. So, for example, nous verrons has a 1784 quotation from Hester Lynch Piozzi, a friend and correspondent of the Burneys, and manqué is illustrated by a citation from Fanny Burney’s letter; neither of these is the first citation given. The first citation of passé, however, is from Fanny Burney, and Burney’s History of Music provides one of the earliest mentions of crescendo. The process of selection for the citations in the OED is known to have been somewhat random, but the fact remains that many of the foreign language passages in Twining’s correspondence were in use among the social circle to which he belonged, and they may be regarded as signalling the correspondents’ roles as members of this literate echelon of polite society.

158 Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

5.

Conclusion

The varying social roles of Thomas Twining are clearly reflected in his patterns of code-switching. The two public roles studied here, those of clergyman and scholar, require the author to perform his professional expertise in different ways. Because of the extensive lay audience of a published sermon, and the contemporary dissociation of classical languages and religion, Twining’s decision not to include foreign-language passages in the texts is understandable. In this choice, he demonstrates his understanding of the requirements of the genre, as well as his own role as a teacher of his congregation (and readers), with demands of maximal clarity of communication. Since the audience could not be expected to be familiar with languages other than English, those were excluded from the text. Even the two more learned dissertations on theology mostly follow this tendency. The opposite strategy characterizes Twining’s scholarly writings. Here his performance of his membership in the scholarly community and display of competence and familiarity with the conventions of the genre lead to frequent switched passages in a number of languages. The patterns of switching also illustrate the ways in which scholarly expertise is performed, with quotations from sources seamlessly integrated in the text without translation and terminology applied to the analysis and discussion of the subject. These strategies serve to create an in-group relationship between writer and audience, strengthening Twining’s role as a scholarly expert through his mastery of the form of writing as well as the subject matter. Twining’s private roles as brother, uncle and friend, as his correspondence shows, seem more varied than the public ones. Because there is a personal relationship and a shared history with each recipient of letters, there is a greater sense of tailoring the frequency and type of switching according to correspondent. Not only is Twining seemingly aware of the linguistic repertoires – and attempts to improve them – of his readers, his switching also reflects shared interests with each individual. The mentoring of younger brothers and nephews, the shared areas of expertise with friends, the varying levels of intimacy in each relationship are evident in the patterns of code-switching attested in the correspondence. The multiple roles performed by one man are reflected in his linguistic practices and the way in which he draws on his particular linguistic resources. It is evident that, in addition to doing identity work with the help of switched passages, Twining also distinguishes his various roles from each other, suiting his words in each role to the requirements of the particular audience addressed in that role. On the other hand, there is also overlap of roles, since friendship and membership of the same group (scholars, musical experts) are both negotiated in the correspondence, for example. It can be argued that in his letters Twining is not



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only displaying his personal expertise, but also constructing his correspondent in a similar role.

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2007. “Bilingualism in the mass media and on the internet.” In Bilingualism: A Social Approach, Monica Heller (ed.), 207–232. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, translated with notes on the translation, and on the original, and two dissertations, on poetical, and musical, imitation. By Thomas Twining, M. A. London. 1789. Auer, Peter (ed.). 1998. Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge. Auer, Peter. 2005. “A postscript: Code-switching and social identity.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (3): 403–410. Auer, Peter and Li Wei (eds). 2007. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bailey, Benjamin. 2007. “Multilingual forms of talk and identity work.” In Auer and Li Wei (eds), 341–370. Bhatt, M. Rakesh. 2008. “In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (2): 177–200. Blommaert, Jan. 1992. “Codeswitching and the exclusivity of social identities: Some data from Campus Kiswahili.” In Codeswitching, Carol Eastman (ed.), 57–70. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bullock, Barbara E. and Almeida, Jacqueline Toribio (eds). 2009. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cashman, Holly R. 2005. “Identities at play: Language preference and group membership in bilingual talk in interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 301–315. CEECE = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. Compiled by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Tanja Säily and Anni Sairio at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. Colley, Linda. 1996. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. London: Vintage. Gafaranga, Joseph. 2007. “Code-switching as a conversational strategy.” In Auer and Li Wei (eds), 279–314. Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 1991. Language Selection and Switching in Strasbourg. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 1995. “Code-switching in community, regional and national repertoires: The myth of the discreteness of linguistic systems.” In One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching, Lesley Milroy and Pieter Myusken (eds), 68–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 2009. “Sociolinguistic factors in code-switching.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, Barbara E. Bullock and Jacqueline Toribio Almeida (eds), 97–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Heller, Monica (ed.). 1988. Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hunt, Tony. 2000. “Code-switching in medical texts.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, David A. Trotter (ed.), 131–147. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow: Longman/Pearson. Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hymes, Dell. 1984. “Sociolinguistics: Stability and consolidation.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 45: 39–45. Hymes, Dell. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Towards and Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis. Iglesias-Rábade, Luis. 1996. “The multi-lingual pulpit in England (1100–1500).” Neophilologus 80: 479–492. Joseph, John E. 2004. Language and Identity. London: Palgrave. Laitinen, Mikko, Leppänen, Sirpa and Pahta, Päivi. Forthcoming. “Global English on Internet contact zones: Corpus-driven analyses of multilingual weblogs.” Lane-Poole, Stanley. 2004. “Twining, Thomas (bap. 1734, d. 1804).” Rev. Anna Chahoud. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/27910, accessed 9 April 2008. Le Page, Robert B. and Tabouret-Keller, Andrée. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li Wei. 2005. “‘How can you tell?’ Towards a common sense explanation of conversational code-switching.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 375–389. Li Wei and Milroy, Lesley. 1995. “Conversational code-switching in a Chinese community in Britain: A sequential analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 281–299. Malek, James. 1971. “Thomas Twining’s analysis of poetry and music as imitative arts.” Modern Philology 68 (3): 260–268. Milroy, Lesley and Li Wei. 1995. “A social network approach to code-switching: The example of a bilingual community in Britain.” In One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching, Lesley Milroy and Pieter Myusken (eds), 136–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, Lesley, Li Wei and Ching, Pong Sin. 1992. “A two-step sociolinguistic analysis of codeswitching and language choice: The example of a bilingual Chinese community in Britain.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2: 63–86. Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nurmi, Arja, Nevala, Minna and Palander-Collin, Minna (eds). 2009. The Language of Daily Life in England, 1400–1800. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nurmi, Arja and Pahta, Päivi. 2004. “Social stratification and patterns of code-switching in Early English letters.” Multilingua 23: 417–456. OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2008. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com. Omoniyi, Tope. 2006. “Hierarchy of identities.” In The Sociolinguistics of Identity, Tope Omoniyi and Goodith White (eds), 11–33. London: Continuum. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oup.com/oxforddnb/



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Pahta, Päivi. 2003. “On structures of code-switching in medical texts from medieval England.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 104: 197–210. Pahta, Päivi. 2004a. “Code-switching in medieval medical writing.” In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), 73–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pahta, Päivi. 2004b. “So seiþ idem comentator: Code-switching and organization of knowledge in John Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum”. In Voices on the Past, Alicia Rodríguez Álvarez and Francisco Alonso Almeida (eds), 35-48. A Coruña: Netbiblo. Pahta, Päivi. 2007. “Flowers, cum multis aliis quae nunc praescribere longum est: On codeswitching in Early Modern English medical texts.” In Tracing English through Time: Explorations in Language Variation, Ute Smit, Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hüttner, Ursula Lutzky and Gunther Kaltenböck (eds), 259–272. Vienna: Braumüller. Pahta, Päivi. Forthcoming. “Code-switching in Early Modern English medical writing.” In Medical Writing in Early Modern English, Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pahta, Päivi and Nurmi, Arja. 2006. “Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: A thousand years of multilingual practices.” In Medieval English and its Heritage: Structure, Meaning and Mechanisms of Change, Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Dieter Kastovsky (eds), 203–220. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Pahta, Päivi and Nurmi, Arja. 2007. “What we do cón amore: On structures of code-switching in eighteenth-century letters.” In ‘Of varying language and opposing creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. BuenoAlonso and Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds), 401–420. Bern: Peter Lang. Pahta, Päivi and Nurmi, Arja. 2009. “Negotiating interpersonal identities in writing: Codeswitching practices in Charles Burney’s correspondence.” In Nurmi et al. (eds), 27–52. Philalethes. 1786. A Discourse on Baptism. London: J. Brown. Porter, Roy. 1990. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin. Quist, Pia and Jørgensen, J. Normann. 2007. “Crossing – negotiating social boundaries.” In Auer and Li Wei (eds), 371–389. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, Ben. 1999. “Deutsch in Inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 480–504. Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivers, David. 1798. Literary memoirs of living authors of Great Britain, arranged according to an alphabetical catalogue ... and including a list of their works, with occasional opinions upon their literary character. In two volumes. London: R. Faulder. Rizzo, Betty. 1993–1994. “Review of Ralph S. Walker, ed. A Selection of Thomas Twining’s Letters (1734-1804): The Record of a Tranquil Life [Studies in British History 25].” Eighteenth-century Studies 27 (2): 348–350. Schendl, Herbert. 2000. “Syntactic constraints on code-switching in medieval texts.” In Placing Middle English in Context, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen (eds), 67–86. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Twining, Thomas. 1790. A Short History of the Pharisees. Trowbridge: Abraham Small. Twining, Thomas. 1790. On the Abuse of Reason, as Applied to The Mysterious Doctrines of Revelation. London: T. Cadell.

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Twining, Thomas. 1794. The Duty of Allegiance Enforced from Its Connection with Benevolence and Religion. London: W. Keymer jun. Valle, Ellen. 1999. A Collective Intelligence: The Life Sciences in the Royal Society as a Scientific Discourse Community, 1665–1965. Turku: University of Turku. Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. 1996. “‘What’s the word?’ Bilingualism in late-medieval England.” Speculum 71: 813–826. Walker, Ralph S. (ed.). 1991. A Selection of Thomas Twining’s Letters 1734–1804: The Record of a Tranquil Life, 2 vols [Studies in British History 25]. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Wenzel, Siegfried. 1994. Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-medieval England. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Williams, Ashley M. 2005. “Fighting words and challenging expectations: Language alternation and social roles in a family dispute.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 317–328. Yoon, Keumsil Kim. 1996. “A case study of fluent Korean-English bilingual speakers: Group membership and code choices.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 395–407. Zhu, Hua. 2008. “Duelling languages, duelling values: Codeswitching in bilingual intergenerational conflict talk in diasporic families.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1799–1816.

The social space of an eighteenth-century governess Modality and reference in the private letters  and journals of Agnes Porter Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala University of Helsinki

Social space can be expressed by e.g. the use of modality and person reference. We discuss how variation in power and distance affects the ways an eighteenthcentury governess, Agnes Porter, is constrained by her professional role, and by what linguistic means she negotiates shifts between different private and public roles. The results show that Porter’s constant efforts of self-effacement are reflected in her habit of referring more to people other than herself, as well as in her use of epistemic must and avoidance of first-person forms. Porter’s social space appears feminine, and her constrained self-expression shows not only in the use of positive adjectives but also in the overall topic of her letters and journal entries.

1.

Introduction

The construction of social space in communication is manifested in many forms. We are particularly interested in the ways in which representations of unequal power as well as social and geographical distance are mapped in personal correspondence and private journals. We investigate the different ways in which an eighteenth-century governess is constrained by her professional role, and what linguistic means she uses to negotiate her interactions with both professional and

. The research reported here has been supported by the Academy of Finland, the “Sociocultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (SoReaL) project (University of Helsinki) and the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG, University of Helsinki).

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private contacts. We identify some strategies our informant employs to perform the role of a governess in her writings. The two linguistic features this article focuses on are modality and reference in the third person. Epistemic modality is often cited as one of the typical expressions of intersubjectivity. Beyond their assessment of the truth value of a statement, epistemic modal expressions convey the speaker’s attitude towards the discussed item. Deontic modality in turn encodes power structures (obligation, permission, necessity), and negotiates power imbalances between interlocutors or correspondents. (For discussion of modality, see e.g. Coates 1983; Leech 1987; Palmer 1987.) Reference can also be seen as a form of intersubjectivity. Third-person reference is related to social deixis, which means shifts in the form and function of linguistic items as governed by social and interpersonal restraints (Levinson 1992). The use of reference terms involves several participant roles, and may also reflect the speaker’s attitude towards the referent, often containing shared information on the relationship between the speaker, the addressee and the referent. In addition to these two linguistic features, we use keyword analysis to identify lexical items separating our informant’s linguistic profile from that of other contemporary women. (For a detailed discussion of keyword analysis, see Fitzmaurice in this volume.) The primary material for the study comes from the private letters and journals of Agnes Porter (c. 1750–1814). For twenty years between 1784 and 1806 she was governess to the children and grandchildren of the second Earl of Ilchester. Her writings give a unique insight into the life and thoughts of an unmarried but employed gentlewoman in the late Georgian period. Porter’s letters and journals also document her insecurity and her ambiguous status in the society in which she lived (Martin 1998).

2.

Social spaces

2.1

A socio-cultural approach to social space

Our discussion of social space is informed by Durkheim, Bourdieu, Goffman and Hall. We see social space as a multifaceted, multidimensional phenomenon, which includes social relationships between people (including, for example, varying degrees of intimacy), social status (and the negotiation of relative power) and the use of physical space as an expression of the social reality people live in. Bourdieu (1989: 15) talks about the constant struggle to understand how social reality is constructed in the minds of the common people, “living their daily life



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within their social world”. He refers to the Durkheimian concept of social reality as a collective of invisible relations which constitutes a positional space defined by their proximity to or distance from each other (Durkheim 1970). This also includes the relative spatial positions of “above”, “below” and “in between”. Social space is constructed so that people who share similar or neighbouring interests or positions are also placed in similar “conditions” (Bourdieu 1989: 17). It tends to function as a symbolic space of different lifestyles and status groups: we know, for example, which properties a governess is supposed to have, as opposed to those of someone who is not a governess. This relates to what Goffman (1959: 167) calls “knowing and keeping [one’s] place”. This sense of one’s place leads people to keep to it, “stay in character”, as well as to recognise the place of others. Goffman (1959: 75) argues that for a person to be a part of a certain social group, or social place, (s)he has to not only have the required attributes (i.e. age, sex, territory, class), but also be able to sustain “the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches to”. A social place is then seen as “a pattern of appropriate conduct”, which has to be realised and not only displayed. According to Goffman (1959: 72), when a person moves into a new position in society, and thus gets a new part to play of another social place, (s)he learns a new way of conduct, a new front, by filling in the gaps between the clues (s)he already knows. This is particularly important for a person who alternates between two or more social spaces. One such person is a servant, whom Goffman (1959: 151) classifies as a typical “non-person”. In one sense the servant is a part of the employer’s group or team, yet (s)he may be treated as someone who is not really present in the situation. Goffman talks about the front and back regions, to which the servant has access, but the shifting between the two regions is governed rather by other participants than the servant him/herself. In order to practise social and situational subordination required by societal norms, the servant has to present proper performances to maintain an idealised social front (for social mobility, see Goffman 1959: 35–36). A governess’s role is even narrower than that of a servant, since she is properly neither a servant nor a member of the family, constrained in her interactions in the front and back regions alike. As Scollon and Scollon (2003: 57) point out, social roles and the physical spaces in which they are performed are constantly indexed by each other. Hall’s (1959: 146–164) description of social distance as personal, social and public is therefore relevant to the discussion of social space as we discuss it here. Physical proximity and shifts in the distance according to situation are one of the ways of constructing and negotiating social hierarchies and levels of intimacy.

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2.2 A linguistic approach to social space In Levinson’s (2004: 97) words, the task of deixis is to introduce “subjective, attentional, intentional and, of course, context-dependent properties into natural languages”. In addition to traditional deictic categories of person, place and time, we may distinguish between social deixis and discourse (text) deixis. Social deixis means the use of those features which encode the social identities of the interactants and their social relationships in a communicative event (Levinson 1988: 184, 1992: 89–91, 2004: 119; Sifianou 1992: 56; Tabouret-Keller 1997: 315–319; also Traugott and Dasher 2005: 226ff.). Both relational and absolute information can be encoded in and expressed by different linguistic elements, such as suppletive forms, particles, affixes and forms of address, which, Levinson (1992: 92) argues, are socially marked for speaker-referent relationship. Social deixis can be considered an additional feature of person deixis, since deixis as a wider concept includes sociocultural information. Levinson (1992: 93) separates social deixis from the sociolinguistic notion of reference (i.e. including concrete social contexts and systems). Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990: 93–94), on the other hand, relate person deixis with social hierarchy, claiming that certain linguistic elements, such as personal pronouns, are inherently double indexicals. This means that, firstly, they identify both the speaker and the addressee and, secondly, locate the speaker in a culturally specific moral order. Social deixis then means accessing the other’s social space and moving within one’s own space, or shifting from one social space to another, by using linguistic means to alter the referential focus. It always describes the referent as what s/he is (socially) within a particular social space as opposed to what the referent is not. Social deixis also relates to in-group convergence and out-group divergence, allowing the speaker to convey information on the social and relative position to the referent or to the recipient. Modality builds social relationships in many ways. “Epistemic modal forms are a key means to modulate what is said to take account of the complex needs of speakers as social beings” (Coates 2003: 346). Coates (2003: 333) describes the multiple uses of epistemic modality in present-day conversations among women, and lists such occasions as “the expression of doubt and of confidence; sensitivity to others’ feelings; searching for the right word; and avoidance of expert status”. Coates (2003: 339) further explains the significance of epistemic modal forms in

. This view is opposed by traditional semanticists, such as Napoli (1997) who argues that proper names are prototypes of reference in that they are, as primitive expressions, sheer proxies which only stand for something instead of characterising it.



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women’s talk through three features: discussion of sensitive topics, practising mutual self-disclosure and maintaining a collaborative floor. Deontic modality has an equally important role in indexing and maintaining social relationships, as it can overtly express and negotiate power relationships, and mitigate or reinforce them. Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008) and Nurmi (2009) show that, during the eighteenth century, modals are used in different proportions to different types of recipients of correspondence, indexing both power differences and levels of intimacy.

3.

The social space of Agnes Porter

3.1

The life of Agnes Porter

Agnes Porter was born in Edinburgh around the year 1750; her exact birth year is not known. Her father was a clergyman, born to a Yarmouth merchant family. Porter’s mother was a Scotswoman, and most likely belonged to the lower fringes of the gentry. Hence it could be argued that Francis Porter married above himself. The family lived in Edinburgh until around 1763, when they moved to London. It seems that Francis Porter had no permanent position, but moved around looking for a living, until finally gaining a parish in Wroughton in Wiltshire. He died in 1782, leaving his wife and three daughters to fend for themselves. It appears Agnes Porter did not live with her parents all the time: at least for some time she stayed with friends in Yarmouth – although it is possible she was occupied as a companion to the mother of the Ramey family, rather than as a guest. Porter’s first known position as a governess was with the Goddard family 1782–1784, after which she was employed by Henry Thomas Fox Strangways, Lord Ilchester, as governess to his daughters at Redlynch near Bruton in Somerset. Porter’s employment with the Fox Strangways family continued until 1797. Lady Ilchester died soon after the birth of her sixth daughter in 1790, and for many years Porter was the only mother figure available to the children (six girls and a son). However, after Lord Ilchester remarried in 1794, her position began to change and, in 1797, when childhood friend Elizabeth Upcher offered Porter a position as her companion in Yarmouth, Porter did not hesitate to accept. . The details of Porter’s life presented in this section are based on Martin (1998), particularly the introduction, but also the texts of Porter’s letters and journals. . In her journal on 28 March 1797, Porter records giving her six months’ notice to Lord Ilchester and comments: “At night I reflected on this conversation, was satisfied in my own mind, as I had not said a single word more than I had resolved to do. I had not been induced

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Mrs Upcher died in 1799, and Porter was left looking for new employment. In 1802, her former pupil Lady Mary Talbot, second daughter to Lord Ilchester, employed Porter as a companion to herself and governess to her children at Penrice Castle in South Wales. Towards the end of 1806 work seemed to become too much, and so Porter moved to the household of her sister Fanny and her husband, Thomas Richards, curate in Fairford. Almost every year Porter still spent a few weeks in Penrice looking after the children while Lady Mary and her husband were absent. In 1812 Porter left her sister’s family, possibly because of disagreements with her brother-in-law, and settled in Bruton in Somerset, very close to her long-term employer’s house. She died in February 1814 after being seriously ill during the winter. After her death, Lucy Lloyd, who had nursed Porter in her fatal illness, wrote to Lady Harriot: (1) It was a great consolation to me that I had it in my power to administer to the ease and comfort of my dear and lamented friend, though far short of what her sisterly kindness and attachment to me deserved. She sleeps in the little spot of ground appropriated for our burying place and near my dear sister as possible – they lov’d each other well.  (Lucy Lloyd to Lady Harriot Frampton, 1814, Martin 1998: 332)

3.2 Shifting between two social spaces In the second half of the eighteenth century, girls’ boarding schools fell out of favour. This led to an increase in the number of governesses in private households. A governess’s working life was often short: the ideal age was between 25 and 30, and so most governesses faced retirement at the age of 40, or even as early as 35 (Hughes 1993: 169). If one’s employer was very favourable, he could leave a small annuity to his governess in his will; for most governesses, however, the end of one job meant finding another one, whether it be teaching or being a companion to an elderly lady (see also Davidoff and Hall 2002: 313). In public, therefore, female writers like Maria Edgeworth, whose Essays on Practical Education (1798) Porter also refers to in her writings, argued for a proper salary to produce more

by any little female resentments to hazard upon myself as the victim of circumstances, but I thought I should withdraw with a degree even of dignity” (Martin 1998: 173). . The reference after each example shows the writer and the recipient, the year when the letter/journal entry was written, and the exact reference to the page in the printed edition. In the examples, epistemic modal verbs and nominal referential terms are in bold. Words in italics are original.



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effective governesses, rising up to an ideal of £300 a year (Renton 1991: 37). In this light, Porter’s career can be regarded as both exceptional and unexceptional: her retirement as governess from the Ilchester family took place when she was in her late forties, so she continued working much longer than was the norm. Her employment after that follows the usual pattern more closely. She also received an annuity from Lord Ilchester, but after his death there were many complications of continuing the payments, although they were mentioned in his will. Agnes Porter and her sister Fanny both started teaching in the 1780s. Porter taught her young pupils reading and writing, as well as history, geography, classics, French, and French and English literature. She also read the Bible with the girls and supervised their needlework. Specialist masters were employed for teaching social skills like music and dancing to the elder girls. Although Porter, like her contemporary colleagues, had no formal training in being a governess, she wanted to improve her learning and teaching skills. After a day’s work, she used to read in her room before going to bed, and in her journal she mentions several French and English poets, novelists and historians whose works she studied. In addition to educational literature, Porter liked reading sermons. A vicar’s daughter, she was a woman of high standards and, in her opinion, women’s main task in life was to please their fathers and husbands. Porter felt strongly that “an agreeable home” was “the greatest blessing in the world” (Martin 1998: 195). As can be seen from example (2), in Porter’s mind men inhabited the wide world, whereas women were associated with the more narrow domestic space. (Compare also Sveen, this volume.) (2) I told her one reason was to protect them [women] and to make life more comfortable for them, for if men were not stronger than we were, that women would not have such nice houses, nor large ships to sail in, and many other conveniences that men (being stronger) procured them. … I told her that women made the inside of the house pleasant, and always took care to be good-natured and agreeable in their conversation, to amuse their husbands and papas when they came home fatigued with their business.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1800, Martin 1998: 203)

Porter’s own social space consisted of her employer’s family, even more so than her own immediate family, and her friends and acquaintances. The Fox Strangways eventually became closest to what could be called her family; she even referred to the children as “my little darlings” and “my dear children” (see Section 6 below).

. The usual annual sum was between £15 and £20, which made Edgeworth’s suggestion widely unacceptable.

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A governess must at all times keep to her place; if she did not, she would risk losing her livelihood (Renton 1991: 101). Porter was aware of her difficult dual role: she was caught in a social space where she was neither a common servant nor a proper member of the family (Martin 2004: 143–144). As a governess, she was expected to keep her distance from the upper servants, but her journal also shows she was aware of the line which she was not supposed to cross when dealing with her employers and their children, as is evident from example (3): (3) When Lord Ilchester is from home I spend the evenings with his daughters; when he is at home I pass them alone.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1790, Martin 1998: 96)

This is a clear example of the role physical space has in the indexing of social space. Similarly, while Porter may have wanted to keep her private moments private, her room was constantly invaded by “her” children. She writes about it in her journal: (4) Dear little Lady Susan grows much stronger, and every morning pays me a visit for the pleasure of thumping an old spinet in my room with her dear little hands. She will not go past my room door till she has had this satisfaction, and must have a book before her when she plays, to imitate her sisters.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1791, Martin 1998: 121)

In the outside world, Porter was very sociable and, when in London, she spent most of her free time paying visits, chatting with friends, going to the theatre and playing cards. Visitors also came quite frequently to Redlynch or Penrice. According to Martin (1998), people generally saw Porter as an educated gentlewoman who had high moral standards. There were, however, also some negative opinions of her. One of the people who criticised her was the Reverend Sydney Smith, who visited Penrice with his pupil Michael Hicks Beach (examples (5) and (6)). (5) Miss Porter perhaps ought not exactly to be set up as a model of good breeding, judgment, beauty or talents. She is I dare say a very respectable woman, and may be a much more sensible woman than I think her, but I confess in my eyes she is a very ordinary article.  (Sydney Smith to Mrs Hicks Beach, 1799, Martin 1998: 40) (6) I will not give up an atom of Miss Porter; instructed in books she may be, but infinitely vulgar she certainly is.  (Sydney Smith to Michael Hicks Beach, 1799, Martin 1998: 40)

Among the Ilchester family Porter’s value was recognised. Susan O’Brien, an aunt to Porter’s pupils, describes Porter in her letter to Lady Elizabeth Feilding:



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(7) As to learning, she will be an oracle, and there is a gratification in being look’d up to, which perhaps none but those who have been look’d down upon, know. I am glad of her determination, as she will be within reach of us all, and is a very valuable friend on many occasions, and one who we all love and esteem. (Lady Susan O’Brien to Lady Elizabeth Feilding, 1812, Martin 1998: 27–28)

If we think of Porter’s life in terms of Hall’s (1959) notion of public, social and personal spaces, we can see that in each case Porter’s position placed some limitations to her freedom of action. In the wider public space Porter appeared only anonymously by publishing a book of tales. It is very revealing of the limitations of her role that the publication was only possible anonymously – not only because of her gender, since there were women publishing under their own name even in the eighteenth century, but also because of her position as a governess, forced to keep herself out of the limelight. Anonymous publications were by no means unusual in the eighteenth century, and it has been estimated that in 1750–1790 nearly 80% of all novels in Britain and Ireland were published anonymously (Raven 2003: 143). On the other hand, from 1788 onwards men seem to have been more likely to remain anonymous than women (Raven 2003: 150, 163–164). Whatever the general trends, it is unlikely that a woman in Porter’s position could have even considered publishing under her own name. In general, however, Porter’s main dilemma in her daily life was balancing between the requirements of intimacy and the distance of her role. On the one hand, she was part of the intimate, personal space of her pupils, taking the place of their mother even. On the other hand, because of the distance in social position, Porter needed to distance herself from the personal space of the family she served, and to try to confine herself to the less intimate social space. Porter’s role in the Talbot household seems to have been somewhat more equal than at Redlynch. This was probably due to several factors. On the one hand, she was hired as both companion to Lady Mary and governess to her children, which gave her more access to the company of the adults of the household. On the other hand, Lady Mary herself was an old pupil of Porter’s, and this, combined with the age difference, may well have brought Porter increasing freedom in her role.

4.

The writings of Agnes Porter

Of the writings of Agnes Porter, unfortunately only a small part has survived. The surviving letters to the children and grandchildren of Lord Ilchester are only a fraction of all the letters she wrote during her lifetime. We have used all 92 letters in Martin (1998), as well as all the journal entries, as our material. Of the ­recipients

172 Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala

Table 1.  The material Source

Date

Words

Letters Journal Tales

1789–1814 1788–1805 1791

39,690 49,736 10,336

Total

92 letters 947 entries 7 tales

99,762

of the letters, Lady Mary Talbot and Lady Harriot Frampton were sisters, and both pupils of Porter’s. Charlotte Talbot was Lady Mary’s daughter, and William Henry Fox Talbot was the son of Lady Mary’s eldest sister, Lady Elizabeth, whose first husband was a cousin of Lady Mary’s husband. Altogether, Porter’s surviving correspondence adds up to 39,690 words. Of these, 13,815 have been included in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE). Porter mentions letters received and sent in her journals, and so we can estimate that she had a lively and varied correspondence. Her correspondents included a selection of family members (sister Fanny, but not sister Betsey, mother, but not maternal aunt in Edinburgh), as well as friends (Mr Green, Mrs Keir, who was a childhood friend from Edinburgh, Dr Macqueen and Mrs Upcher). Porter also wrote to various members of the Fox Strangways family, including the sisters of her employer, Lord Ilchester. Porter’s only known surviving letters are found at Penrice, and so it seems the major part of her correspondence is probably lost: not all her letters even to Lady Mary and Lady Harriot have survived. Agnes Porter’s journals survive as bound volumes in Penrice Castle in the possession of the descendants of Lady Mary Talbot, and include some pencilled comments probably made by Lady Mary and her daughter Charlotte. The journals cover the years 1788 to 1805, but there are frequent gaps in them. From our reading of the journals, some gaps seem to be due to boredom with her uneventful life, but there are also deleted passages, and pages which have been cut out. In the journals Porter records her daily life, her constant efforts at self-improvement by reading and studying foreign languages, visits and entertainments. The shortest entries are one or two words long, saying just “Ditto” or “As usual”, and the longest entry goes on for 91 lines, and recounts a story of the French revolution told by an emigrant. The longest and most lively entries often include a description of a journey and her travel companions, or a visit to the theatre. Altogether, the journals amount to 49,736 words.

. For information on CEECE, see Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin (2009), or http://www. helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC.



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 173

Porter sent her own journals to Lady Mary Talbot in 1812, hoping that the journals “will perhaps amuse you, and are peculiar in the circumstances of adverting to the education of both the mother and her children”. As many obvious deletions occur when her sister Betsy is going through a fairly tumultuous stage, it seems Porter probably deleted entries on private or sensitive topics before sending the journals to her former pupil. Porter also wrote other things apart from letters and journals. In one of her journal entries she mentions she has a “memory”, where she presumably recorded the longer anecdotes. Porter also published anonymously a volume of educational stories for girls, The Triumphs of Reason; Exemplified in Seven Tales, which came out in 1791. We have used the book as comparative material to Porter’s other writings in the case of modality.

5.

Keywords

In order to identify some of the ways in which Porter constructed and expressed the social space in which she was constrained we compared her letter writing to that of her female contemporaries. The writers selected for comparison were all women of a certain social status and literary ambition, so their letters present a good reference corpus for Porter. The differences between Porter’s and the other women’s linguistic behaviour were identified with the help of the Keyword feature of the WordSmith program. It calculates the appearance of tokens in the text, and compares the frequency of appearance to the reference corpus. If the difference is statistically significant, the words are included in a list of keywords. Table 2 shows the most significant keywords with the highest positive and negative keyness values. In addition to those listed, there are 22 other keywords identified (apart from proper names and titles). Proper names (Porter, Agnes, Talbot, Mary, Penrice etc.) and titles (Lady, Miss, Mrs) make up the bulk of keywords, but they have been excluded from Table 2, since they merely reflect the participants of the correspondence and their immediate surroundings. Tellingly, many of the proper names and titles showing up as . For more on the WordSmith Tools software package and its keyword statistics, see e.g. the WordSmith website (http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/). . Other words identified as key (keyness in parentheses) were: young (43.65), quite (42.78), three (41.16), sister (37.78), star (37.17), happy (34.87), stout (34.20), good (31.83), asked (31.62), both (31.47), respectful (30.89), studies (30.89), health (30.62), sisters (27.99), French (27.69), farewell (27.11), music (26.26), nice (25.29), love (24.97), day (24.83), agreeable (24.30) and perfect (24.23).

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Table 2.  Keyword comparison of Agnes Porter’s letters and her female contemporaries10 Word

Frequency

Keyness

and dear darlings little her your well she mamma etc children darling their our more for which it his without of if has have not

1363   317    44   228   551   458   198   359    22    31    60    24   147    65    61   341   129   383   152    11   905    85   103   269   243

597.75 215.53 192.03 145.98 136.08   96.01   84.13   72.91   71.33   70.16   64.36   59.87   50.81 –24.20 –28.01 –30.81 –30.82 –30.96 –32.04 –33.20 –34.49 –41.22 –47.61 –57.27 –67,68

keywords are female. Table 2 shows the keywords in the order of keyness which the program has calculated for each one of them, with the most significantly different on top, and decreasing in the degree of significance going down. The words showing a negative keyness value appear in Porter’s letters less frequently than in the comparison material.10 There are items that are easily assigned to the special circumstances of the correspondence: darling, darlings and children probably refer to Porter’s charges 10. The comparison material comes from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE). All writers are women, and their social rank ranges from professionals to upper gentry. Several are published writers. The letters selected date from 1750–1800. The collections included are Austen, BurneyF, Carter, Draper, Gower, Lennox, Melbourne, Montagu, Perrot, Pierce, Piozzi, Pitt2, Twining, Wedgwood, Wollstonecraft, Young. For details on the collections, see Nurmi, Nevala and Palander-Collin (2009).



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 175

at the Ilchester and Talbot households. Among the less significant keywords, sister and sisters also show up with the same focus on the families employing Porter. The preponderance of her and she bring out clearly the extremely female world Porter lived in, or at least was supposed to live in, and therefore described in her letters; the appearance of his among the negative keywords strengthens this impression. Your and their, and the relative absence of our seem to suggest a strategy of selfeffacement: the world of the recipient (her sisters) is a more central topic for the letters than the writer of them. There are several terms which describe affection (dear, darlings, little, darling, and among the less significant keywords happy, good, respectful and love); many of these will be discussed in Section 6. It is important to point out that Porter uses more of these words than other women writing letters at the same time. The keywords also seem to express a very positive attitude (happy, good, agreeable and perfect among the lower key items), as complaints or worries probably would have been deemed unsuitable for this kind of communication. The words quite and well appear in Porter’s letters often together as in example (8). Quite is in most cases used in modifying adjectives, often positive ones, or sometimes hedging negative ones (see examples (9) and (10)). Well refers most often to someone’s good health (example (11)). As health has been a frequent topic of correspondence for centuries, it might be interesting to follow this up, and see how the discourse of health differs in the other female writers’ letters. (8) Lady Charlotte is quite well, but not so studiously disposed as she used to be  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 1793, Martin 1998: 140) (9) Your sister Harriot is at present quite happy in Miss Syndercombe’s company  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 1794, Martin 1998: 146) (10) We have an old lady who is quite extravagant and luxurious with regard to herself, yet refuses a grown-up daughter a little pocket-money, or the least independence in any [thing].  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 1797?, Martin 1998: 188) (11) My Dear Lady Mary, I thank God your darlings continue all well, and as good children as ever were known.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 1800?, Martin 1998: 203)

Finally, comparing two different stages of Porter’s life reveals another significant keyword. In letters written before 1800 Porter uses the first-person pronoun I significantly less than either her female contemporaries or she herself after 1800 (keyness –28.99 compared to her own later letters and –51.55 compared to other women). This proved to be an important discovery, since it seems to support our interpretation of the other lexical patterns as an effacement of self. This also

176 Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala

­reflects Porter’s change of status, since after resigning from the employment of Lord Ilchester, her position changed with regard to the recipients of her letters. Palander-Collin (2006: 351) has found a correspondence between self-inclusion and the letter addressee’s social rank, in that self-mention is more common in letters directed to social inferiors and equals than to social superiors. In eighteenth-century correspondence, Palander-Collin has traced several differences in the use of first-person pronouns. These results show that women use more firstperson pronouns than men, family letters have a greater frequency of self-mention than letters to more distant recipients, and non-gentry writers refer to themselves more than gentry writers. First-person pronouns are also more frequent when the recipient of the letter is female (Nurmi and Palander-Collin 2008). ­Palander-­Collin explains these findings by suggesting that these differences relate to intimacy and familiarity between correspondents, with higher frequency in self-mention indicating a more involved or subjective style of writing. At the same time, even in family correspondence power relationships are clearly in evidence, in that first-person pronouns are much less frequently used when writing to parents or other superior family members than when writing to children. Comparing Porter’s pattern of first-person pronoun usage to Palander-­Collin’s findings, we see some conflicting trends, which may well be explained by Porter’s difficult social position. While she as a woman writing to other women would be expected to use first-person pronouns frequently, she is writing to her social superiors, which curtails the frequency of self-mention. At the same time, Porter is in a position of intimacy with regard to her pupils and, as governess, in a position of authority, which would suggest more self-reference than is actually extant. The change in Porter’s patterns of first-person pronoun usage may well reflect a change to a more equal position with regard to her correspondents.

6.

Third-person reference

The use of referential terms and expressions involves several participant roles and usually extends the focus of interest from binary to tripartite or multiple relationships. Reference as a form of description can also be used to define the relationship of the writer and the referent. The manner in which the writer points to the referent, by way of describing his/her character, appearance or work, relates to the way the writer wants the referent’s identity or person to be seen, not only by, for example, the recipient of the letter, but also by others (see e.g. Nevala 2004). As can be seen in Table 3, Agnes Porter’s letters and journals include a great number of different referential terms and expressions. The instances have been sorted according to the relative distance between Porter and the referent, i.e. the



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 177

Table 3.  The number of instances of nominal third-person reference  (normalised frequencies per 1,000 words in square brackets) Referents

Porter herself* Porter’s own family (Former) Pupils Employer Friends Acquaintances Others

Sources Letters 1789–1798

Letters 1800?–1814

Journals 1788–1797

Journals 1802–1805

Total

10 [0.75] 35 [2.62] 193 (19)* [14.46] 74 [5.54] 38 [2.85] 19 [1.42] 105 [7.86]

20 [0.75] 45 [1.69] 534 (33)* [20.08] 314 [11.81] 49 [1.84] 58 [2.18] 116 [4.36]

1 [0.03] 231 [7.56] 464 [15.19] 379 [12.41] 356 [11.66] 75 [2.46] 225 [7.37]

1 [0.05] 132 [6.88] 229 [11.93] 456 [23.76] 109 [5.68] 151 [7.87] 180 [9.38]

32 [0.36] 443 [4.94] 1,420 [15.83] 1,223 [13.64] 552 [6.16] 303 [3.38] 626 [6.98]

*These figures mean the (included) instances of the third-person forms used to refer to Porter herself and the recipient (Lady Mary Talbot and Lady Harriot Frampton).

nature of their relationship. Porter’s own family includes references to her parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, cousins, aunts, and other relatives. Her (former) pupils mainly consist of the children and grand-children of the Fox Strangways family: Lady Mary, Lady Harriot, and their children. References to the rest of the employer’s family have been separated in a category of its own; it consists of terms used of Lord and Lady Ilchester, the Talbots, their relatives, friends, and acquaintances, as well as other employees. Porter’s references to her own friends and acquaintances are, however, placed in categories of their own, and they include instances of referential terms used of, for example, Dr Macqueen, Mrs Pinnock, Mr Green, Mr and Mrs Goodenough, and Mr and Mrs Vilett. References to more distant or unknown referents are included in “others”. The diachronic categorisation of the material is two-fold: both letters and journals have been divided into two separate groups, prior and after 1799, when Porter moved into the Talbot household. When referring to people closest to her, Porter often uses terms of endearment, nicknames and first names. She truly has many names for the things she loves, since her young pupils in particular receive the most diverse terms imaginable. The children are called pretty little elves, darling children, blooming pupils, dearest little creatures, stout little loves, little darlings, and rosebuds (example (12)).

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(12) My Dearest Lady Mary, I hope your darling goes on well at Salisbury, and that the other precious loves are in perfect health. I cannot express to you how lovely your rose-buds look that bloom in Penrice Castle. Morning Star [Emma] shines most auspiciously.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1809, Martin 1998: 285)

The children are also referred to as old and new “friends”. In example (13), Porter is once again writing to Lady Mary to tell about her dear little pupils. (13) It is a great comfort to me to think that such a sensible chearful woman as Mrs Edwards is now with your absent darlings. My love to the dear creatures that are with you – I hope Miss Jane my old friend, Charry my old companion, and Miss Ellinor my sweet little new friend, will all give me some commissions to do for them in Town.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1809, Martin 1998: 280)

She also refers warmly to the members of her own family, her mother and her sister Frances, calling them by terms such as my dear Fanny, my dearest mother, and my dear parent. Porter’s obvious dislike of her other sister Elizabeth shows, however, in her manner of referring to her only by her nickname Betsey, as in example (14). (14) Some serious discourse with Betsey, but all in vain. Were not a parent’s welfare concerned, I would take the poet’s advice: ‘Disgust conceal’d is oftimes prudence, when the defect is radical and past a cure’. Passion, inconsideration, and ignorance of self are dreadful evils but with God nothing is impossible. Wrote to my dear Fanny to prevent her needlessly hurrying to Sarum. Sat with my dear mother all the day.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1791, Martin 1998: 126–127)

Porter had a large circle of friends and acquaintances, whom she mostly refers to by using their titles and last names, such as Mrs Pinnock and Mr Green. Her use of modifying adjectives decreases the further the distance between her and the referent grows. The distance can also be emotional and intentional: Porter does not, for example, use modifying adjectives (dear, amiable) when she refers to Dr Malcolm Macqueen, whom she had hopes of marrying but who then chose to marry an heiress instead. Porter considered herself a friend of Dr Macqueen and his wife, even visited them many times when in London, but kept her distance in order to remain an honourable governess. In example (15), Porter is writing to Lady Mary, who is socially superior, and so it seems important to her to claim authority by mentioning that her friends had attended the Princess Royal’s marriage, thus leaving Lady Mary in the out-group.



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 179

(15) Two friends of mine, Dr and Mrs Macqueen, were at the Princess Royal’s marriage: they told me she looked very well satisfied with her lot and that the Prince of Wertemberg, though extremely fat, had a good-humoured, sensible countenance.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1797, Martin 1998: 187)

Example (16) shows an instance where Porter also refers to Mrs Pinnock as her good friend: in the extract, she reports Mrs Pinnock’s words of her friend Miss French. Porter’s obvious respect towards her old friend shows in the term this worthy woman. (16) My good friend Mrs Pinnock spent the day with me. She told me some very extraordinary particulars of her friend Miss French, now Mrs Heale – it grieved me to hear this worthy woman say that she had no friend in the world but this lady and myself.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1791, Martin 1998: 106)

Porter tends to associate certain type of reference with people of different social origin. She often refers to people of lower classes with terms like poor country girl, a poor, meagre old woman and innocent creatures, and, in example (17), even describes a sailor a great fardeau: (17) Had a very tolerable seat, except in one circumstance: a sailor on the bench before me being extremely fat, and not finding his form broad enough, sat farther back and reposed himself on my knees all the spectacle. It was in vain for me to suppose what an honest, good creature he might be – I found him a great fardeau [burden] – he kindly offered me his rum bottle to enable me the better to go through the fatigues of the evening, but neither my companion nor self took any advantage of his liberality.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1788, Martin 1998: 79–80)

Porter’s obvious want of making her own distinguished character and level of learning known also shows in the way she writes about her “literary friends” and acquaintances. Example (18) is an extract from her letter to Lady Harriot. Here Porter is obviously referring to people who are more likely to be categorised as acquaintances rather than personal friends. Her aim to claim authority and ingroup membership with people she suspects that Lady Harriot also has respect for shows in her choice of terms. (18) My Dear Lady Harriot, I hope you and all yours are well. You may suppose I have not forgotten your Marie Baudin: on the contrary she has been an object of my peculiar research, among my literary friends and my émigré acquaintances. I have tormented them incessantly about Marie Baudin.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Harriot Frampton, 1807, Martin 1998: 267)

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Reference to the writer him/herself or to the recipient can also be used to alternate the writer’s status in the in- or out-group. For example, Porter often uses nominal reference forms in the third person when she refers to herself, as can be seen in examples (19)–(21). Instead of using the nickname Nanny or Nancy given by her own family, she uses the form Po by which her pupils called her. (19) Rose at seven. Bolted my door till I had said my prayers, then opened it, and in rushed my two children. A thousand things have they to say to Po after a night’s separation.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1791, Martin 1998: 122) (20) dear Miss Talbot is now at the other end of the table, elbow on lap and head in hand, considering a sum done in the rule of three, which she intends to prove by practice. Plaguey Po, in spite of this abstracted occupation, comes in with a ‘Hold up your head my dear’. I stopt writing just now to look at the sums, which were quite right.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1809, Martin 1998: 284) (21) Miss Talbot is now writing to her mamma, but perhaps it may not be ready to go with Po’s to-day. She has been very diligent at her studies and has done a great deal in these few weeks past. We take time, however, for exercise, and for her amusement Po tries to walk and talk as if she were quinze ans. My best performances are, however, but a poor substitute for the pleasures she looks forward to, and which I hope she will soon enjoy.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1809, Martin 1998: 287)

As can be seen in example (21), Porter may also refer to her recipient in the third person (her mamma referring to Lady Mary). (22) and (23) are further examples of how she tends to alter distance and deictic focus by shifting between a direct second-person approach and third-person reference. (22) Give a kiss to your pretty elves for me, take good care of their mama, and tell her I am her affectionate and sincere A. Agnes Porter.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1796, Martin 1998: 171) (23) I do indeed take a real concern in your disappointments, having many reasons exclusive of personal ones to wish for you here, yet none of them so important as the delight it would give my dearest Lady Mary to see her loves again. […] It is time for me to go to the Alpean church. Mr Christopher accompanies us. I repeat to my dear Lady Mary that all her children are quite well. God bless her and them, amen! Po.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1809, Martin 1998: 286)

In example (22), Porter shifts the actant viewpoint from herself to the children and, in a way, separates Lady Mary’s roles as the recipient of the letter and as the



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 181

children’s mother. After the nominal referential term their mama, she changes from direct you to the third-person pronoun her. A similar switch occurs in an extract from another letter to Lady Mary (example (23)). Porter’s use of third-person reference appears to be a means of expressing intimacy, in the same way as parents often refer to themselves when they talk to children. As already said, Porter refers to her pupils as if they were her own children, and she mostly uses third-person reference for emotional emphasis, reminding the recipient of her dual role as a governess and an occasional substitute mother.

7.

Modality in the writings of Agnes Porter

In her use of modal auxiliaries, Agnes Porter does not greatly differ from her contemporaries. Porter uses fewer modal auxiliaries in her letters than eighteenthcentury letter writers on average, although the frequencies of tentative modals are closer to the norm than those of the non-tentative forms (Nurmi and PalanderCollin 2008). Similarly, the frequency of modals in Porter’s book of tales is lower than in either the Century of Prose Corpus, the ARCHER corpus or the Corpus of English Dialogues (for details see Nurmi and Palander-Collin 2008). Table 4 presents the results in Porter’s writings. It is not unexpected that Porter’s journal has the lowest number of instances of modal auxiliaries, since modality is a feature typical of interactive language use. The tales fall in the middle ground between the journal and the letters, showing some interactive qualities, mostly in the dialogue between characters. The letters are obviously the most interactive of these three genres, and thus present the most frequent appearance of modal auxiliaries. There seems to be no change in the Table 4.  Modal auxiliaries in the writings of Agnes Porter

can could may might must shall should will would

Letters 1789–1798

Letters 1800–1814

Journal

Tales

N

/1,000 w.

N

/1,000 w.

N

/1,000 w.

N

/1,000 w.

28 21 20  5 21 22 22 83 34

2.1 1.6 1.5 0.4 1.6 1.7 1.7 6.2 2.6

  58   33   38   20   31   57   39 146   84

2.2 1.3 1.4 0.8 1.2 2.2 1.5 5.5 3.2

48 62 45 24 24 34 42 71 91

1.0 1.2 0.9 0.5 0.5 0.7 0.8 1.4 1.8

18 14  8 11  6 13 11 26 25

1.7 1.4 0.8 1.1 0.6 1.3 1.1 2.5 2.4

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­frequency of modal auxiliaries in Porter’s letters to correspond to the increase of the first-person pronoun I in the nineteenth century. Two features of Porter’s use of modal auxiliaries stand out: epistemic must and quasi-subjunctive may. An earlier study (Nurmi 2004) on the development and use of epistemic must during the course of the history of English showed that Agnes Porter used must unlike other informants. While by the eighteenth century women use more epistemic must than men, their use of it does not mostly differ from male usage. The difference is one of quantity, not of quality. The one informant who stood out qualitatively with examples like (24) was Agnes Porter. This example shows a unique communicative strategy among the eighteenth-century letter writers in the CEECE. This usage has very little to do with the literal meaning of epistemic must: Porter is not primarily estimating the truth value of her claims, but is rather employing epistemic must to mirror the recipient’s experiences right back at her, highlighting the recipient at the writer’s expense. This strategy of placing more importance on her correspondents than herself can be seen throughout Porter’s correspondence. There is also one passage in one of her early journal entries (see example (25)) where Porter uses epistemic must to imagine herself in the place of another, this time sharing the unpleasantness of the experience rather than the pleasantness in the letter, but on the whole this feature seems to be more part of Porter’s interactive repertoire. (24) Your little tent parties must be pleasing indeed, and no doubt the salmon brought from the water to the cook must be eaten with peculiar relish, as well as in its highest perfection, when you recollect who caught it.  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 1792, Martin 1998: 138) (25) As maid of honour to the Queen she [Miss Julia Digby] is obliged to attend St James’ at this undue season of the year when London must be dreadfully hot and unpleasant.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1790, Martin 1998: 84)

It is possible to regard this use of epistemic must as a feature of caretaker language, as Porter uses it quite frequently in letters addressed to the girls and young women under her care (to Lady Mary’s daughter in (26)). She does, however, also resort to this strategy when writing to the adult Lady Mary, as in (27). (26) My Dear Miss Charlotte, I wish you joy on your twelfth birth-day, and hope you will see many as happy as the last. I think your doll’s gown must be extremely pretty by your description, and what a darling little thing must your cottage be!  (Agnes Porter to Charlotte Talbot, 1812, Martin 1998: 318)



The social space of an eighteenth-century governess 183

(27) When I have the happiness to see you I shall hope to be indulged with a sight of your manufactory journals. I think it must have been delightful to you to make so much of your time under the name of amusement, and to see your darling girls enjoy and investigate what they saw with all the hilarity of youth  (Agnes Porter to Lady Mary Talbot, 1812, Martin 1998: 322)

In the case of quasi-subjunctive may, the form itself is not a marked form in eighteenth-century English. It is not the use of the form itself that is in any way unusual, merely the high frequency with which it appears in Porter’s journal (see example (28)). That is to say, in this case the difference between Porter and other informants is quantitative rather than qualitative. Quasi-subjunctive may appears in Porter’s letters as well, but with a much lower frequency (29). (28) [28 August] My dear pupils all well, happy and amiable. My study is that every thing concerning their education, health etc. should be conducted as nearly as possible the same as it was under their blessed mother’s direction. May she prove their model, as in all their concerns I have aimed at making her mine.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1790, Martin 1998: 85) (29) You, I hope will take precious care of your own health, as a duty of the first magnitude. But I know ease of mind is half in half. May this blessing be your own in its fullest extent! Have you had time to read Coelebs? I think you would approve of a great part of it.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1809, Martin 1998: 281)

In Porter’s journal this use of may seems to be tied most often to good wishes on people marrying (30), and it is sometimes accompanied with amen (31). This would indicate that Porter was expressing her piety, or at least the appropriate sentiment, in this formulaic way, remaining in her role of the vicar’s daughter and the conscientious governess. (30) [21 September] Accompanied my dear Lady Elizabeth to Bruton church where she was confirmed by Dr Moss, Bishop of Bath and Wells. May a blessing be on this, as on every act of her life!  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1790, Martin 1998: 87) (31) [9 May] Lady Mary is to-day so poorly that I suppose she will soon be confined. May the event prove fortunate! Amen. A. A. Porter, Penrice Castle near Swansea, May 9th 1803.  (Agnes Porter, journal, 1803, Martin 1998: 226)

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8.

Discussion: Defining social space

8.1

General observations

The social space of Agnes Porter as expressed in her writings is narrower than that of her female contemporaries. On the basis of the keyword analysis of her letters, Porter’s world is more female than that of most, and focused on her employers’ families and the positive aspects of life. She uses self-effacement as a strategy, as is evidenced by her avoidance of first-person pronoun I in her letters in the eighteenth century, although consequent changes in her position result in her abandoning this tactic.

8.2 Use of third-person reference In her letters, Porter refers most often to her (former) pupils and least to her acquaintances. This is not surprising, considering that the Fox Strangways and the Talbots equalled her extended family, and they belonged to her immediate social space. The difference between her use of reference to the current pupils in her letters and journals may be explained by the fact that the bulk of Porter’s letters is addressed either to their mother, Lady Mary, or to their aunt, Lady Harriot, and thus she has a more valid reason to refer to the children and their daily life. The number of references to her pupils also seems to correlate with references to distant others: the number for pupils increases in time in letters and decreases in journals, whereas the number for others decreases in time in letters and increases in journals. Correspondingly, references to Porter’s employers are more frequent in her journals than in her letters. It is also worth noting that the number of references to her employers’ family and friends increases in the course of time, both in her letters and journals, and is particularly high in the latter part of her employment as a governess to Lady Mary’s children. This might be explained by the fact that by that time, the Talbot family had grown to its largest with seven children, and Lady Mary and her husband did not travel around the country as much as they used to in the earlier days. Correspondingly, the Talbot household was more frequently visited by relatives and friends, with whom Porter was also acquainted. Porter’s references to her own family decrease in time, even though she does write about her family members more in her journals than in her letters. What is also interesting is the fact that Porter uses the term friend over three times more often in her journals than in her letters, although the number of references to her friends decreases over time in the entire material. One might assume that since



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journals lack a proper addressee, there would have been no obvious reason for her to use extra-recognitional terms like friend. One explanation is, however, that she may have written her journals with a “private” audience in mind, since she sent them to Lady Mary in 1812, hoping that the journals “will perhaps amuse you, and are peculiar in the circumstances of adverting to the education of both the mother and her children”. Also, Porter mostly uses friend of those people with which she actually spent a lot of time – her pupils and her close friends – in her letters, but even more so in her journals. She only refers to her acquaintances as friends on few occasions, which could particularly be interpreted as strategically altering distance and expressing in-group membership with the referent(s). One such case is shown in example (18), in which Porter writes about her “literary friends” and “émigré acquaintances”. In this context, she is obviously emphasising the fact that she knows some people who might be able to help Lady Harriot to find information on “Marie Baudin”.11 Her position as a former governess to her recipient plays a central role in the matter. Porter, on the other hand, uses third-person reference of herself and the addressee to express familiarity and a positive attitude. Her use of the nickname Po when relating to herself (examples (19)–(21)) is a good example of a type of “care-talk”, meaning that she refers to herself like a mother talking to her small child.12 This way, she minimises the distance between the recipient, the referent, and herself. By referring to Lady Mary as my dear Lady Mary, Porter manages to express the inequality of their relationship (she herself a governess, the recipient a lady). Her habit of referring to other people more than herself, and her avoidance of first-person pronouns add to her obvious wish to efface her own persona to the background. In the journal she writes about her own feelings and attitudes more than in the letters, but maintains a level of objectivity and keeps up the role of a governess. This kind of constant balancing reflects her own social position characterised by shifts between authority/obedience and distance/intimacy. The material also includes cases in which Porter uses self- and addresseeoriented third-person reference as a rhetorical device to close an interactional sequence. This kind of referential use often appears in her letters to intimates, i.e. Lady Mary and Lady Harriot. The subject should be further studied before making any conclusions, but the current data suggests there may be some structural

11. It appears the right name was Marie Gaudin, and Porter’s friend Mr Roscoe suspected that she may have appeared in Pierre de Bourdeille’s Vies des dames galantes. 12. Po is used in this context similarly to what Schegloff (1996: 443, 447) calls “simplified register” (e.g. when parents use third-person terms of themselves when talking to their children).

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functions to the use of third-person reference in other Late Modern English letters as well.13

8.3 Modality Agnes Porter’s use of modal auxiliaries showed an overall trend of staying below averages for contemporary writers. This would seem to indicate that Porter was wary of showing too much strong personal involvement in her writings, feeling the constraints of her social position. That is to say, Porter seems to have avoided qualifying her opinions through epistemic modality or explicit negotiations for power through deontic modality, preferring to write as if all her statements regarding the wondrous nature of her wards were true and there was no power imbalance to discuss – or no need to discuss the existing power imbalance because it was as it should be. This ties in with Coates’s (2003: 339) discussion of the role of epistemic modality in present-day women’s conversations: in Porter’s position, however intimately she was involved in the life of the family she worked for, there was no room for discussion of truly sensitive topics, mutual self-disclosure or even maintaining a collaborative floor, because the focus was more often than not on the recipient of her letters. This interpretation is supported by the results of the keyword comparison of Porter’s letters to those of her contemporaries. In addition to this trend of avoidance, Porter’s use of modal auxiliaries showed two special features which merit some attention. Uniquely to the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE), Agnes Porter employs epistemic must as a self-effacement feature. She uses it as a strategy of shifting the attention to the recipient of the letter, either mirroring the recipient’s account of her experiences, or putting herself in the recipient’s place. This shows Porter’s consciousness of her narrow social role as a governess, as the important experiences worthy of correspondence are those of her recipient, and Porter is relegated to living them vicariously, as expressed by her use of epistemic must. Another feature of the constraints of Porter’s social space is the expected or self-imposed piety, which is expressed in her journals with the highly frequent use of quasi-subjunctive may, wishing happiness in marriage to others while her own hopes of wedlock were repeatedly dashed. This form of wishing is occasionally framed as a prayer, as it is concluded with the word amen, and it may well be an expression of religious feeling learned at home from her father, the vicar. On the

13. A similar strategy is used by Josiah Wedgwood in his letters to his friend Thomas Bentley, only he often uses third-person reference of himself and the recipient in the opening sequence of a letter (see Nevala 2009).



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other hand, the highly formulaic nature of these wishes leaves room for the interpretation that they were more a matter of form than a genuine sentiment. This formula might also be regarded as yet another expression of self-effacement, since Porter was following the socially accepted norm, including these wishes in her most private of writings, her journal. Perhaps her place in society – or her own perception of it – required not only behaving according to the norm in public but also following the code in private.

9.

Conclusion

Agnes Porter’s constant efforts to efface herself are reflected in her use of certain linguistic features. In general, she refers more to other people than herself. Also, her way of occasionally referring to the recipient and herself in the third person can be seen not only as a way of showing emotional emphasis, but also as a way of effacing her own persona to the background. Porter uses other linguistic strategies, such as epistemic must and avoidance of first person forms, for the same purpose. Porter’s social space could be described as feminine; her ample use of the pronouns her and she in the letters alone shows the reader who those nearest to her were. Her constrained self-expression can be seen in the use of positive adjectives, as well as the overall topic of her letters. In the journal she writes about her own feelings and attitudes more than in the letters, but maintains a level of objectivity and keeps up the role of a governess. By giving moral advice, recommending good reading, and composing daily schedules, Porter wants to make it known that she considers herself an exemplary governess who knows her right place in the social space she happens to be acting in.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social space and symbolic power.” Sociological Theory 7 (1): 14–25. CEECE = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen (leader), Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Anni Sairio (née Vuorinen) and Tanja Säily. University of Helsinki. Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. Coates, Jennifer. 2003. “The role of epistemic modality in women’s talk”. In Modality in Contemporary English, Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug and Frank Palmer (eds), 331–348. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine. 2002. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. London/New York: Routledge.

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Durkheim, Émile. [1897] 1970. “La conception materialiste de l’histoire.” In Les sciences sociales et l’action, Jean-Claude Filloux (ed.), 245–252. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Hall, Edward T. 1959/1970. The Silent Language. New York: Fawcett. Hughes, Kathryn. 1993. The Victorian Governess. London: Hambledon and London. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1987. Meaning and the English Verb. 2nd edition. London: Longman. Levinson, Stephen C. 1988. “Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s concepts of participation.” In Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds), 161–227. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983/1992. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 2004. “Deixis.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds), 97–121. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, Joanna. 2004. Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House. London: Hambledon and London. Martin, Joanna (ed.). 1998. A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter. London/Rio Grande: Hambledon Press. Mühlhäusler, Peter and Harré, Rom. 1990. Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Napoli, Ernesto. 1997. “Names, indexicals, and identity statements.” In Direct Reference, Indexicality, and Propositional Attitudes, Wolfgang Künne, Albert Newen and Martin Anduschus (eds), 185–211. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Nevala, Minna. 2004. “Accessing politeness axes: Forms of address and terms of reference in early English correspondence.” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (12): 2125–2160. Nevala, Minna. 2009. “Altering distance and defining authority: Person reference in Late Modern English”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10 (2): 238–259. Nurmi, Arja. 2004. “Must in eighteenth-century correspondence.” Paper presented at ICAME (International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English) Conference, 19–23 May, Verona. Nurmi, Arja. 2009. “May: The social history of an auxiliary.” In Pragmatics and Discourse: Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora, Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds), 321–342. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nurmi, Arja, Nevala, Minna and Palander-Collin, Minna (eds). 2009. The Language of Daily Life in England, 1400–1800. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nurmi, Arja and Palander-Collin, Minna. 2008. “Letters as a text type: Interaction in writing.” In Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data, Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds), 21–49. Bern: Peter Lang. Palander-Collin, Minna. 2006. “(Re)constructing style and language as social interaction through first- and second-person pronouns in Early Modern English letters.” In Dialogic Language Use, Irma Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen (eds), 339–362. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Palmer, Frank Robert. 1987. The English Verb. Second edition. London: Longman. Porter, Agnes. 1791. The Triumphs of Reason; Exemplified in Seven Tales. London. Raven, James. 2003. “The anonymous novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830.” In The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, Robert J. Griffin (ed.), 141–166. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Renton, Alice. 1991. Tyrant or Victim? A History of the British Governess. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. “Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics”. In Studies in Anaphora, Barbara Fox (ed.), 437–485. Amsterdam/Atlanta: John Benjamins. Scollon, Ron and Scollon, Suzie Wong. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London/New York: Routledge. Sifianou, Maria. 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tabouret-Keller, Andrée. 1997. “Language and identity.” In The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Florian Coulmas (ed.), 315–326. Oxford: Blackwell. Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Dasher, Richard B. 2005. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Building trust through (self-)appraisal in nineteenth-century business correspondence Marina Dossena

University of Bergamo

This paper analyzes the main strategies employed by encoders of nineteenthcentury business letters to encourage the trust of the recipient or to show their trust in the recipient’s skills and qualities, so that successful business relationships may develop. Relying on the sample of business letters included in the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (19CSC; see Dossena 2004; Dury 2006), findings are discussed in the light of the Appraisal system outlined in Martin and White (2005) and White (2007). In particular, I relate this study on stance to earlier ones on the expression of authority (Dossena 2006a, 2006b), as both are functions of the social roles performed by the participants, and complex and adaptable social profiles are constructed through linguistic means. As I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the infirmities of my description.  (R. L. Stevenson, An Old Scotch Gardener (Memories and Portraits [1887]))

1.

Introduction

Language never occurs in a vacuum. Everything we say, write, read or hear (and hopefully listen to) is a socially-situated phenomenon, inevitably dependent on the communicative purpose of the users, their mutual status, and the kind of image participants wish to present to each other, so that their exchange can be successful. Language, therefore, is inextricably linked to issues of face and identity – two very significant concepts most recently discussed by Spencer-Oatey (2007). After a thorough overview of the theoretical approaches to the concepts of face and identity, Spencer-Oatey challenges the idea of face as a dyadic phenomenon,

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“whereas identity is an individual (and much broader) phenomenon”, arguing that a “multi-level perspective on self-representation can be usefully applied to the analysis of face in interaction” (2007: 643). As a matter of fact, face can only be at least a dyadic phenomenon, as “one cannot claim face unilaterally” (Spencer-Oatey 2007: 642), so the crucial role of the receiver is highlighted. But the issue appears to be even more complex when we realize that identity is seldom restricted to a completely personal domain, as it may belong to groups. This implies that investigations of facework also have to take into consideration the potential plurality of identities coexisting in one user, whether as an individual or as a member of a specific social group. The need for a multi-level approach is also clear when we see that there is an affective reaction on the part of the subject if face claims are appraised in an unexpected way (Spencer-Oatey 2007: 644). This is particularly clear in cases of conflict, as this forces users to balance their need for the preservation of their own face, whether positive or negative, without threatening irretrievably the face of the recipient (see Dossena 2008). Also self-promotion is a very delicate context in which mutual face claims need to be managed with skill. The kind of self-representation offered to the recipient (and to any third parties not directly involved in the exchange, but possibly influencing it in various ways) plays a significant role in the development of the exchange itself, and a fundamental underpinning of this is found in mutual trust, without which no cooperation can take place. The strategies employed in Present-day English are beyond the scope of this contribution – not least because my main interest here is in the time-depth of the linguistic phenomena under investigation. In what follows I intend to analyze the strategies employed by encoders of nineteenth-century business letters in order to encourage the trust of the recipient or to show their trust in the recipient’s business skills and qualities, so that fruitful exchanges may take place and successful business relationships may develop. Relying on the sample of business letters included in the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (19CSC; see Dossena 2004; Dury 2006), findings will then be discussed in the light of the Appraisal system outlined in Martin and White (2005) and White (2007),

. In analyses of 19CSC I prefer to use the term “encoder”, as opposed to “writer”, as the latter can only be applicable to holograph letters: when the contribution of an amanuensis cannot be excluded, or is in fact expected, as in the case of managers dictating to secretaries, the person who actually “writes” the letter is not necessarily the person whose meanings are conveyed. Similarly, “recipients” is deemed to be a better term than “addressees”, as the person to whom the letter was actually addressed was not necessarily the only person who read it. Finally, tokens are counted as “orthographic units”, not “words”, because words could be linked up – a feature which is of course recorded in 19CSC transcriptions.



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though other approaches will also be taken into consideration (e.g. Hunston and ­ ompson 2000). Th As evaluation is not only expressed atomistically (in terms of individual lexical items), but also in a more diffused way (for instance, through epistemic modality, which evaluates the truth value of the predication, or deontic modality, which implies an evaluation of the subject’s reliability), it is crucial to clarify issues in the phenomena before any quantitative findings may be offered. In this respect I agree with Kohnen (2007): qualitative analyses of the strategies employed in a highly homogeneous, albeit small, corpus may lead to the identification of patterns the validity and significance of which go beyond mere frequency patterns. My aim in this contribution, therefore, is to investigate the expression of stance within the framework of politeness strategies. In particular, I intend to relate this study to earlier ones on requests and the expression of authority (see Dossena 2006a, 2006b), in order to outline the construction of complex and adaptable social profiles through linguistic means in various business contexts. As pointed out by Spencer-Oatey (2007: 642), “identities develop and emerge through interaction”, so the study of correspondence may be a useful way to explore such developments in a specific time and social frame.

1.1

Trust as basic component of business relationships

In a Gricean perspective, all interaction presupposes bona fide usage of linguistic and paralinguistic codes (Grice 1975) – exceptions to this rule are always pragmatically motivated, and may be intrinsically face-threatening: from irony to sarcasm, from lies to insults. Any deviation from ordinary, predictable forms may challenge the recipient’s positive or negative face (see Brown and Levinson 1987). This is all the more important in business exchanges, in which the social role of the participants requires them to use language consistently with the level of reliability, authoritativeness and trustworthiness they wish to convey to their interlocutors. Such positive traits may be reinforced non-linguistically by a fairly strict dress code and the main features of the working setting in which the interaction takes place (down to solidity of architecture and reassuring interior design). As pointed out by Richard Dury (p.c.), “trust is a key quality in the creation of ‘social capital’, the ‘glue’ that holds people together and that shapes the quality of social interaction”. A trusted subject is expected to fulfil agreements, keep promises and act according to common ethical standards. The greater the trust, the stronger the relationship and the more value that can be obtained from the social network, since cooperation and common endeavour become easier.

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­ owever, ‘trust’ is an abstraction: it refers to a prediction of future action and H exists only in discourse; business discourse in particular therefore requires repeated expressions of trust in the interlocutor and reciprocal strategies to obtain trust from the other. Thus we find frequent confirmations of positive opinions of reliability and competence in decisions and acts of the other. We also find encoders stating that such reliability and competence are expected. Or one party provides more or less direct statements aiming to reassure the other that they do possess these same qualities. For this reason, language plays a very considerable role in the construction of the social identity of the participants. In fact, the participants’ ­linguistic choices may help them construct “fluctuating identities” that correspond to their pragmatic requirements, for instance when greater or lesser modesty, or greater or lesser authority have to be conveyed (see Dossena 2006a, 2006b). In addition, nineteenth-century business relationships could rely on “gentlemanly” values and forms of behaviour in slightly different ways from what is expected today (see Del Lungo Camiciotti 2005, 2006). This means that such concepts as “social proximity”, “distance”, or “friendliness” were expressed differently, on account of such specificity in the thought style. Ethical aspects translated into verbal and discursive choices aiming to signal the close adherence to appreciated qualities. However, up to very recently, no fully-fledged corpus of business letters was available for investigation, and therefore no study could be carried out on what choices appeared to be particularly frequent, on their potential polysemy, and their correlation to varying communicative conditions (different encoders, recipients, settings and purposes). The launch of 19CSC is hoped to be a starting point, and although it does not allow quantitative investigations yet, in this paper I intend to present an overview of what linguistic elements encoded trust and reliability in business correspondence. The data for my analysis consist of c. 300 letters, written mostly, but not exclusively, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, for a total of c. 50,000 orthographic units. The letters concern different types of business (mainly banking, insurance, publishing, commerce and contracting of various types), and in some cases it is possible to follow the development of a transaction quite . This means a corpus comprising letters from a variety of encoders, to a variety of recipients, on a variety of issues, and therefore representing a range of communicative functions. . I gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from MSS held in the National Library of Scotland, Glasgow University Archives, and the Bank of Scotland Archives; such permission does not extend to third parties, so the quotations presented in this paper should not be used elsewhere. I am also indebted to Richard Dury for his help in the design and compilation of 19CSC, and for valuable comments throughout the investigation process.



Building trust in 19C business correspondence 195

e­ xtensively, as both parties’ letters have been preserved in the archives and have been transcribed for the compilation of the corpus. As for the time span ­under investigation, there are letters from all decades of the century, and at all times encoders are typically middle- or upper-middle class male adults. An important consequence of this is that the level of education and/or professional training exhibited in the letters is fairly consistent throughout the corpus. However, 19CSC also includes job applications and service offers encoded by lower-middle class men and women, whose level of education was lower. Here I will take into consideration lexis (i.e., the keywords conveying the concepts relating to mutual trust), syntax (i.e., the way in which epistemic modality and passive forms may convey certainty, objectivity and reliability, while deontic modality may convey trustworthiness and, again, reliability), and pragmatic moves aiming to reinforce positive politeness through (self-)appraisal, and therefore strengthening the business bonds between participants. In the conclusion I will highlight the interdependence of these elements, none of which may be said to be intrinsically more important than the others, although some are clearly more transparent from the semantic and pragmatic points of view. In this respect I intend to rely on the traits summarized by Spencer-­Oatey (2007: 650–651, Figure 1 and Table 2 respectively), on the basis of Schwartz (1992: 44) and Schwartz and Bardi (2001: 270). In this framework face issues are negotiated according to the value constructs that participants find most important in the circumstances: such value constructs are Power (i.e., authority), Achievement (i.e., success), Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-direction (i.e., freedom), Universalism (implying harmony), Benevolence (implying loyalty and honesty), Tradition, Conformity (i.e., “proper”, socially accepted behaviour) and Security. As we can see, all these concepts can have a considerable bearing on issues of face and positive or negative politeness moves. At the same time, however, we should not neglect the fact that these traits need to be discussed in a ­ diachronic perspective – while most value constructs are indeed universal, ­others, such as “hedonism” and “universalism”, cannot be expected to have ­applied in similar ways more than two hundred years ago, when social thought styles were quite different.

. It should be pointed out that in this case “keyword” is not meant in any quantitative sense, as the frequency patterns of certain lexical items do not necessarily correlate directly with their significance from the semantic and pragmatic point of view. It is in this latter sense, related to those of relevance and prominence, that the term is used.

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2.

The language of trust and confidence in nineteenth-century business letters

2.1

Lexis

Interesting points for discussion can be identified starting from the lexical items that convey trust and confidence. First of all, we may note that such vocabulary occurs in various contexts, employing a range of items that express quite specific and specialized meanings. Among these, we find several nouns, not all of which function exactly as synonyms of ‘confidence’. In banking and commercial exchanges, for instance, trust depends crucially on security, i.e., the goods or sums of money intended to guarantee the subject’s business, and – as a result – allow partners, bankers, etc. to consider him trustworthy; an example is given below: (1) Sir, Be pleased to open an account in the Banks Books at Leith with a Credit of one Thousand Pounds Sterling in name of Mr […] Wine Merchant Leith on the Security of his Bank of Scotland Stock, and to admit his operations thereon as usual  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 03.04.1826)

In other cases the reliability of the business partner is signalled through reference to certifications issued by authoritative third parties; in (2), for instance, Bank Directors accept to rely on the attestation of a Writer to the Signet, i.e., (in Scots legal terminology) a lawyer. Further on in the letter, we see that the idea of trust is conveyed by faith, in the sense of belief or in fact presupposition, expectation, or prediction – all meanings conveying epistemic modality for the expression of confidence, other instances of which will be discussed below: (2) The searches hitherto exhibited are certified by your Brother Mr Geo McClelland WS and on these, the Directors are willing to rely. But some

. In all quotations word, line and page breaks are omitted, except where it is deemed important to retain them; in such cases the symbols are <->, <#> and <###> respectively. Spelling is retained as in the original, including linked-up words. The names of the people mentioned in the letters may be replaced by [...] for reasons of privacy; for the same reason, names are replaced with qualifications where sources and dates are provided. While in this case personal names are unimportant, the social role being performed by the parties is instead highly significant to assess the social context in which the exchange takes place. . In the letter the standard abbreviation WS is used. This instance of terminological specificity is of course due to the specificity of the Scottish legal system itself, which – together with the church and education systems – is one of the main cultural elements distinguishing Scotland from England and Wales on historical grounds.



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­farther searches are still wanted. But on the faith that all shall be found right you may immediately let the old Houses No. 3 and 4 of your plan […] (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 27.12.1827)

In other cases, the related idea of confidence is encoded by the lexical item expressing the trust placed in the recipient’s course of action, in the expectation that this will be profitable for both parties. In (3) the concept is stressed by the addition of the adjective entire and by the equally boosted promise to be “wholly” guided by the recipient’s decisions: (3) We beg leave to refer to your decision and adjustment […] in connection with the various copartneries in which we were interested together for several years and as we have entire confidence in you we shall be wholly guided by the decision to which you come_  (Merchant to Lawyer, 07.07.1831)

In this letter the expression of trust is repeated three times: first the encoder states that they will rely on the recipient’s decision, then they promise to be guided by such a decision, precisely because they have confidence in the recipient. Such redundancy, far from being unnecessary, aims to persuade the recipient of the truthfulness of the encoder’s stance. A simpler statement like “you can do as you wish” would convey the same meaning, strictly speaking; but it would be inappropriate from the pragmatic point of view, because its very brevity might imply a certain lack of interest, which is of course face-threatening. However, as mentioned above, face-threatening speech acts may need to be considered in a broader sense than in the typical dyadic ways traditionally found in the literature, as third-parties may be involved (see Spencer-Oatey 2007: 646, 653). For instance, when advice is sought, trust in the recipient or their representatives is shown by the idea of guidance, as this attributes authoritativeness to the recipient, and shows that the encoder trusts them. When this concerns third parties, such as in (4), the letter indicates how the participants are to proceed, so that such trust is formally notified: (4) as the intention ofboth parties, as I understand is, to be guided by the advice which the two Gentlemen above mentioned may give, it would beas well to have this expressed previously, in case of accident. I therefore enclose ashort memm. to this effect ofwhich if you approve you can return itto me, and I shall get it signed by my Father, when he returns from the north Journey where he atpresentis –  (Merchant to Manager of Insurance Company, 13.07.1831)

In this example we see that face-work relates to identity and self-representation issues not just in face-to-face, two-party interactions, but also when (temporarily) (absent) third parties are involved. The attention given to such apparently distant

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participants, not directly contributing to the exchange, shows the encoder’s will to consider all the subjects involved, thus enhancing his identity as a careful and unselfish business subject, and showing concern for the face claims of the group, rather than the individual. The next examples concern cases in which a request may be granted, if the recipient agrees to provide security (as indicated above); in these cases, however, the presupposed agreement is expressed by the phrase “on/in the understanding that”. This has the same illocutionary force as “on condition that”, but reference to a shared mental process attributes responsibility to the recipient and implies trust in the coincidence of results that this process will bring about. Such results will of course be as expected by the encoder – see (5a) and (5b): (5) a. b. 

I have submitted to the Directors your letter of 11 inst + they desire me to say that so far as the mere question of delay is concerned, they have no difficulty in at once acceding to your proposal for spreading over three or four years the payment of the sums due by you under the Cash credit bond of Messrs […] + Sons to the Bank, on the understanding that you assign in security a Policy of Insurance on your life to a correspond- ing amount  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Client, 28.02.1861) The Directors have allowed this payment in the understanding that the past due Bill D 3588 Jas Kerr on John Kerr and James Smith 24 Nov 1825 at 4 & for £395 – 2 shall be paid out of the Deposit money before mentioned unless otherwise retired (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 12.09.1826)

As a matter of fact, uses of trust as a noun are rather infrequent; it is more typically found as a verb expressing epistemic or deontic modality, although there is also one instance in which it occurs as a noun: the recipient is actually invited to be vigilant and not expect the new accountant to carry out unrequired tasks: (6) Mr […] is appointed by the Court of Directors to be the Banks Dumfries Accountant and has given his oath of Office accordingly: and goes to day to Dumfries to enter on Office. He will be introduced to you by the Banks Inspector now at Dumfries. You will be responsible for Mr […] in terms of your Bond: but you are not desired to put any Trust in him on the contrary, your vigilance is expected, that he do his own Office; and that he do not yours  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 17.07.1827)

In this case, we have a two-tier system of trust – one involving the encoder and the recipient, the other involving the recipient and the third party mentioned in the text. The encoder trusts the recipient not to trust the third party, which indicates how complex situations (and their verbal codification) may become, depending



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on the different levels of authority pertaining to each interactional/social identity (see Spencer-Oatey 2007: 642). The encoder has authority over the recipient, who – in turn – has authority over the third party. Such authority is reflected in the level of accountability expected from their respective recipients.

2.2 Syntax If we focus on syntax, we see that trust is typically associated with an idea of reliability that derives from objectivity. Encoders often convey such objectivity by means of passive forms to show that what is stated is not the encoder’s arbitrary, possibly interested, perception, but corresponds to factual reality. When the encoder’s subjective points of view are conveyed, epistemic modality is employed, in order to signal a greater or lesser degree of certainty, depending on the pragmatic aim of the encoder. On the other hand, deontic modality may be employed to express polite requests, thus attributing reliability to the recipient. This means that different linguistic strategies are selected, depending on who is presented as reliable, or on whom confidence is put. Various instances of the different cases will be discussed below. When passive forms occur in requests, they indicate objectivity and indeed universality of the dispositions conveyed – who exactly will carry out the actions indicated in the message is irrelevant: what matters is that the actions will (or will not) take place. In the example below, the encoder directs the recipient as to the situation concerning a certain client. The encoder invites the recipient to comply with these directions quite directly, with imperative forms and adverbs frequently occurring in legal discourse, such as duly, sufficiently, rightly and immediately: (7) Sir # Concerning […] Esqr of Barscobe bound by Bonds and Bills of your Agency and of the Dumfries Agency […] Heritable Bond of Credit and Disposition under reversion to be duly executed by said […] before sufficient witnesses to be sufficiently named and designed by sufficient designations and thus the Deed to be rightly completed and thereon Sasine to be immediately taken (the Instrument will be sent to you in a day or two) But no account under this Bond of Credit is to be opened nor drawn on nor debited without special permission from this office  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 05.02.1827)

In this case trust is not foregrounded as far as the recipient is concerned; instead, he is expected to trust the encoder’s greater competence (and authority on these issues). The deontic value of the proposition is thus expressed by means of strategies that mainly rely on voice.

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If we now turn to more typical strategies encoding modality, we find that – as is often the case with modal verbs – interesting instances of polysemy and ambiguity may be observed. In (8) below, for instance, the verb trust may mean both think (thus conveying epistemic modality) and – more probably – hope, or in fact wish (thus conveying deontic modality): (8) I have submitted to the Directors the question as to a retired allowance and have to acquaint you that on account of your long service they are disposed to allow you to retire on three fourths of your salary […] It is not the practice of the Bank in any case to give the full salary and I trust that what is now proposed may be satisfactory to you  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Former Employee, 23.07.1840)

The statement at the end of the letter thus proves conclusive, and does not seem to admit disagreement, unless a controversy is started. Although it is modalized, the matrix verb expresses the encoder’s confidence that the matter is now settled. Opinion, whether of the encoder or the recipient, is typically conveyed by the modal auxiliary may, verbs like think and presume, and adverbs like probably; the example below is quite paradigmatic in that respect, although it is as polysemic as the preceding one: (9) probably you may think it better to come into Edinr., and arrange about the transferrence of the tea, which we propose should be done at the sight of John Abel Smith Esq and which we presume is already fully insured.  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Client, 11.09.1840)

On the surface, the opening statement indicates what the encoder imagines to be the recipient’s opinion on the opportunity to go to Edinburgh and carry out his business in person. However, it could in fact be interpreted as an invitation to do so – the illocutionary force would therefore be deontic, despite clearly epistemic phrasing. The recipient is expected (i.e., trusted) to do what is appropriate from the encoder’s point of view. As a matter of fact, deontic modality plays a crucial role in business exchanges, and is closely connected with the concept of trust. For instance, the encoder’s trust in the recipient emerges when the former gives fairly clear indications as to the latter’s expected course of action. In these cases deontic modality expresses polite requests, though often with relatively little opportunity for diverging solutions. In the quotation below the encoder appears to give a certain degree of freedom to the recipient, but also recommends the avoidance of “needless forbearance” – a vague expression that the recipient may (or perhaps should) interpret as a fairly direct invitation to avoid delay. As above, trust coincides with the expectation that the encoder’s recommendations will be followed.



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(10) The Directors do not allow any dispensation […] But whether to do or forbear immediate diligence, the Directors leave meanwhile to you: recommending to you not to give needless forbearance  (Bank of Scotland Secretary to Agent, 20.12.1826)

In other cases the encoder promises to carry out the required action, i.e., expresses deontic modality, in such a way as to invite trust from the recipient. An example is given in (11) below, in which “you may depend” stresses the reliability of the encoder, who encourages the recipient to expect the required results within a very specific time span. This is also emphasized by the fact that the sentence is preceded by a reference to unexpected “events” over which the encoder had no control, which takes responsibility away from his volition, and prevents the recipient’s attribution of blame. (11) Events, which I could not foresee nor controul, have hitherto prevented me, from forwarding to you the Notice regarding […]. You may depend on its being forwarded however, in ten days, from this date __  (Rev.d WB to Publisher, 12.09.1807)

2.3 Politeness strategies In business exchanges positive politeness is extremely important for the maintenance of relationships in which the sense of sharing interests and goals is the basis upon which the link is formed. In these cases trust and reliability are conveyed by means of (self-) evaluative elements that encourage the participants’ perception of a positive image. For instance, when requests are made, encoders may stress the positive face of the recipient, as in the example below, in which complying with the request is attributed to the “goodness” of the recipient: (12) I request you will have the goodness immediately to propose new Security to the Bank for the Cash Account here in your name instead of the late Mr […].  (Bank of Scotland Manager to Client, 07.09.1840)

In the next example, the encoder asks for information, provides guidance on how to obtain it, but then attributes responsibility to the recipient as to what steps should be taken, thus expressing trust and confidence, and (modestly) admitting some ignorance of the complete circumstances in which the recipient operates – in this case, what parties may be consulted:

. On accepting or attributing blame to self, recipient or third parties see Dossena (2008).

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(13) By looking back upon your Bill negotiation book you could easily find some party in yourplace on whom they have been accustomed to draw; and if you could Speak to him confidentially, you might ask to see, from the backs of his recent Acceptances to the Campbells, what Bank or Banks they passed through I beg however to leave it entirely to yourself to do what may appear to you necessary to help us out of our difficulty, as a good deal must dipened upon the character of the parties you have access to.  (Bank of Scotland Manager to Client, 10.08.1838)

Similarly, trust in the recipient’s business skills is conveyed through moves that enhance positive face when the encoder requires the termination of a certain negotiation or operation. In (14), for instance, the encoder presents his opinion, and then invites the recipient to follow a certain course of action “if he thinks it right” – that is, if his own opinion leads him to that decision: an addition aimed to redress any threat to negative face: (14) With regard to Mr […]’s proposal, unless circumstances enable you to report favorably, the negotiation may be considered at an end. From all I have seen I do not think the Bank could advance beyond the present burdens other £ 200 at the very utmost. […]. Now you might ascertain what Mr […]’s ideas are upon the subject, and if they do not extend beyond the sum named, if you think it right you may forward the proposal in the regular way, with valuations. […]  (Bank of Scotland Manager to Client, 13.09.1838)

Positive face is also enhanced when evaluation is given in letters of reference. In (15), for instance, the recipient as a trusted employee is portrayed through reference to how well and accurately he performed his tasks; the encoder then describes his expectations of equally good performance in a new situation: (15) In compliance with your request Ihave much pleasure in stating that you discharged in a most satisfactory manner the duties of Teller + Accountant at the Agency of the Bank of Scotland at Stonehaven. for several years – and from the opportunities Ihave had of observing the knowledge which you possessed of the Agent’s department ofthat Branch, I am of opinion that your ability + qualifications for taking a similar management are ofthe highest order. And Ihave every confidence that you would conduct aBank Agency with great prudence and caution. I consider + esteem you a gentleman of high honor and integrity and I am confident that in whatever situation you may be placed. you will add the most upright conduct to the faithful + honest discharge of your duty  (Bank of Scotland Inspector of Branches to Former Employee, 06.06.1840)



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As we can see, positive evaluation is boosted by adjectives in the superlative form (most satisfactory, highest, most upright), and by nouns preceded by qualifiers that extend the meaning or emphasize the positive connotation of the noun (every confidence, great prudence and caution, high honor and integrity, whatever situation, upright conduct, faithful + honest discharge of duty). Throughout the text content keywords like duty, honesty, prudence, caution, knowledge, ability, qualifications, honor and integrity outline the profile of the ideal teller and accountant – a profile to which the recipient is said to correspond in full. Positive evaluation of previous work may also be the grounds upon which the business relationship develops and heads for new accomplishments. The next example is almost flattering, were it not for the fact that the encoders also refer to considerations pertaining to their own interest, i.e., the lesser risk involved in a new project with a successful partner: (16) Your reputation is now so firmly established that a measure of success is a certainty & we have accordingly encreased upon former terms in consideration of the lesser risk we run. That a great success will be obtained we feel hopeful […] We trust that this new undertaking may prove a fresh bond between us & should there be any points in our proposal which you would like altered we will gladly do what we can to meet your wishes.  (Publisher to Author, 26.08.1852)

The conclusion stresses the encoder’s wish to meet the recipient’s requirements, thus attributing greater authority to the latter, but also within limits – the encoder refers to what they “can do”, i.e., expresses dynamic modality, not deontic, lest any idea of insufficient volition to accommodate the recipient’s needs should transpire and threaten his positive face (see Dossena 2006a). This is in fact emblematic of the difficult position in which encoders typically find themselves, where they need to balance modesty and positive self-evaluation, in order to construct an identity that the business partner will find acceptable, because it will not threaten his positive or negative face. We find instances of modesty in such phrases as “if my memory does not deceive me” or “to the best of my knowledge and belief ”, which help the encoder present his point of view on the basis of what he remembers/knows/thinks, but hedges the statement with a suggestion that such recollections/knowledge/beliefs may not be perfect. Another example is given below, in which the encoder evaluates the product and expresses his hope that the recipient will agree with his positive assessment, but hedges this with the addition of a modal auxiliary indicating epistemic (or perhaps even dynamic?) possibility:

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(17) I hope […] that you may agree with me in thinking the Copy successful_  (Artist to Client, 15.07.1853)

If it is meant to signal reliability, self-evaluation can be more assertive. In (18a) and (18b), for instance, the adverb carefully, the adjective earnest and the combination adverb + adjective every possible intend to reassure the recipient as to the encoder’s good will. It should be noted that the letter from which both examples are taken is marked as “private” and concerns a case of potential competition between the publisher’s activities and those of the encoder, whose society had republished some texts of a certain author, so it was crucial that the danger of legal action should be pre-empted: (18) a. b. 

Your letter to Mr Bonar will be laid before the Committee & carefully attended to. your suggestion will receive our earnest consideration And I venture to say, on the part of the committee, that every possible deference will be paid to it, should it appear that we cannot satisfy you on the subject  (Gentleman to Publisher, 12.10.1844)

Nor is it unusual for encoders to express solidarity, therefore stressing positive face, when mutual problems are discussed. In (19a), from the same letter as above, the encoder conveys empathy and gratitude, two feelings that reinforce the link between participants: (19) a. I am as much vexed by the injudicious + unfair advocacy of our plan, by unwise friends, as I am obliged to you for defending us against unreason- able opposition.

The letter then continues with a report on external (positive) evaluations that are meant to present the encoder as reliable and trustworthy. Indeed, the paragraph closes with an appeal to the recipient not to entertain different perceptions that might damage his reputation – see (19b): (19) b.

We have received the most handsome + liberal treatment from the Trade generally, who, for the most part, are inclined to put a favourable con- struction on our plan, + to believe, with us, that so far from injuring the trade, it will create a new taste + demand for the best kind of literature, which will greatly exceed our supply. We are busy making arrangements as to agency +c + I would fain hope we shall be able to announce, speedily, such a plan, on that head, as well as on the other, as will show that we are really anxious to carry all our worthy Booksellers + Publishers along with us, + interest them in this national undertaking. Meanwhile let me hope that you will not hastily



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suspect me, or the Committee, of an intention to break faith, or depart from our pledges.  (Gentleman to Publisher, 12.10.1844)

Positive self-evaluation is typical of promotional discourse; however, in (20) we come across an instance in which the encoder accepts a contract, and accurately rehearses the requirements he will be expected to meet. In this case, self-evaluation does not derive from the need to persuade the recipient of the encoder’s good qualities, but from the need to signal acceptance of the recipient’s expectations concerning results and standard of quality: (20) Gentlemen, # I hereby agree and engage to furnish you with full and complete original copies of […] – And I engage further to do my utmost to procure for you unpublished or scarce Burns Songs, and Letters by Burns, and such other materials as may be deemed interesting and useful in editing your Edition of Burns’ works._ […] And for the more speedy furtherance of your more immediate designs, I also hereby agree to repair to Glasgow for the purpose of putting myself in more direct and immediate communication with those who have the charge of editing and printing your edition of Burns, and that I may be enabled to complete my contributions as above specified within one month form this date, which I hereby engage to do_ All which I do in consideration of the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, to be paid to me by you on performance as above, and which I hereby declare to be the full price and remuneration for the same._ (Author to Publisher, 01.07.1834)

The encoder thus reinforces his identity as a serious and trustworthy business partner. He talks about “full and complete original copies, speedy furtherance of the recipient’s designs”, and promises to do “his utmost”, to the point of going to Glasgow to ensure “direct and immediate communication” with relevant third parties. This involves remuneration, of course, but the recipients’ interests (i.e., their positive face) are foregrounded throughout the text, especially owing to ­adjectives that stress completeness, accuracy and speed – a requirement that seems to have become increasingly important in business contexts.

. On the other hand, job offers from prospective contractors were found to be quite direct and straightforward, without instances of self-evaluation for promotional purposes, except for the case of one contractor who provided an accurate description of the kind of materials he would employ – see Dossena (2006b: 182–185). An early instance of a letter containing promotional discourse, in that it advertises the opportunities to acquire goods (in this case wine) at what is claimed to be reasonable prices is discussed by Dossena (2008: 242). . On propriety in business correspondence see also Dossena (forthcoming).

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3.

Appraisal and the link between trust and authority

As trust presupposes the positive assessment of the participants’ qualities, it is indispensable in all kinds of interaction. My aim was to identify the major strategies employed in business interaction, in order to convey an image of trustworthiness and reliability and to attest one’s own trust in the other. It may be the encoder signalling his trust to the recipient, or inviting the recipient to trust him – either way, what is particularly important is the way in which (self-)evaluation contributes to the definition of this respected identity. This, in turn, relates to concepts of authority, power and solidarity, as trusting a partner means giving up some of one’s own independence, in order to be guided by the other’s choices. While this could pose a threat to one’s negative face, it in fact reinforces positive face, as trust leads to co-participation and cooperation. On the basis of the observations conducted on 19CSC, it is now possible to see what basic patterns can be outlined as far as appraisal and trust are concerned, and how these may relate to a concept of authority. To that end, it may be useful to see how stance is conveyed by means of linguistic tools. In the instances provided by 19CSC it was possible to observe ­lexis, syntax and pragmatic moves aiming to safeguard both parties’ positive face, though all contribute in different ways. An analysis of these strategies in terms of evaluation theories is therefore useful. While Hunston and Thompson (2000) may provide a general background to the main issues, the approach outlined by ­Martin and White (2005) may help us shed light on what items contributed more to the definition of the trusted business partner in late modern Scotland – ­whether it was Affect, Judgement or Appreciation, that is, the categories by means of which Attitude is expressed in Appraisal theory. If we focus on the items highlighted in the examples to which reference is made in this contribution, we see that various elements may co-occur. In the letter of reference, for instance, Judgement seems to be dominant – as pointed out, the encoder mentions honesty, loyalty, prudence, caution, honor and integrity, i.e., all traits emphasizing the moral qualities of the subject. This is also the case when participants refer to the “goodness” of one of the parties when they are asked to comply with some request. Affect, instead, is conveyed less frequently, if stereotypical, progressively grammaticalized phrases like I am pleased to or Be pleased to are excepted.10 Appreciation, on the other hand, characterizes the texts in which participants discuss products and negotiations, for instance when reference is made to “speedy furtherance” of one of the participants’ interests.

10. On this point see Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Faya Cerqueiro (2007).



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In general, then, Judgement appears to play a leading role in the expression of trust and confidence in 19CSC texts. This implies an asymmetrical power relationship between the subject who has the authority to judge, and the participant whose character, or performance, or products are judged. Such power, on the other hand, is not fixed, but can fluctuate for pragmatic purposes, in the same way as authority does. In the case of self-evaluation, for instance, subjects balance selfpraise and modesty, granting themselves authority to carry out the assessment, but mitigate the face threat with expressions of epistemicity, hedges, and elements that stress how the (positive) evaluation is in fact in favour of the recipient, who may profit from a business relationship with such a reliable partner (for instance, acquiring valuable products at reasonable prices and/or obtaining services speedily and efficiently).

4.

Concluding remarks

The expression of trust and confidence and the appeal for this from the interlocutor are typically meant to reinforce positive face. However, when this expression supports directive speech acts, whether (indirect) orders or requests, the encoder expresses positive stance in order to minimize the threat to the recipient’s negative face. Like in a mirror maze, changing perspectives on subjects and their pragmatic aims reveals a continual dynamic negotiation of social roles, identity and participant relationships. In the end, who evaluates what, for what purposes, and in what ways, is a function of the strategies employed for the creation and maintenance of significant and successful business relationships. Trust may be invited or expressed more or less redundantly, and encoders may convey their power and authority more or less explicitly, but recipients and their face needs remain the key defining factor dictating linguistic choices. Face claims and the linguistic strategies associated with their accommodation appear to vary in relation to the various levels at which self-representation itself may vary – i.e., at the individual, interpersonal and group levels, though of course the types of self-representation offered at these three levels are normally consistent with each other, as dramatic discrepancies would lead to a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario. Even so, strategies of positive politeness may be more important at the interpersonal level, while at the personal level negative politeness may play a more important role. Finally, at the group level, identity may be seen to be a function of the social cohesion binding participants and their activities – an aim for the achievement of which appropriate linguistic choices are indispensable.

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References Brown, Penelope and Levinson Stephen C. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. 2005. “‘I perceive, my dear friend, by your letter of the 20th inst that you are decided on entering upon the career of commerce’: Nineteenth-century business correspondence.” In Genre Variation in Business Letters, Paul Gillaerts and Maurizio Gotti (eds), 125–146. Bern: Peter Lang. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. 2006. “‘Conduct yourself towards all persons on every occasion with civility and in a wise and prudent manner; this will render you esteemed’: Stance features in nineteenth-century business letters.” In Dossena and Fitzmaurice (eds), 153–174. Dossena, Marina. 2004. “Towards a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish correspondence.” Linguistica e Filologia 18: 195–214. Dossena, Marina. 2006a. “Stance and authority in nineteenth-century bank correspondence: A case study.” In Dossena and Fitzmaurice (eds), 175–192. Dossena, Marina. 2006b. “Forms of self-representation in nineteenth-century business letters.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English, Marina Dossena and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 173–190. Bern: Peter Lang. Dossena, Marina. 2008. “‘We beg leave to refer to your decision’: Pragmatic traits of nineteenth-century business correspondence.” In Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data, Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds), 235–255. Bern: Peter Lang. Dossena, Marina. Forthcoming. “‘Be pleased to report expressly’: The development of public style English in nineteenth-century business and official correspondence.” In Eighteenth Century English: Ideology and Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dossena, Marina and Fitzmaurice, Susan M. (eds). 2006. Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations. Bern: Peter Lang. Dury, Richard. 2006. “A corpus of nineteenth-century business correspondence: Methodology of transcription.” In Dossena and Fitzmaurice (eds), 193–205. Grice, Paul H. 1975. “Logic and conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds). New York: Academic Press. [Reprint: 1989. In Studies in the Way of Words, Paul H. Grice (ed.), 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] Hunston, Susan and Thompson, Geoff (eds). 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kohnen, Thomas. 2007. “Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis.” In Methods in Historical Pragmatics, Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 139–166. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Martin, James R. and White, Peter R. R. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwartz, Shalom H. 1992. “Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in twenty countries.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 25, Mark P. Zanna (ed.), 1–65. San Diego: Academic Press.



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Schwartz, Shalom H. and Bardi, Anat. 2001. “Value hierarchies across cultures: Take a similarities perspective.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32 (3): 268–290. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2007. “Theories of identity and the analysis of face.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 639–656. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and Faya Cerqueiro, Fátima. 2007. “Saying ‘please’ in eigh­ teenth- and nineteenth-century English.” In ‘Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso and Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds), 421–444. Bern: Peter Lang. White, Peter R. R. 2007. “Appraisal.” In Handbook of Pragmatics Online, Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds), s.v. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. http://www.benjamins. com/online/hop, accessed 28 June 2008.

Good-natured fellows and poor mothers Defining social roles in British  nineteenth-century children’s literature Hanna Andersdotter Sveen Södertörn University

The present paper is a corpus-based study which examines social roles as constructed in British nineteenth-century children’s literature. Both gender roles overall as well as the more specific roles of mother and father are investigated. The main approach is to systematically study adjectival descriptions of characters both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to find recurring patterns of description that function as part of defining a social role. The method of classification is primarily through semantic domains. The study shows that the female social role is defined as involving few mental qualities, whereas a pleasant appearance is important. In contrast, social status and positive mental characteristics are important defining factors for the male social role.

1.

Introduction

The twofold nature of language practices as both reflecting and constructing social roles is central to the present paper. The sub-period of Late Modern English investigated is the second half of the nineteenth century, and the specific genre under scrutiny is children’s literature. The language of nineteenth-century children’s literature is an interesting object of study, presenting two levels of ideological coding. First of all, language practices in a particular time period are believed to mirror ideologies prevalent in society at that time. Second, the genre of children’s literature (especially in the nineteenth century) also has the extra element of the authors trying to influence their readers by representing ideologies that were deemed correct and important by their contemporaries (Richards 1989). Such influence illustrates the unequal relationship between readers (children) and writers (adults). The imbalance in power between adults and children is a key issue in the study of children’s

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­literature, and the fact that adults produce literature for a group that they control is believed to affect the literature in profound ways (see e.g. Hunt 1988). Consequently, the language practices found in nineteenth-century children’s literature are thought both to reflect ideologies in society, as well as to aim at influencing the next generation. Ideologies as conveyed in a text include, for instance, the construction of social roles. The way the authors choose to construct their fictional characters is an effort to present a social role available to the readers, either as a role model or as a cautionary example. Fairclough defines ideologies as assumptions that, “through the recurrence of ordinary, familiar ways of behaving”, legitimize the existing power relationships (1989: 2). “Recurring ways of behaving” can also be applied to language practices: if the same qualities are consistently attributed to a category of characters (such as boys, or mothers), readers will eventually perceive these features as typical for the category. In this way they become part of the represented social role. For the purpose of the present paper, a distinction between external and internal language practices is proposed. Internal language practices relate to the language use of the individual, and how that use works to define the social role of the individual. External language practices, by contrast, refer to language practices outside the individual, which still aim at forming the individual’s social role, or at offering a variety of ready-made social roles from which the individual can choose. External language practices (among others involving those of authors of children’s literature) also build and index social roles. To put it simply, language is used by someone else (the author) to construct a social role available as a model for the readers of the text. In contrast, internal language practices mean that the user of language (speaker/writer) defines his or her own social role, and may even move between several roles, depending on the social context, for instance (see e.g. Palander-Collin and Nevala, and Nurmi and Pahta in this volume). The idea that social roles are dynamic is central to the study of language and gender. The dynamic or social constructionist approach to language and gender stresses the point that gender is constructed in a social context (see e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Coates 2004). In other words, gender is not a given, but a role which we perform, for instance by using language. A range of masculinities and femininities is available to a user at any given point in time, and by positioning ourselves among these we are doing gender instead of being gender. Consequently, gender is also considered a social role, a dynamic one which we create and perform in every utterance. This definition of gender as socially constructed concerns primarily internal language practices. Nevertheless, the construction of gender also takes place when someone else uses language to create a gendered role, by mapping features as typically male or female



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by attributing them to either male or female characters. This external language practice can be both intentional on the part of the writer – enforcing differences between female and male characters, in order to construct desirable gendered social roles – or unintentional, thus reflecting the more implicit assumptions about gender ­prevalent in society. In the present study I will examine firstly gendered social roles as constructed by the use of adjectival descriptions. I will also see if a similar analysis of adjectival descriptions of adult and child characters will reveal anything about these social roles. Finally, I will pursue a more in-depth study of the social roles of parents, as portrayed in British nineteenth-century children’s literature.

2.

Material

The material investigated for the present study consists of a small corpus of British nineteenth-century children’s literature (the Victorian Corpus). The corpus comprises 95,000 words from ten different texts, five written by female authors, intended primarily for female readers, and five texts written by male authors, intended primarily for male readers. The books seem to have been widely read, judging for instance from Salmon’s (1888) reader survey (as reported in Knowles and Malmkjaer 1996), but also from their inclusion in literary handbooks and anthologies. The texts included represent the following popular sub-genres of children’s literature in the Victorian period: school stories and adventure stories (typically male genres); domestic dramas and evangelical tales (typically female genres) (see Townsend 1990). Both school stories and adventure stories take place away from home (at a boarding school or on a desert island, for instance). Domestic dramas, on the other hand, deal with life in the private sphere: in families and among neighbours for instance. Evangelical tales have an explicit mission of teaching children how to be good Christians. Nevertheless, the texts share features such as treating issues of growing up, and family relations, often with adventure elements included. As for other aspects of Victorian society, gender was an important defining factor regarding the production and classification of children’s books (see e.g. Townsend 1990). However, as pointed out by Yonge (1887), girls often read books intended for boys, and, in Yonge’s opinion, boys should also be encouraged to read texts for girls as part of their education (see Marquis 1999: 55; Richards 1989: 4). The texts were published between 1841 and 1869, the bulk of them in the 1850s. I have chosen to study children’s literature from this period, since the middle of the nineteenth century has been put forward as a breaking point for modern children’s literature (Briggs and Butts 1995: 130). A new kind of children’s ­fiction

214 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

was now being published, where the didactic elements were less prominent, and reading for entertainment and pleasure was encouraged.

3.

Method

The part of speech which is normally associated with labelling social roles is the noun – doctor, patient, husband, wife, traitor, hero, etc. However, to describe what attributes we normally associate with a labelled social role, adjectives are primary. The hallmark function of adjectives is to describe nouns, that is, to attribute qualities to the referents of the nouns (cf. Culpeper 2001: 105). In this way, adjectives are crucial in the linguistic construction of social roles. The nouns that are of special relevance for social roles in the present context are central terms for people, and kinship terms (cf. Magnusson 1996; Wallin-Ashcroft 2000; Norberg 2002). According to Persson (1990: 36–37), central terms are those that define a person according to the semantic dimensions of gender and age (see also Holmes and Sigley 2002; Curzan 2003: 133–179; Eckert and McConell-Ginet 2003: 242–253 for more in-depth studies of central terms). Kinship terms, especially terms for members of the immediate family, are significant in children’s literature, since family is an important concept in a child’s life. The starting-point was to identify the most frequent central and kinship terms in the material. While studying a list of the 500 most frequent words in the corpus I discovered that, in addition to central and kinship terms, epicene terms were also frequent. Epicene terms are gender-neutral terms for people, such as person or creature, and when the gender of the referent to these terms could be identified from the context, instances of these terms modified by adjectives were also included in the study. In addition, I decided to study adjectives used to describe proper names and gendered personal pronouns. The aim was to provide a fuller picture of adjectival descriptions by including all frequent terms referring to characters that were defined according to gender. The next step was to study the concordance lists for selected terms manually to be able to extract those instances where the terms were described by adjectives. As previously mentioned, the terms included in the study were selected on the basis of their frequency. However, it was not necessarily so that a term frequent in the corpus was also frequently described by an adjective. I included adjectives describing terms in four different functions: attributive, predicative, postpositive, and as a predicative adjunct (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 529). Attributive adjectives function as premodifiers in a noun phrase (a hungry woman), and a postpositive adjective function as a postmodifier in a noun phrase (the person elect). An adjective in predicative function occurs as a predicative complement in



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 215

a clause (the father was hungry). Finally, an adjective functioning as a predicative adjunct has a freer position in the clause; example (1) illustrates an instance with several descriptions where the adjectives functioning as predicative adjuncts have been highlighted. For a more thorough discussion of adjectival functions and criteria, see Sveen (2005: 49–53). (1) She was a little woman, with that smooth pleasant plumpness that seems to belong to perfect content and serenity, her complexion fair and youthful, her face and figure very pretty, and full of quiet grace and refinement, and her whole air and expression denoting a serene, unruffled, affectionate happiness, yet with much authority in her mildness – warm and open in her own family, but reserved beyond it, and shrinking from general society.  (The Daisy Chain)

In order to semantically classify the data, the adjectival descriptions in my material were distinguished as belonging to seven different semantic domains, depending on which property they denoted. The method of classification was based on Hene (1984; see also Bäcklund 2006), and sometimes included subfields within the domains. The domains were: 1. Age (e.g. young); 2. Appearance, with the subfields looks (e.g. pretty) and bodily constitution (e.g. tall); 3. Mental Property, with the subfields emotions (e.g. happy), characteristics (e.g. good-natured) and intelligence (e.g. wise); 4. Physical State (e.g. hungry, dead, or blind); 5. Attitude, which accommodates adjectives that “are essentially non-descriptive, and rather denote a general evaluation of the person” (Sveen 2005: 56), (e.g. poor in the sense of commiseration); 6. Situation, which includes mainly classifying adjectives (e.g. new) and especially those denoting position in society, (e.g. powerful, married, rich); 7. Sociability, which describes how characters behave or interact together with other characters (e.g. obedient, kind). A distinction was made between interpersonal domains, which focus on properties pertaining to characters in relation to other characters (Attitude, ­Situation and Sociability), and intrapersonal domains, which focus on properties that are constructed so as to be perceived as more integral parts of characters, and not as much constructed in the characters’ social context (cf. Hene 1984 and ­Bäcklund 2006).

216 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

4.

Findings

4.1

Gender roles

In the discussion of findings I will first account for findings pertaining to adjectival descriptions of male and female characters overall. This part is based on my PhD project, presented in Sveen (2005). The construction of gender roles takes place by attributing certain features to male and female characters. On the textual level, that is, as language practice, this means that adjectives are used to describe nouns, names and pronouns referring to characters. In doing so, the authors, consciously or unconsciously, define what qualities are considered typical or important for men and women, boys and girls. Used in the construction of gendered characters, the language practices of the authors index social gender roles available to their readers. As explained in Section 3, in order to distinguish between the different kinds of attributes assigned to female and male characters, I grouped the descriptions into semantic domains. The distribution of adjectives across semantic domains will be discussed shortly, but first a brief account of the overall figures. In total, 858 adjectives describing terms referring to female and male characters were found. The majority of these adjectives (54%) described female characters (461 descriptions of female characters versus 397 descriptions of male ones). The reason for the female predominance is the many collocations involving terms for female characters, such as old woman and little girl. In such collocations, the adjectives have almost lost their descriptive value, and have instead become an integral part of the expression overall. The distribution of descriptions over semantic domains for male and female characters is shown in Table 1 and Figure 1, respectively. As shown, the distribution for female and male characters is rather different. Table 1.  Distribution of adjective phrases across semantic domains for female and male characters (from Sveen 2005: 87) Female

%

Male

%

Age Appearance Mental Property Physical State Attitude Situation Sociability

145   68   75   29   47   33   64

31 15 16  6 10  7 14

  61   36 131   33   31   52   53

15  9 33  8  8 13 13

Total

461

99

397

99



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 217

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Figure 1.  Distribution of adjective phrases across semantic domains for female and male characters (from Sveen 2005: 88)

The differences are greatest in the domains Age, Appearance, Mental Property and Situation. In the domain of Age, female characters score high, almost twice as high as male characters, with 31% versus 15%. The reason female characters are so often defined by adjectives describing age is the use of collocations such as young lady (26 instances) and little girl (30 instances) to refer to the characters. The use of collocations signals that the property has become part of the referring expression, rather than assigning attributes to the referent. Thus, the social role of a lady more or less entails that she is young, and for the social role of girl, the normal state of things is that she is little. Little is one of the most frequent adjectives describing characters overall in the material, but most of all it occurs with girl (30 of 74 instances; compare with the seven instances of little boy). Little has been classified as primarily denoting age and not size of character when it describes children (e.g. boy and girl). However, for instance little in the phrase “the little old lady overtheway”, which is a character in Mrs Overtheway’s Remembrances (Ewing 1869), was classified as describing size and not age. Further, female characters score high in the domain Appearance with almost twice as many adjectives as male characters: 15% compared to 9%. This finding ties in well with the traditional social role of women and girls, who are supposed to be more preoccupied with appearance than the traditional male individual. An inclination of describing the appearance of female characters, but not of male characters to the same extent, can then be thought to reflect this social convention. The domain Appearance was subdivided into Bodily Constitution and Looks. The adjectives describing bodily constitution for male characters focused on the large

218 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

side, while the adjectives describing female characters denote more attributes on the small side; see (2) and (3). (2) He was a very tall, large-made man quite noted all round the country for his strength, – the best rider and cricketer to be found for miles.  (Ursula) (3) She was a child, it must be remembered, or little more than one; but though very small, she was very graceful.  (Peter the Whaler)

However, it is the sub-domain Looks where the greatest differences are found, both quantitative and qualitative ones. Only 17 adjectives described male characters, while 44 describe female characters. The male adjectives convey a more neutral impression, very often describing inner qualities and emotions, with the help of a compound adjective ending in -looking (kind-looking, solemn-looking). In contrast, an overwhelming majority of the adjectives describing female characters denote good looks (attractive, blooming; see also (4)). (4) Flora had greater regularity of feature, and was fast becoming a very pretty girl, while Mary and Harry could not boast of much beauty, but were stout sturdy pictures of health;  (The Daisy Chain)

Another striking difference was found in the Mental Property domain, where adjectives denoting mental or intellectual qualities were rarely attributed to female characters (16% compared to 33% for male characters). This suggests that mental qualities were not considered as important to the social role of “female” as to the social role of “male” in nineteenth-century children’s fiction. In other words, the female social role as portrayed in nineteenth-century children’s literature does not entail much mental activity. However, an interesting result was found by carrying out a complementary study of part descriptions referring to characters (i.e., nouns referring to parts of people, such as mind or hand, that were described by adjectives, such as inquiring mind or ministering hand). This complementary study showed that the most frequent kind of part descriptions referred to mental qualities, both for male and female characters (25% and 21%, respectively); see Sveen (2005: 149). Mental qualities were not only attributed to abstract body parts such as mind or manner, but also to concrete ones such as eyes and face. Two examples are provided in (5) and (6), respectively, where the adjectives denoting mental qualities are highlighted. (5) He had a frank open face, bright intelligent fearless eyes, and a very taking voice and manner.  (Eric) (6) She was beautifully fair, with blue, truthful eyes, in which it was impossible guile could ever find a dwelling-place.  (Peter the Whaler)



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 219

Consequently, when considering both overall and part descriptions, the number of mental qualities attributed to female characters was a little higher than suggested by overall descriptions only. However, the part descriptions represent a more indirect way of attributing qualities. Returning to the overall descriptions, a noticeably large number of adjectives describe mental characteristics for male characters. This is part of male characters being portrayed as ideals, with traits such as honourable, good-natured, well-principled (see example (7)), or with undesirable mental characteristics (e.g. godless, selfish) that will be changed and “improved” in the course of the narrative. (7) My shipmates were kind, good-natured fellows, and they and I got on very well together.  (The Coral Island)

In the sub-domain of Emotion, it is conspicuous that the female characters were not constructed as ever being angry. Male characters experienced anger in at least seven instances, see e.g. (8). Instead, female characters were mostly attributed emotions of sadness or happiness; see (9). (8) William would give out an oath sometimes, when he was very angry;  (Ursula) (9) My governess won’t like dining by herself; she will be melancholy.  (Leila at Home)

In the semantic domain of Situation, there is a fairly striking difference: 7% of the adjectives describe female characters, and 13% male characters. The situational status of male characters was more important, for instance regarding position in society such as powerful, educated or well to do; see (10). Many of the adjectives in this domain also define the characters in terms of their role or position in the schooling system, an important concept in the school stories (e.g. new, upper). Interestingly, the adjectives that do describe situation for female characters often describe a state that is a result of another character’s action, e.g. deserted or forsaken, thus emphasizing passivity, or that the female characters are defined as being at the mercy of other characters, as in (11). (10) Observe one of those fellows, the instant an educated gentleman appears in the circle of which he is the attraction;  (Peter the Whaler) (11) “I’ve always thought so, sir,” replied Ready; “and I dare say many a poor deserted sailor’s wife, and when she has listened to the wind and the rain in her lonely bed, has thought the same.”  (Masterman Ready)

Finally, a few comments on the findings for the domains where fewer gender differences were evident are in place. The domain of Attitude is dominated by the

220 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

adjectives dear and poor which were frequent in the material overall (31 and 44 instances describing characters, respectively). By using these adjectives in adjective-noun collocations, the notion of characters as being externally evaluated is conveyed. Possibly this could be linked to the didactic purposes of Victorian children’s literature; when constructing characters so as to represent good or bad social roles, the reader can also be offered guidance as how to evaluate characters. By using evaluative adjective-noun combinations such as silly child or poor mother the reader is guided in his/her perceptions of the constructed role. These kinds of descriptions were slightly more often found for female than for male characters. That the domain Physical State was relatively large, even for female characters, was somewhat surprising. However, considering the themes and/or the subgenres in the texts included, the picture becomes clearer. It is part of the nature of an adventure story that the characters experience physical strains (hurt, hungry, worn out, etc.) In addition, even in the more restricted setting of home, suffering children are present, as ill, weak, or dead, for instance. As indicated here, the physical states described are primarily negative. Lastly, the domain Sociability showed almost an equal percentage of adjectives describing female and male characters. Moreover, the same pattern was found in children’s literature from the 1980s and 1990s (Sveen 2005: 85 et passim). This suggests that in the construction of fictional social roles in the genre of children’s literature, it is equally important to attribute qualities pertaining to social behaviour to female and male characters.

4.2 Adult and child roles The previous section dealt with the use of adjectival descriptions to define the gender roles found in nineteenth-century children’s literature. In this section I will compare the adjectival descriptions of characters from another perspective, namely by grouping them according to whether they work as defining the social role of adult or child. The terms investigated here represent only a sub-set of the terms from Sveen (2005), specifically central terms which were easily identified as referring to either children or adults. The included adult terms were: woman, man and gentleman, and the included child terms were boy, girl, child (and two instances of woman referring to a child character). Relational terms such as son or daughter were not included here, since they do not define whether the referent is an adult or a child. Similarly, the terms lady and fellow were also disregarded, since the age of their referents ranged from young to old. The distribution across semantic domains is illustrated in Table 2 and Figure 2.



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 221

Table 2.  Distribution of adjective phrases across semantic domains for adult  and child characters Adult

%

Child

%

Age Appearance Mental Property Physical State Attitude Situation Sociability

  43   30   17    9    9   16   15

  31   22   12    6    6   12   11

  59   25   30    3   35   24   21

  30   13   15    2   18   12   11

Total

139

100

197

101

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Figure 2.  Distribution of adjective phrases across semantic domains for adult  and child characters

As can be seen in Table 2 and Figure 2, respectively, the major differences in the distribution of adjectival descriptions across semantic domains for adult and child characters are found in the domains Appearance, Mental Property, Physical State and Attitude. Appearance and Physical State were more often described for adults than for children, whereas Mental Property and Attitude were described more often for children than for adults. In all likelihood, this finding is related to the different functions of adults and children in the narratives rather than mirroring or constructing different social roles for the two general groups adults and children. Since the texts are aimed at child readers, they have child characters as protagonists, and the adults serve more minor roles in the stories. What the characters look like, and their physical state (primarily describing positive physical states such as strong), are more transparent qualities which minor characters can

222 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

display. In contrast, displaying mental properties is an important trait for main characters, i.e., children in the case of children’s literature. That adjectives belonging to the semantic domain of Attitude are more frequent with children than with adult characters is probably an effect of readers more likely to being prompted into feeling for major rather than for minor characters. Such feelings can be evoked using expressions such as poor child, etc. It may also suggest that child characters are subjected to more external evaluation than adult characters. Furthermore, the epicene term child showed the greatest difference in how many instances referred to female and male characters. The male instances described by adjectives were three in total: two dear child and one lost child. Of the 33 described female child, the majority comes from the same text, namely Ministering Children (Charlesworth 1854). Of the texts included in the corpus, this one probably has the youngest implied audience. Ministering Children is an evangelical tale, and the main character is a poor, orphan child. Poor child is also the most frequent adjective-noun combination. Generally, the word child is described by negative adjectives: in addition to poor, uninteresting, desolate, forsaken, silly, and unhappy, among others. Thus, at least in this text, “child” seems to be an undesirable social role. As has been illustrated in the present section, the idea of grouping the characters into adults and children in order to investigate how these social roles were defined, did not prove a fruitful approach. Instead, the findings from this study showed mainly a difference between minor and major characters. Finally, I will pursue a more detailed analysis of the social roles of parents as portrayed in nineteenth-century children’s literature. The frequencies are far from providing conclusive evidence. Nevertheless, the observations offer some insights or ideas about the role of parents, and not the least, they point to interesting aspects which could be pursued in future research.

4.3 Family roles: Parents The roles of parents are especially relevant to children’s literature, since parents (whether present or absent) are relevant to a child’s life. In order to investigate how parents were portrayed in the material, the adjectival descriptions of the terms denoting parents found in the material were studied. These terms were father and papa, and mother and mamma. Only 33 instances of adjectives describing either the term mother or mamma were found. Nine of these were described by poor, and seven by dear. The rest of the adjectives were beautiful (2), beloved, dead (3), fond, frightened, good (2), old, pale, pleased, real, true and well (2). A pattern can be seen: primarily positive attributes were assigned to female parents,



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 223

except for poor and frightened. (Dead is considered more factual than conveying positive or negative connotations). Poor is a description which signals the author’s or the speaker’s attitude to the described character, rather than a description of the character itself. Fathers were not pitied to the same extent in the present material. Overall, the adjectives describing terms for father amounted to even fewer than for mother, only 20 instances. The study yielded only one instance of poor, but four instances of dear. Instead, the descriptions of fathers were more diverse, and more descriptive than classifying compared to the descriptions of mothers. Descriptive adjectives are prototypical adjectives, which attribute qualities such as mental properties or appearance to referents. Classifying adjectives, on the other hand, specify what kind of noun the referent is; cf. for instance the classifying adjective real in the expression real mother, and the descriptive adjective beautiful in the expression beautiful mother (see Magnusson 2003 for a discussion of real father, and Warren 1989 for a discussion of different kinds of adjectives). Using the present system of classification, classifying adjectives are found in the semantic domain of Situation. Except for poor and dear, the adjectives working to define the father role were alive, asleep, dead (2), kind (2), old, sarcastic, sharp, sorry, sure, well off, well to do, and vexed (2). It might be suggested that the more descriptive adjectives actually describe negative properties rather than positive ones. Compare the positive description in (12) with the negative one in (13). (12) “Why don’t you come in, love?” “Come to the door, dear papa, but do not open it, till I speak to you.”  (Leila at Home) (13) “Perhaps it is best, for it is very miserable when papa is sarcastic and sharp, and he cannot understand it, and takes it as meaning so much more than it really does, and grows all the more frightened and diffident.”  (The Daisy Chain)

Further, since adjective-noun characterizations of fathers were more descriptive while the adjective-noun combinations characterizing mothers were more classifying, this might suggest that the social role of father was constructed as weightier, as evidenced by the pains the writer actually took to come up with properties befitting a complex character such as a father. In contrast, the simpler and more stereotypical role of mother needed no thorough descriptions. One of the typical grammatical functions of adjectives is as subject complement. However, this position can also be filled with a noun phrase. To complement the study of adjectival descriptions, I decided to look at all subject complements following was, that is, the most frequent form of a copular verb in the material,

224 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

to the terms father and mother, respectively. Some differences were found. Eight instances of was directly followed the term father. Of these, four were followed by occupational terms (bailiff, clergyman, foreman, seacaptain); see (14). The other elements following was were alive, away, said to be very well to do in the world, and taken first. (14) My father was a clergyman, the vicar of a large parish in the south of Ireland, where the events I am now narrating took place.  (Peter the Whaler)

The term mother was only directly followed by was in three instances (a very good woman, constantly employed with my sisters, seated), i.e., one general statement, one description of typical chores, and one participle. The idea of mothers occupying the domestic sphere and fathers the public one is visible in these few examples.

5.

Conclusion

The present study has shown how language practices both reflect and construct social roles by imposing ideologies on readers, while at the same time mirroring the social roles in society. The major findings pertained to gender roles as constructed in British nineteenth-century children’s literature, both generally and more specifically for mothers and fathers. The female role meant little focus on mental qualities, and large focus on a pleasant appearance. These findings reflect the traditional gender roles in society, which are at the same time the ideologies passed on to the readers of the texts. The male role stressed social status and positive mental characteristics, as shown in the combination good-natured fellows. The focus on positive mental characteristics may have been a particularly strong element in didactic nineteenth-century children’s fiction, which had the purpose of instilling good values in its readers by constructing desirable social roles. On the other hand, the role of mother was a pitiful one, as shown by the collocation poor mother. This is probably also an effect of the didactic functions of the texts. “Bad children” in the literature made their mother sad, providing a reason for the real child readers to eschew bad behaviour. Fathers, on the other hand, were seemingly less affected by their children’s behaviour, judging by the literature. Further, mothers seemed to be active in the domestic setting, while fathers, as well as male characters overall, were defined to a greater extent by their occupation; thus reflecting the division between a domestic sphere reserved for mothers and a public one for fathers. Similarly, the more frequent use of the adjective dear with terms for female characters than with terms for male characters also suggest that female characters were involved in more intimate, private relations than male characters.



Good-natured fellows and poor mothers 225

By carrying out a quantitative systematic study of adjectival descriptions of characters, as well as more detailed qualitative analyses, I have examined one aspect of social roles as constructed by language practices in Late Modern English. One benefit of using a corpus-based approach is the ability to see recurring patterns that might not even be consciously employed by the writer, nor directly noticeable by the reader. However, as pointed out by Bailey (1996: vi) and Görlach (1999: 8), a challenge that we need to be aware of when studying the word uses of past times, is the fact that the connotations may be different to a present-day reader than was intended in the nineteenth century.

References The Victorian Corpus Ballantyne, Robert Michael. 1858. The Coral Island. London: T. Nelson & Sons. Samples from Chapters 1–3; 22; 25. Charlesworth, Maria Louisa. 1857/1854. Ministering Children. London: Seeleys. Samples from Chapters 2–3; 13; 16–17. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. 1881/1869. Mrs Overtheway’s Remembrances. London: George Bell and Sons. Samples from “Ida”; “Mrs. Moss”; “The Snoring Ghost”. Farrar, Frederic William. 1858. Eric, or Little by Little. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Samples from Chapters 2; Part II, 1; Part II, 11. Hughes, Thomas. 1857. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Cambridge: MacMillan. Samples from Chapters 2; 5; Part II, 3. Kingston, William Henry Giles. 1851. Peter the Whaler. London: Grant & Griffith. Samples from Chapters 1; 11; 33. Marryat, Capt. Frederick. 1889/1841. Masterman Ready. London/New York: Frederick Warne. Samples from Chapters 4–5; 45–46; 64–65. Sewell, Elizabeth Missing. 1858. Ursula. London: Longman. Samples from Volume I, Chapters 1; 11; 36. Tytler, Ann Fraser. 1852. Leila at Home. London: T. Hatchard. Samples from Chapters 2–3; 8–9; 17. Yonge, Charlotte Mary. 1856. The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations. London: John W. Parker & Son. Samples from Chapters 1; 2; 13.

Works Cited Bäcklund, Ingegerd. 2006. “Modifiers describing women and men in nineteenth-century English.” In Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and Change, Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds), 17–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, Richard W. 1996. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

226 Hanna Andersdotter Sveen

Briggs, Julia and Butts, Dennis. 1995. “The emergence of form (1850–1890).” In Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, Peter Hunt (ed.), 130–166. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Coates, Jennifer. 2004. Women, Men and Language: A Socio-Linguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, 3rd edn. Harlow: Longman. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2001. Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman Pearson Education. Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London/New York: Longman. Görlach, Manfred. 1999. English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hene, Birgitta. 1984. Den dyrkade Lasse och stackars lilla Lotta. En syntaktisk-semantisk studie av personbeskrivande adjektiv och adverb i populära ungdomsböcker (The adored Lasse and poor little Lotta. A syntactic-semantic study of adjectives and adverbs describing characters in popular youth literature). Umeå: Acta Universitatis Umensis. Holmes, Janet and Sigley, Robert. 2002. “What’s a word like girl doing in a place like this? Occupational labels, sexist usages and corpus research.” In New Frontiers of Corpus Research: Papers from the Twenty First International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora Sydney 2000, Pam Peters, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds), 247–263. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Huddleston, Rodney D. and Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Peter. 1988. “Degrees of control: Stylistics and the discourse of children’s literature.” In Styles of Discourse, Nikolas Coupland (ed.), 163–182. London/New York/Sydney: Croom Helm. Knowles, Murray and Malmkjær, Kirsten. 1996. Language and Control in Children’s Literature. London/New York: Routledge. Magnusson, Ulf. 1996. “Labelling human individuals: Theory and practice in the classification of lexical data in the project ‘Male and female terms in English’.” In Male and Female Terms in English: Proceedings of the Symposium at Umeå University, May 18–19, 1994, Gunnar Persson and Mats Rydén (eds), 93–114. Umeå: Acta Universitatis Umensis. Magnusson, Ulf. 2003. “What’s the real thing? Paradoxes and prototypes of an English adjective.” ICAME Journal 27: 29–50. Marquis, Claudia. 1999. “Romancing the home: Gender, empire, and the South Pacific.” In Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet (eds), 53–67. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Norberg, Cathrine. 2002. Whores and Cuckolds: On Male and Female Terms in Shakespeare’s Comedies. Luleå: Luleå University of Technology. Persson, Gunnar. 1990. Meanings, Models and Metaphors: A Study in Lexical Semantics in English. Umeå: Acta Universitatis Umensis. Richards, Jeffrey (ed.). 1989. Imperalism and Juvenile Literature. Manchester/New York: ­Manchester University Press. Salmon, Edward. 1888. Juvenile Literature as It Is. London: Henry J. Drane.



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Sveen, Hanna Andersdotter. 2005. “Honourable” or “Highly-sexed”: Adjectival Descriptions of Male and Female Characters in Victorian and Contemporary Children’s Fiction. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis. Townsend, John Rowe. 1990. Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children’s Literature, 6th edn. London: The Bodley Head Children’s Books. Wallin-Ashcroft, Anna-Lena. 2000. Great Men and Charming Creatures: On Male and Female Terms in Eighteenth Century Novels. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Department of Modern Languages, Umeå University. Warren, Beatrice. 1989. “Pseudo-problematic pseudo-adjectives.” English Studies 70 (4): 348– 356. Yonge, Charlotte Mary. 1887. What Books to Lend and What to Give. London: National Society’s Depository.

Name index

A Addison, Joseph  20, 29, 30–32, 33, 34–36, 40–44, 48, 50, 51, 56, 94, 95 Agha, Asif  3, 5 Aikin, John  75 Alighieri, Dante  147, 148 Allen, Elizabeth  116, 117, 122 Almeida, Jacqueline Toribio  137 Androutsopoulos, Jannis  139 Anne, Queen  34 Antony, Laurence  38 Archer, Dawn  7, 10 Aristotle  21, 140, 141–142, 146–147, 149, 150, 155 Armstrong, John  55, 69, 73, 76 Arne, Thomas  115–116, 126, 127 Arnold, M.  91 Ashforth, Blake E.  2, 3 Atterbury, Francis  33 Auer, Peter  5, 7, 137 Ault, Norman  56 B Bäcklund, Ingegerd  215 Backscheider, Paula R.  35 Bacon, Sir Francis  19, 147 Bailey, Benjamin  137 Bailey, Richard W.  225 Baldwin, Abigail  34 Bamberg, Michael  5 Bardi, Anat  195 Barrowby, William  71 Basker, James  60, 63, 65, 66, 69, 74–76 Baudin (Gaudin), Marie  179, 185 Bax, Randy C.  7 Baynham, Mike  114 Beal, Joan C.  76

Beattie, James  95 Bell, Allan  114, 115 Bell, Barbara  113 Bentley, Thomas  186 Berkenhout, John  71, 74 Bewley, William  75 Bhatt, M. Rakesh  139 Biber, Douglas  4, 8, 44, 114, 115, 136 Bickerstaff, Isaac  30, 36 Biddle, Bruce J.  2 Blommaert, Jan  1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 136, 138 Bloom, Edward A.  61 Blot, Richard  5 Blunt, Reginald  105 Bogel, Fredric V.  55, 57, 74, 77, 79 Bolingbroke, Lord  66 Bond, Donald  36 Bourdieu, Pierre  164–165 Brewer, John  56 Brewer, Marilynn B.  3, 89 Briggs, Asa  15, 16 Briggs, Julia  213 Brown, Gillian  5 Brown, Penelope  193 Brunton, Deborah  71 Buchanan, George  66 Bucholtz, Mary  9 Buckley, Samuel  34 Budgell, Eustace  31, 33, 36 Bullock, Barbara E.  137 Burke, Edmund  95, 96, 105–106, 116 Burke, Peter  3, 4, 14, 16 Burney, Charles jr  117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 141, 143, 144, 152, 153, 154, 155

Burney, Charles sr  21, 112–113, 115–131, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 152–157 Burney, Esther  116 Burney, Frances (Fanny)  95, 96, 106, 112–113, 115–124, 127–131, 143, 144, 152, 153, 157 Burney, James  115 Burney, Sarah Rose  117, 122, 125, 129 Burnham, John C.  63 Burr, Vivien  3, 4 Butler, Samuel  58 Buttny, Richard  112, 114, 115, 119 Butts, Dennis  213 C Calsamiglia, Helena  118 Campbell, George  94, 95, 102 Campbell, Thomas  95 Carter, John  94, 95 Cashman, Holly R.  138 Castelvetro, Lodovico  147 Chapman, Don  19 Charlesworth, Maria Louisa  222 Ching, Pong Sin  138 Cicero  147 Clark, Herbert H.  118, 119 Clift, Rebecca  114, 118 Coates, Jennifer  164, 166, 186, 212 Colley, Linda  62, 152 Collins, Daniel E.  114 Collins, James  5 Conrad, Susan  9, 44, 115 Cordella, Marisa  5 Corfield, Penelope J.  63, 64 Coulmas, Florian  114 Coupland, Nikolas  10, 115 Cowan, Brian  35, 36

230 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Crisp, Samuel  95, 117, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129 Culpeper, Jonathan  7, 9, 10, 38, 214 Curzan, Anne  214 Cutts, Elizabeth  91 D Dacier, André  147 Dacier, Anne  43 Dailey-O’Cain, Jennifer  113 Dasher, Richard B.  166 Davidoff, Leonore  168 Davy, Charles  117, 122, 125 de Beaugrande, Robert-Alain  5 de Bourdeille, Pierre  185 de Coverley, Sir Roger  39 de Fina, Anna  5, 7 de Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier  147, 149, 151 Defoe, Daniel  14, 30, 33, 35, 95 Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella  194 Demetrius  44 Derrick, Samuel  76 Digby, Miss Julia  182 Donoghue, Frank  57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 77, 79 Dossena, Marina  10, 12, 15, 22, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 203, 205 Downie, J. A.  33 Dressler, Wolfgang  5 Dryden, John  19, 58 Duff, William  65, 67, 68 Dunning, Ted  38 Durkheim, Émile  164–165 Dury, Richard  191, 192, 193, 194 Dussinger, John A.  61 E Eagleton, Terry  56 Eaves, T. C. Duncan  58 Eckert, Penelope  5, 37, 212, 214 Edgeworth, Maria  168, 169 Eger, Elizabeth  89 Elspass, Stephan  8 Ewing, Juliana Horatia  217 F Fairclough, Norman  11, 212 Faust, Katherine  91

Faya Cerqueiro, Fátima  206 Feilding, Lady Elizabeth  170, 171 Ferrara, Kathleen  113 Fielding, Sarah  91, 92, 96 Finegan, Edward  44, 114 Fisher, Anne  94 Fitzmaurice, Susan M.  6, 9, 12, 17, 20, 38, 39, 40, 56, 57, 79, 164 Flexman, Roger  67, 70 Forster, Antonia  60–63, 65–67, 71–75 Fox Strangways (Talbot), Lady Mary  168, 169, 171–173, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180–181, 183, 184–185 Fox Talbot, William Henry  172 Frampton, Lady Harriot  168, 172, 175, 177, 179, 184–185 Francklin, Thomas  67 Freelove, Jack  50 French, H. R.  14 French (Heale), Miss  179 Fritz, Gerd  7 G Gafaranga, Joseph  137 Gardner, Wendi  3, 89 Gardner-Chloros, Penelope  137, 138 Garrick, David  116 Garth, Samuel  33 Gay, John  36 Gerrig, Richard J.  118, 119 Giles, Howard  115 Goffman, Erving  3, 111, 164–165 Goldsmith, Oliver  63, 116 Goodenough, Mr  177 Goodenough, Mrs  177 Goodwin, Aidan  56 Görlach, Manfred  18, 19, 20, 92, 225 Graddol, David  18 Green, Mr  172, 177, 178 Greville, Fulke  116 Grice, Paul H.  193 Griffiths, Ralph  60–62, 64–66, 70 Gumperz, John J.  4, 5

Gustafsson, Larisa O.  58, 95, 96, 104, 105, 106, 107 H Hall, Catherine  168 Hall, Edward T.  164–165, 171 Hall, Kira  9 Halliday, M. A. K.  6, 114 Hamilton, Bernice  57, 63 Harley, David  57, 63 Harley, Robert  33 Harré, Rom  166 Haslett, Beth  2 Haugland, Kari  92, 93, 94, 95, 97 Hawkins, Sir John  116 Haycock, David Boyd  36 Heiss, Jerold  4 Heller, Monica  137 Hemlow, Joyce  128, 129 Hene, Birgitta  215 Hicks Beach, Michael  170 Hicks Beach, Mrs  170 Hitt, Thomas  64, 70, 75 Hobbes, Thomas  19 Holmes, Janet  5, 214 Holt, Elizabeth  112, 114, 115, 118 Home, Francis  76 Homer  56, 148 Horace  39 Huber, Magnus  98 Huddleston, Rodney D.  98, 214 Hudson, Giles  72 Hudson, Rachel  113, 121 Hughes, John  33 Hughes, Kathryn  168 Hume, David  63, 76, 95, 105–106 Hunston, Susan  193, 206 Hunt, Peter  212 Hunt, Tony  146 Hyland, Ken  147 Hyland, P. B. J.  34 Hymes, Dell  4, 135, 136 I Iglesias-Rábade, Luis  144 Ilchester, Lady  167, 177 Ilchester, Lord (Henry Thomas Fox Strangways)  164, 167–172, 176–177



Ingrassia, Catherine  56 J Johansson, Stig  44 Johnson, Maurice  36 Johnson, Sally  38 Johnson, Samuel  18, 19, 56, 92, 96, 116, 119, 122, 123 Jones, N. G.  68 Jørgensen, J. Normann  139 Joseph, John  5, 136 Jucker, Andreas H.  7, 8, 9 K Keir, Mrs  172 Kenrick, William  66 Keymer, Thomas  61 Kimpel, Ben D.  58 King, William  33 Kirkpatrick, James  67–73, 75, 77–78 Klein, Lawrence  36, 57 Knowles, Murray  213 Koch, Peter  8 Kohnen, Thomas  193 Kulick, Don  5 Kytö, Merja  7, 18 L Labov, William  4 Laitinen, Mikko  139 Lane-Poole, Stanley  140, 141 Lange, Deborah  113 Langer, Nils  8 Langhorne, John  78 Lappalainen, Hanna  114, 121 Layder, Derek  13, 113 Le Page, Robert B.  9, 136 Lebsanft, Franz  7 Leech, Geoffrey N.  44, 164 Leith, Dick  18 Lennox, Sarah  95, 106 Leonard, Sterling A.  69 Leppänen, Sirpa  139 Leslie, Charles  33 Levinson, Stephen C.  5, 164, 166, 193 Li Wei  137, 138 Linden, Diederick Wessel  67, 70, 75 Linton, Ralph  2

Name index 231

Lloyd, Lucy  168 Locke, John  19, 31, 64 Longinus  43 López Ferrero, Carmen  118 López-Couso, María José  94, 98, 103 Lorrain, E. P.  3 Lowth, Robert  18, 19, 79, 92, 94, 103 M Macaulay, Ronald  113 Macqueen, Dr Malcolm  172, 177, 178, 179 Macqueen, Mrs  179 Magnusson, Ulf  214, 223 Malek, James  142 Mallet, David  57 Mallet, Elizabeth  34 Malmkjaer, Kirsten  213 Manley, Mary Delariviere  33 Mansfield, Lord  68 Marquis, Claudia  213 Marriott, Thomas  74 Marshall, David  63 Martin, James R.  191, 192, 206 Martin, Joanna  164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183 Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.  6, 114 Maxted, Ian  34 Maxwell, Robert  70, 76 May, Trevor  15, 18 Maynwaring, Arthur  33 Mazzon, Gabriella  98 McConnell-Ginet, Sally  37, 212 McEnery, Tony  38 McGregor, William  114 McIntosh, Carey  61, 65, 66, 67, 76 Mead, George Herbert  3 Mendoza-Denton, Norma  88 Meyerhoff, Miriam  5, 89, 106 Meyers, Carole  64 Milroy, James  18, 19 Milroy, Lesley  5, 18, 137, 138 Milton, John  39, 48 Molyneux, Thomas More  71 Montagu, Barbara  91 Montagu, Edward  90

Montagu, Elizabeth  21, 87–91, 96–107 Moody, Patricia A.  76 Morphew, John  33 Moses  43 Moxon, Joseph  92 Mühlhäusler, Peter  166 Munck, Thomas  14, 17 Murdoch, Patrick  63, 76 Murray, Lindley  18, 19 Myers, Sylvia Harcstark  87 Myers-Scotton, Carol  138 N Nangle, Benjamin C.  66 Napoli, Ernesto  166 Neale, R. S.  14 Neale, Thomas  55, 73 Nevala, Minna  9, 12, 15, 17, 21, 22, 112, 113, 121, 143, 172, 174, 176, 186, 212 Nevalainen, Terttu  7, 92 Norberg, Cathrine  214 North, Montagu  117, 122, 125 Novak, Maximillian E.  35 Nurmi, Arja  8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 21, 22, 112, 117, 125, 136, 137, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 156, 167, 172, 174, 176, 181, 182, 212 O O’Brien, Lady Susan  170, 171 O’Halloran, Sylvester  68, 69 Ochs, Elinor  1, 5 Oldham, James  68 Oldmixon, John  33 Omoniyi, Tope  3, 138 Osselton, Noel E.  19, 88, 92, 93 Österreicher, Wulf  8 Ovid  48, 147 Ozell, John  36 P Pahta, Päivi  12, 16, 21, 117, 125, 136, 137, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 156, 212 Palander-Collin, Minna  8, 9, 12, 17, 21, 112, 113, 121, 143, 167, 172, 174, 176, 181, 212 Palmer, Frank Robert  164

232 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Parr, Samuel  143 Parsons, James  72 Pasley, Thomas  95 Paston, Margaret  11 Patey, Douglas L.  56, 57, 63 Penny, Anne  75 Percy, Carol  10, 12, 19, 20, 55, 70, 79, 94, 102 Perrin, Laurent  114 Persson, Gunnar  214 Philips, Ambrose  33, 36, 43 Phillips (Burney), Susanna Elizabeth  117, 119, 122, 124, 128 Piccolomini, Alessandro  147, 150 Pinnock, Mrs  177, 178, 179 Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale  95, 112–113, 115–116, 117, 119, 121–124, 130–131, 157 Plato  43, 44, 147 Pliny  150 Pohl, Nicole  87 Pope, Alexander  19, 33, 36, 56–57, 66, 75, 76, 123, 130 Porter, Agnes  22, 163, 164, 167–187 Porter, Francis  167 Porter, Roy  14, 16, 31, 145 Porteus, Beilby  141 Priestley, Joseph  18, 19 Priestly, Dr  145 Prior, Matthew  33 Pugh, Benjamin  72 Pullum, Geoffrey K.  98, 214 Q Quintilian  147 Quist, Pia  139 R Rampton, Ben  9, 136, 138 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena  7 Raven, James  171 Redwood, John  56 Relly, James  59, 60 Renton, Alice  169, 170 Reynolds, Sir Joshua  116, 119, 122, 123, 124 Ribeiro, Alvaro  115, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128

Ribeiro, Branca Telles  2 Richards, Jeffrey  211, 213 Richards, Thomas  168 Richardson, Samuel  58, 61, 96 Rivers, David  141 Rizzo, Betty  87, 90, 91, 141 Robertson, George  95 Romaine, Suzanne  113 Roper, Derek  66 Roscoe, Mr  185 Rose, William  66, 70 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  17, 147, 151 Royle, Edward  16, 18 Ruffhead, Owen  68, 69, 75 Ruhi, Şükriye  7 Rydén, Mats  18 S Sabor, Peter  61 Sairio, Anni  7, 12, 19, 20, 21, 88 Salmon, Edward  213 Sandwich, Lord  117, 122, 123, 126, 127 Sappho  43 Scharloth, Joachim  8 Schegloff, Emanuel A.  185 Schellenberg, Betty A.  87 Schendl, Herbert  144 Schiffrin, Deborah  5, 10 Schomberg, Isaac  71 Schwartz, Shalom H.  195 Scollon, Ron  165 Scollon, Suzie Wong  165 Scott, Mike  9, 38 Scott, Sarah  21, 87–91, 96–107 Scott, William  68 Seneca  43, 44, 147 Shackleford, Ann  62 Shakespeare, William  57, 123, 130 Sher, Richard B.  76 Sheridan, Betsy  95 Sheridan, Richard  95 Sheridan, Thomas  62, 76 Sifianou, Maria  166 Sigley, Robert  214 Silverstein, Michael  5 Simmel, Georg  91 Skeat, Walter  18 Smart, Christopher  95

Smith, John  62, 97 Smith, Lawrence B.  69 Smith, Sydney  170 Smitterberg, Erik  18 Smollett, Tobias  60, 63, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74–77 Smythies, Elizabeth  140 Snyder, Henry L.  33 Sommerville, C. John  73, 74 Sorensen, Janet  69 Speck, William A.  32, 33 Spectator, Mr  20, 29–30, 32, 36, 40–42, 44, 45, 48, 51, 56 Spector, Robert D.  60 Spencer-Oatey, Helen  7, 191, 192, 193, 197, 199 Steele, Richard  20, 29, 30, 32, 33–36, 40–42, 44, 48, 50, 51 Stein, Dieter  19 Sterne, Laurence  92, 93, 95, 103, 105–106 Stets, Jan E.  3, 4 Stevens, J. N.  67, 71, 73, 77, 78 Stevenson, R. L.  191 Strabo  147 Strangways, Lady Susan  123 Stryker, Sheldon  3 Suhr, Stephanie  38 Sveen, Hanna A.  9, 12, 15, 23, 169, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220 Swift, Jonathan  18, 19, 30, 33, 35, 94 T Taavitsainen, Irma  6, 9 Tabouret-Keller, Andrée  9, 136, 166 Tagliamonte, Sali  113, 121 Talbot, Charlotte  172, 182 Tannen, Deborah  118 Tasso, Torquato  147 Tavor Bannet, Eve  87, 90 Tenger, Zeynep  78 Theobald, Lewis  57 Thomas, E. J.  2 Thompson, Geoff  193, 206 Tickell, Thomas  33, 36 Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid  7, 19, 58, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 103, 206 Tonson, Jacob  44



Tourneyser  67 Townsend, John Rowe  213 Traugott, Elizabeth C.  166 Trolander, Paul  78 Tutchin, John  33 Twining, Daniel  140 Twining, Daniel jr  143, 152, 153 Twining, Daniel sr  143, 152, 153, 154, 156 Twining, Elizabeth  153 Twining, Richard  143 Twining, Richard jr  143, 152, 153, 154 Twining, Richard sr  143, 152, 153, 154 Twining, Thomas  21–22, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 135, 136–137, 140–158 U Upcher, Elizabeth  167–168, 172

Name index 233

V Valle, Ellen  147 Vandenbussche, Wim  8 Vickery, Amanda  90 Vilett, Mr  177 Vilett, Mrs  177 Vincent, Diane  114 Virgil  39, 147, 148 Voigts, Linda Ehrsam  146, 147 von Haller, Albrecht  61 Vorlat, Emma  91

Webb, R. K.  15, 16 Weber, Max  3 Wedgwood, Josiah  186 Wenger, Etienne  37 Wenzel, Siegfried  144 White, H. C.  3 White, Peter R. R.  191, 192, 206 Wilde, Jonathan  66 Williams, Ashley M.  137, 138 Williams, Aubrey L.  57 Wood, Johanna L.  11

W Wagstaff, John  115 Walker, Ralph S.  140, 141, 143, 144, 153, 154, 155, 156 Wallin-Ashcroft, AnnaLena  214 Warren, Beatrice  223 Warton, Joseph  76 Wasserman, Stanley  91 Watts, Giles  71 Watts, Richard  32, 57, 79

X Xenophon  144 Xiao, Zhongua  38 Y Yonge, Charlotte Mary  213 Yoon, Keumsil Kim  138 Yule, George  5 Z Zhu, Hua  137, 138

Subject index

19CSC  see corpus abbreviation  21, 87, 88, 92–98, 103, 104, 106 accommodation  21, 42, 115, 203, 207, 215 acquaintance  15, 22, 67, 112, 117, 123–125, 130, 144, 169, 177–179, 184–185 address  112, 115, 117, 144, 154, 158, 182, 184 forms of  46, 93, 166 formula  11, 47, 89 addressee  7, 21, 40, 111, 112–113, 131, 164, 166, 176, 185, 192 adjective  9, 23, 92, 98, 197, 203–205, 214–224 modifying  175, 178 positive  163, 187 adult  9, 138, 213, 220–222 adverb  47, 199, 200, 204 adverbial  118, 120 advice  42, 60, 73, 75, 78, 94, 95, 178, 187, 197 age  23, 87, 106, 107, 113, 165, 168, 171, 214–217, 220–221 agriculture  57, 63–65, 75 ambiguity  98, 164, 200 ampersand  89, 98, 103 anthropology  4–5 apostrophe  89, 92, 94–97, 100, 103, 105 appraisal system  23, 191, 192, 195, 206 appropriateness (of linguistic choices)  1, 11, 70, 113, 136, 139, 146, 151, 197, 207 article  42, 44–45 attitude  8, 12, 19, 36, 75, 91, 112, 115, 118, 164, 175, 185, 187, 206, 215, 216, 219–223 audience design  21, 115

audience  6, 17, 22, 43, 74, 115, 126, 144, 146, 158, 185, 222 expected  6, 13, 146, 149 author  9, 13, 19–21, 23, 29, 31, 33, 36, 41, 42, 55–79, 87, 91–92, 95–96, 97, 100, 104, 106, 115, 130, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149–151, 158, 204, 211–213, 216, 223 authority  19, 23, 40, 44, 56, 59, 62, 63, 69, 74, 77, 88, 126, 130, 138, 176, 178, 179, 185, 191, 193–195, 199, 203, 206–207, 215 authorship  29, 41–42, 76, 91 auxiliary verbs  88, 97–105, 107, 181–182, 186, 200, 203 B Bibliothèque raisonée  61 bilingual  see multilingual Bluestocking Corpus  see corpus Bluestockings  20, 88–91, 105, 106 book review  6, 13, 19, 20, 55–79, 94, 102 bookseller  33, 57, 60, 62–63 booster  123–124, 197, 203 borrowing  145 boy  15, 216 business  12, 34, 35, 88, 91, 143, 154, 192–207 correspondence  6, 8, 10, 15, 22, 192–194, 196–205 relationship  15, 22, 194–195, 203, 207 C capital (letter)  88, 92, 93 caretaker language  182, 185

CEECE  see corpus Celtic  69 censorship  32 character (fictional)  6, 7, 9, 13, 20, 23, 30, 165, 181, 212–225 child  2, 9, 15, 23, 116, 122, 130, 138, 140, 143, 164, 167–181, 184–185, 211–214, 217, 220– 222, 224 children’s literature  6, 9, 12, 15, 23, 173, 211–225 church  3, 47, 51, 196 class  4, 10, 14–15, 17, 19, 69–70, 75, 113, 165 lower  15, 16, 17, 18, 64, 179 middle  15, 17, 195 upper  15, 17, 91, 103, 124 classical languages  61, 140, 143, 158 clergy  21, 67, 136, 139–140, 144–145, 151, 158, 167, 224 cluster analysis  38–39 code-switching  16, 21, 125, 136–140, 144–159 avoidance of  125, 146 conventionalised  151–153, 155–157 (discourse) functions  137– 139, 145–148, 156–157 forms  22, 146 intertextuality  146–151, 156 coffee house  15, 17, 34–37 coherence  42, 48, 50 collective (self)  21, 89 collocate  38–39, 216–217, 220, 224 commercial  17, 18, 20, 30, 56–57, 60, 194, 196 communicative situation  1, 4, 112, 136–137

236 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

community of practice  5–6, 12, 20, 30, 32, 37, 40–42, 44, 48, 51 confidence  18, 166, 196–203, 207 conflict  15, 56, 65, 73–75, 192 connectives  98, 103 consciousness  19, 31, 59, 186 consumer  63, 65, 73, 79 context  6, 10–13, 22, 23, 30–32, 34, 37–38, 41, 44, 46–47, 50, 70, 77, 112, 118–119, 125, 126, 129–131, 146, 150, 166, 185, 192, 193, 196, 205, 214 discourse  4, 9, 136–139, 144, 151 social  5, 38, 112, 139, 166, 196, 212, 215 contextual  6, 10, 13, 112, 120, 123, 124, 130 contracted form  21, 47, 65, 68, 88, 92–107 controversy  70, 200 convention  10–11, 33, 59, 92,  145, 156, 217 genre  6, 11, 158 conversation  37, 88, 94, 114, 138, 166, 186 analysis  6–7, 10 cooperation  192–193, 206 corpus  9–10, 23, 37–40, 44, 46–48, 50, 55, 98, 103, 173, 194 ARCHER corpus  98, 103, 181 Bluestocking Corpus  88–89 Century of Prose Corpus  181 Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE)  112, 117, 136–137, 143, 172, 174, 182, 186 Corpus of English Dialogues  181 Corpus of NineteenthCentury Scottish Correspondence (19CSC)  192, 194–195, 206–207 Helsinki Corpus of English Texts  139, 144

Network of Early Eighteenth-century Texts (NEET)  20, 32, 38, 46, 48 Victorian Corpus  213 corpus linguistic  6, 9–10, 20–23, 32, 37, 120, 139, 145 correspondence  7–8, 11, 20, 38, 40, 46, 67, 72, 88–89, 96, 98–107, 116–129, 139, 167, 193 business  6, 8, 10, 15, 22–23, 191–205 personal  6, 12, 15, 17, 21–22, 92, 112–115, 129, 131, 136–137, 140–143, 145, 151–159, 163, 171–187 private  8, 17–18, 95–96, 104, 164 correspondent  7–8, 21, 23, 51, 56, 112, 115–117, 125, 137, 139, 143, 152, 156–159, 164, 172, 176, 182 Critical Review  60–72, 75–79 criticism  7, 11, 19, 20, 43, 56–72, 76–79, 94, 142, 148 cultural (see also sociocultural)  10–11, 15, 16, 32, 37–38, 50, 56–57, 60, 62, 67–69, 74–75, 196 culture  13, 15, 30–31, 34, 56–57, 70, 76, 77, 79, 147, 155 D daily paper  34, 44 deixis (social)  164, 166 dialect  18–19 dialogic  7 dialogue  7, 33, 181 diary  13, 95–96 dictionary  18–19, 66, 92, 116, 156–157 discourse  13, 18, 29, 34–36, 45, 51, 115, 119, 145–147, 156, 175, 194, 199, 205 analysis  5, 7–9, 11 business  199 community  6, 12, 17, 20, 30, 32–34, 48, 50, 147 context of  4, 9, 136–139, 144, 151 function  113, 120, 156–157

legal  199 practice  11, 30 promotional  205 distance  6, 7, 8, 15, 22, 88, 163, 165, 170–171, 176, 178, 180, 185, 194 domain  3, 9, 13, 47, 139, 144– 145, 215 private  136, 192 public  17, 135–137, 139 domain theory  13 drama  7, 38, 46, 213 E Early Modern English  139, 144, 146, 151 editor  6, 57, 59–61, 63, 65–66, 69 education  11, 14, 16, 19–20, 21, 57–59, 67–70, 75, 79, 87, 94, 96, 102, 106, 136, 140, 144, 151, 173, 185, 195, 196, 213, 219 educator (see also governess)  20, 65, 74–79 eidolon  20, 29, 32, 36, 40, 51 eighteenth century  1, 6, 12–14, 16–22, 30–40, 46, 50, 55–61, 72, 74, 88–97, 106, 112, 115, 117, 124, 129, 136–137, 139, 142, 144–145, 147, 151, 157, 163, 167–168, 171, 176, 181–184 elite  8, 16, 91, 104, 106, 136, 147 enclitic  93–94, 97, 101 endearment (terms of)  177 enlightenment  16 entertainer  20, 51, 59, 74 essay  6, 13, 19–20, 30–33, 35, 37–39, 44, 46, 48, 59, 65, 142 ethnographic  4, 7 evaluation  193, 202–207, 215, 222 evaluative  21, 118, 119, 120, 126–127, 201, 220 F face (see also speech act)  22, 191–193, 195, 197–198, 201–207 face-to-face  7, 13, 197 family  2, 9, 12, 17, 21–23, 87, 90–91, 104, 112–113, 116–117, 123, 129–130, 136–138, 140,



143–144, 152–154, 156, 165, 167–172, 176–178, 180, 184, 186, 213–214, 222–224 father  68, 112, 116, 123, 128–130, 143–144, 154, 167, 169, 186, 222–224 fiction  20, 38, 46, 61, 213, 218, 224 first name  177 first person  22, 46, 175–176, 182, 184–185, 187 footing  111 foreign language  16, 61, 125, 136, 145, 152, 157, 158, 172 foreigners  67, 75 formal  8, 14–16, 18, 32, 92–93, 95, 100, 104–107, 144, 146, 169 formula(e)  11, 43, 47, 67, 72, 89, 153, 183, 187 French  43, 61, 114, 124, 138, 140, 144, 146–147, 150, 152–153, 169, 172 frequency  9, 21–22, 37–40, 44–47, 49, 50, 93–104, 113, 118, 121–125, 129, 144, 146, 151–153, 158, 173–174, 176–177, 181–183, 193–195, 214, 222 friend  17, 21–22, 56, 66–68, 75, 78, 88, 90, 91, 103, 112, 117, 122–123, 125, 129–130, 135, 140, 143, 144, 156–158, 167–172, 177–179, 184–186 friendship  91–92, 116, 139, 143, 158 function word  44 functions of language  1 G gender  5, 9, 10, 21, 23, 75, 112–113, 121, 130–131, 171, 212–214, 216, 219, 220, 224 General Evening Post  72 generic  42, 46 genre  6–8, 11, 17–18, 21–22, 30, 39, 46, 50, 60, 62, 64, 71, 77, 114, 129, 136–137, 139, 142, 144, 151, 158, 181, 211, 213, 220 Gentleman’s Magazine  61 gentry  14, 19, 57, 71, 87, 167, 174, 176, 220 German  7, 67, 140, 152–154

Subject index 237

girl  15, 217 gossip  35, 37, 42 governess  15, 22, 163–165, 167–171, 176, 178, 181, 183–187 grammar  20, 56–60, 67–71, 76, 77–78 bad  59, 64–65, 67–68, 73 book  18–20, 62, 67–68, 73, 79, 95 grammarian  19, 66 grammatical  9, 10, 19, 38, 46, 58, 60, 68, 70, 91, 94, 102, 118, 223 Greek  22, 43, 71, 123, 127, 130, 141–150, 152–155 H hedge  203, 207 historical linguistics  5–13 I identity  6, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 23, 30–32, 35, 40–44, 48, 51, 66, 72, 77, 88, 89, 91, 106, 112, 135, 136, 156, 176, 191– 194, 197–198, 203, 205–207 group  4, 22, 37 personal  4, 20, 22, 31 work  5, 152, 158 ideology  5, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 42, 56–58, 60, 64, 69, 79, 211–212, 214 image  31, 191, 201, 206 immediacy  8 imperative  199 impoliteness  57, 78, 94, 120 indexicality  1, 6, 9, 19, 64, 67, 69, 79, 136, 138–139, 147, 155–156, 165–167, 170 individual  1–3, 5–8, 12–13, 16, 21–22, 30–32, 36, 40, 44, 49, 51, 64, 67, 79, 89, 90–91, 121, 135–136, 138, 146, 152, 158, 192–193, 198, 207, 212, 217 individuality  31, 40 infinitive  47, 50 inflection  88, 92–93, 95, 106 informal (language, register, style)  14, 18, 21, 93, 96, 100, 103–107

information  6, 10, 17, 18, 60, 112, 114, 115, 120, 125, 146, 151, 164, 166, 185, 201 in-group  138–139, 155, 158, 166, 179–180, 185 institution  1–2, 5, 7, 10–13, 30, 34, 59, 67, 77, 79 instruction  36, 43–44, 78 instructor  44, 51 insult  59, 66, 68, 193 interaction  1–8, 10–12, 15, 37, 47, 112, 114, 118, 136–138, 152, 163, 165, 185, 192–193, 197, 199, 206 intergenerational communication  137–138 interlocutor  21, 138, 164, 193–194, 207 interpersonal  6, 89, 112, 120, 124, 126, 128, 131, 136, 138, 151, 207, 215 intertextuality  31, 35, 44, 48, 55, 59–60, 72–73, 78, 118–120, 123–129, 141, 146–151, 155 intimacy  6, 21, 106, 115, 125, 138–139, 152, 158, 164–165, 167, 171, 176, 181, 185 intimate  8, 17, 22, 88, 92, 100, 103, 106, 171, 185, 224 intraspeaker variation  4, 136, 152 invective  56, 66, 74 involvement  8, 65, 115, 120, 123–124, 126, 130, 186 Ireland  72, 171, 224 Irish  67–69, 72, 76 irony  56, 66, 73, 193 Italian  140, 146–147, 150, 152–153, 155–156 J journal (diary)  6, 22, 96, 104, 163–164, 167–173, 176–187; (paper) 17, 34, 65, 74, 77 journalism  33 journalist  72, 79 K keyness  38–39, 44–47, 49–51, 173–175 value  39, 45–46, 50, 173–174

238 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

keyword  195, 203 analysis  9, 20, 22, 32, 37–51, 164, 173–175, 184, 186 L language practice  1, 4–6, 8, 11, 212–213 Latin  18, 22, 43, 61, 71, 143, 145–154, 157 lawyer  7, 19, 139, 196 letter  see correspondence letter-writing  11, 13, 93, 156–157 lexical  9–10, 32, 37–39, 42, 44, 47, 50–51, 68, 142, 145, 146, 164, 175, 193, 195–197 lexicographer  19 lexis  19, 22, 58, 70, 195, 206 Licensing Act  32 literacy  5, 8, 11, 149 literary  7, 17, 20, 21, 30, 32, 36, 38, 44, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62, 64, 67, 69, 75, 88, 93, 104, 106, 112, 116, 120, 122, 123, 126, 130, 136, 150, 173, 179, 185, 213 London  20, 30, 32–34, 36, 50, 88, 90–91, 98, 104, 106, 115– 116, 141, 167, 170, 178, 182 M macro  2–3, 11–12, 113–114, 139, 147 market  56–57, 60–62, 77, 79 meaning  3, 4–6, 64, 72, 91, 113–114, 142, 144–145, 150, 151, 155, 182, 185, 192, 196–197, 203 media  30, 114 medicine  57, 69, 71 medieval  136, 139, 144, 146 membership  2, 20–22, 89, 91, 138, 158, 179, 185 memory  31, 173, 203 merchant  17, 30, 136, 139, 167, 196 metaphor  72–74 micro  3, 11, 113 Middle English  144 modality  164, 173, 182–183, 186 deontic  22, 164, 167, 186, 193, 195, 198–201, 203 dynamic  203

epistemic  22, 164, 166, 168, 182, 186–187, 193, 195–196, 198–200, 207 verbs  43, 97–101, 104–105, 181–182, 186, 200, 203 modesty  97, 126–127, 194, 203, 207 Monthly Review  60–72, 75–79, 141, 155 morals  15, 75, 149 mother  2–3, 90, 137–138, 143, 167, 171–173, 178, 181, 183–185, 212, 220, 222–224 motivation  65, 138 multilingual  21, 142 community  136 resources  136–139, 151–152 multilingualism  21, 144 N names  93, 156–157, 166, 173, 177–178, 196, 216 negation  75, 98 negative  5, 9, 19, 46–48, 50–51, 64, 66, 77–79, 94, 97–98, 101–103, 107, 119, 121, 129, 170, 173–175, 192–193, 195, 202– 203, 206–207, 220, 222–223 negotiation  4, 137–138, 164, 186, 202, 206–207 NEET  see corpus network  6, 7, 12, 20–21, 30, 89, 91, 116, 193 analysis  5, 138 newspaper  17–18, 30, 32–35, 38, 60–62, 68, 124, 139 nickname  177–178, 180, 185 nineteenth century  1, 6, 9, 12–13, 15–16, 18–20, 22–23, 94, 182, 192, 194, 211–213, 218, 220, 222, 224–225 non-standard  18, 58–60, 68 norms  2, 10, 13, 91, 100, 107, 113–114, 165, 169, 181, 187 normativity  12 noun  23, 44, 66, 92–93, 119, 196, 198, 203, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222–223 novel  13, 18, 72, 116, 126–129, 171

O object  45–46, 61, 74–76, 136 obligation  2, 164 Old English  139 oral  7, 32, 100, 106, 114 out-group  121, 138, 166, 178, 180 P parent  2–3, 91, 138, 140, 167, 176–178, 181, 185, 213, 222 part descriptions  218–219 participant roles  11, 164, 176 past participle  47, 88–93, 95, 97–98, 104, 107 patterns  2, 9, 11, 21–23, 33, 38, 88, 105, 113, 130, 175, 176, 193, 195, 206, 225 of code-switching  22, 138–139, 145, 151–152, 156, 158 of interaction  7 peers  2, 76–77, 138–139 periodical  6, 12, 17, 19–20, 29–37, 40–42, 56–57, 60–62, 65, 71–74, 76, 79 essay  13, 30, 48 press  30, 32, 34, 38, 48–51 persona  1, 5, 20, 30, 36, 40–42, 51, 124, 127, 185, 187 philanthropist  91, 104 plural  46, 50, 92 poetry  48, 142 polite society  16, 21, 88, 90–91, 106, 152–153, 156–157 politeness  10, 16, 22, 37, 56, 94, 120, 153, 193, 195, 201, 207 political  15, 17, 18, 30, 32–35, 37–38, 40, 51, 60, 67, 130 politician  19, 32, 33 politics  17, 30, 32–37, 49–51 polysemy  194, 200 position  1–3, 6, 13–14, 44, 62, 79, 90–91, 100, 104, 106–107, 111–112, 138, 152, 165–167, 171, 176, 184–186, 203, 212, 215, 219 power  2, 6, 8, 13, 15, 18, 22–23, 50, 57, 90–91, 138, 163–164, 167, 176, 186, 195, 206–207, 211–212



practice  1, 4–6, 8, 11–13, 16, 19–23, 30, 32–33, 37, 40, 42, 44, 48, 51, 65, 90, 92–93, 96, 112–113, 121, 129, 135–139, 142, 146, 151, 158, 211–213, 216, 224–225 pragmatics  5–11, 22, 194–195, 197, 199, 206–207 praise  57, 122, 126–127, 130, 141, 207 preposition  45–47, 50, 66, 88, 93 prescriptive  20, 65, 79 prescriptivism  19, 56, 61 Present-day English  98, 113– 114, 151, 192 prestige  20, 57, 138 print culture  50, 56, 59–60, 62–63, 73–75, 77, 79, 91 printer  33–34, 62, 91–93, 95–97 private  21, 67, 78, 88, 91, 113, 130, 142, 158, 163–164, 168 170, 173, 185, 224 sphere  12, 17, 135–136, 138, 152, 213 writing  6, 8, 17–18, 59, 88, 92–93, 94–97, 103–104, 106, 139, 164, 187, 204 professional  2, 19, 21, 22, 33, 57, 59, 63, 67–68, 70–71, 74, 91, 106, 114, 135, 139, 147, 151, 158, 163, 174, 195 professionalization  57 prominence  40, 45, 91, 104, 106, 195 pronoun  66, 93, 166, 214, 216 first-person  22, 46, 175–176, 182, 184–185 relative  42, 45 second-person  46 third-person  50, 181, 187 propaganda  32, 34 proper names  166, 173–174, 214 prose  58, 61, 75, 93–94, 98, 146–148, 151 psychobiography  12–13 public  13, 15–18, 30, 56–57, 59–61, 72, 78–79, 92 95–97, 100, 104–105, 113, 115, 123, 130, 158, 165, 168, 171, 187

Subject index 239

discourse  34–36, 51 sphere  17, 20, 35–37, 135–139, 224 taste  63, 74 publishing  12–13, 18, 30, 32–34, 56, 58–61, 65–68, 72, 76, 87–88, 91, 93–95, 106, 116, 141, 144, 158, 171, 173, 194, 204, 213–214 Q qualitative  4, 9, 20, 22–23, 182–183, 193, 218, 225 quantitative  4, 20–23, 136, 183, 193–195, 218 quotation  22, 43–44, 55, 59, 64, 66–67, 71–72, 74, 79, 113–115, 119–121, 123–125, 128–131, 144–151, 154, 156–158, 200 R rank  11, 16, 62, 139, 151, 174, 176 reader  6, 9, 17–18, 20, 23, 30, 34, 36, 42–43, 49, 56, 59, 61, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 72–76, 79, 116, 127, 130, 144–145, 151, 158, 187, 211–213, 216, 220–222, 224–225 readership (see also audience)  18, 22, 36, 49, 51, 145, 147 recipient  11–12, 21, 92, 103, 107, 112–113, 115, 117–125, 129–131, 137, 139, 141, 143, 151–156, 158, 166–168, 171, 175–176, 180–182, 185–187, 192–194, 197–207 reciprocity  22, 152, 156, 194 reference (third person)  22, 46, 164, 176–181, 184–186 addressee-oriented  185 anaphoric  45 self-oriented  40, 176, 185 referent  64, 164, 166, 176–178, 185, 214, 217 referential (nouns, terms)  176, 177, 181 register  4, 18, 21, 38, 103, 114– 115, 136, 142, 146, 185 relationship  1–6, 13–14, 21–22, 33, 87–89, 92, 103, 112–113,

115–116, 121, 125, 129, 131, 135–139, 151, 153, 156, 158, 164, 166, 176–177, 185, 192–194, 203, 207, 211–212 building  166 indexing  139, 167 maintaining  167, 201, 207 relative (clause, marker)  42, 45–46 relevance  10, 195 reliability  193–196, 199, 201, 204, 206–207 religion  30, 50, 136, 139, 144–145, 158 religious  16–17, 21, 50, 60, 66, 70, 141, 145, 151, 186 repertoire (linguistic, verbal)  1, 4, 7, 136, 151–152, 158, 182 reported speech  112, 114, 118–120, 124–129 reporting  17, 21, 111–131 constructions  9–10, 118–119 direct  112, 114–115, 118–119, 121–122, 129–131 frames  10, 112, 118–119, 124 indirect  114, 118–119, 121–122, 129 resources (linguistic)  4–5, 11, 13, 37, 113, 136–137, 139, 152, 158 review  see book review reviewer  6, 12, 19–20, 56–79 rhetoric  44, 63, 67, 75, 147 rhetorical  45–46, 185 role relationships  2, 89, 139 role theory  2–3, 5 role  1–13, 15, 20–23 construction  1, 3–6, 9–10, 20, 22–23, 113, 135–136, 138, 159, 211–214, 216, 220–221, 223–225 foregrounding  3, 136, 138 gender  9, 23, 212–213, 216, 218, 220, 224 indexing  1, 9, 136, 156, 212, 216 institutional  7, 12–13 negotiating  1, 4, 21–22, 90, 137–138, 158, 207 performance  2, 11, 20, 22–23, 51, 59, 135, 158, 164–165, 196, 212

240 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

professional  21–22, 163 role-making  3, 31, 40, 90 role-taking  2–3, 12, 15, 23, 61, 63, 75, 79, 90, 130 static  21, 90, 138 S satire  56–57, 59, 61, 72, 74, 77–79 scholar  21, 58, 60, 79, 136, 139–142, 144, 146–147, 151, 154–155, 158 science  2, 5, 16–17, 36, 61, 136, 139 scientific register  22, 142 scientific writing  13, 18, 139, 144, 146–147, 151 Scotland  65–66, 68, 196, 206 Scots  69, 76–77, 167, 196 Scots Magazine  76 Scottish  67–68, 76, 196 second person  46, 50, 180 secular  49, 145 self  3–4, 20–21, 31, 40–41, 43, 89, 111, 201 appraisal  195, 201, 203–207 effacement  22, 175, 184, 186–187 mention  21, 77, 89, 120, 125, 176, 187, 192, 197, 207 praise  127, 192, 207 semantic domains  9, 215–223 semiotic  1, 3–4, 135–136 sender  22, 156 sermon  13, 21–22, 67, 137, 139–141, 144–146, 158, 169 servant  63, 165, 170 seventeenth century  14, 91, 93, 114, 147 sister  21, 87–88, 90–91, 100, 103, 107, 130, 168–169, 172–173, 175, 177–178 singular  45–46, 50 situated activity  12–13, 115 social behaviour  1, 23, 195, 220 capital  57, 70, 89, 193 categories  2, 10, 75, 113 hierarchy  14, 16, 166 interaction  1, 3–6, 152, 193 practice  1, 4, 11, 113

relationship  1, 5–6, 13–14, 137, 139, 164, 166–167 setting  13, 115 standing  100, 106 status  1, 8, 21–22, 151, 164, 173, 224 system  2, 4–5, 166 social action theory  3 social deixis  164, 166 social embedding  4 social network  5–6, 20–21, 30, 89, 91, 138, 193 social order equals  15, 176 inferiors  15–16, 22, 176 superiors  15, 91, 100, 104, 176, 178 social persona  1, 5 social space  22, 163–171, 173, 184, 186–187 keeping one’s place  22, 165, 170 physical  164–165, 170 socio-cultural  2–4, 9, 12, 23, 135, 166 sociolinguistics  4–5 socio-pragmatics  7, 11, 112 soldier  30 solidarity  23, 204, 206 sorts of people  14–16, 35 speaker  4–5, 11, 19, 23, 106, 111–112, 114–115, 118, 136–138, 164, 166, 212, 223 Spectator  6, 12, 17, 19–20, 30–34, 36–51, 94 speech  4, 7, 16–18, 93, 98, 112–115, 136–137, 214 speech act  136, 197, 207 face-enhancing  202 face-threatening  192–193, 197, 203 spelling  88–106 bad 93–94, 102 epistolary  21, 88, 92–94, 97–98, 100, 103–107 private  88, 93, 95–97, 103–104, 106 public  92, 96, 100, 105 standard  21, 92, 95, 100, 104–106

system  19, 88, 96, 100, 106–107 spoken language  5, 8, 98, 113–114 dialogue  7, 181 face-to-face  7, 13, 197 talk-in-interaction  6–7, 114 stance  9, 22, 30, 44, 60, 193, 197, 206–207 standard  21, 56, 58–60, 64, 67–72, 76–77, 79, 88–89, 92, 95, 100, 104–107, 142, 165, 169–170, 193, 196, 205 standardization  18–19, 56–59, 71, 76, 79, 93, 95 dictionaries  18–19, 92 grammars  18–20, 56–57, 59 grammatical correctness  19, 58 prescriptivism  19, 56 state  18, 31, 58, 215–217, 219–221 statement  8, 32, 42, 62, 77, 164, 186, 194, 197, 200, 203, 224 status  1, 5, 8, 13–14, 16, 21–22, 50, 60–61, 69, 75, 77, 79, 90, 123, 151, 155, 164–166, 173, 176, 180, 191, 219, 224 stigma  62, 67, 103 style  4, 9, 11, 19, 21, 38, 51, 64, 67, 69, 72, 88, 92, 94–97, 100, 103–107, 115, 121, 125, 136, 137, 151, 176, 194–195 style-shifting  137 stylistic  17, 105, 115, 152 subject  46, 97, 223 superscript  89, 101, 103 syntax  64, 67, 195, 199, 206 T talk  10, 17, 137, 167, 185 tense  70 past  47 present  42, 45, 50 preterite  88–89, 92–95, 97–98, 104, 107 terminology  14, 22, 146, 150, 155–158, 196 terms for people  23, 177, 214, 220, 222 text  1, 6–7, 9–13, 18, 20, 32, 37–38, 40, 44, 46, 58, 61,



64, 67, 76, 89, 91–92,  95–96, 106, 112, 119, 136, 137, 139, 141–142, 144–146, 148–151, 158, 166, 167, 173, 198, 203–207, 212–213, 220–222, 224 production  11, 13, 136 third person  22, 41, 45–46, 50, 120, 164, 177, 180–181, 185–187 thought styles  194–195 Tory  30, 32–35, 37 translation  21, 43, 56, 62, 88, 140–142, 146–149, 155, 158 travelogue  95 trend-setter  106 trial records  7, 114 trust  10, 22–23, 192–207 U ungrammatical  65, 67, 71, 75 utterance  114, 119, 212 V variable  21–22, 44, 88, 95, 113 variation  4, 8, 10, 13, 22, 43, 67–68, 88–89, 92, 95, 98,

Subject index 241

100–102, 107, 113, 115, 129, 131, 136, 152 studies  4, 10 verb  43–47, 50, 58, 70, 76, 88, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 106, 118–119, 168, 198, 200, 223 verbal  93, 119, 194, 198 criticism  57, 63, 65–69, 77–79 repertoire  4, 136, 151 Victorian Corpus  see corpus Victorian period  15, 213, 220 viewpoint  114, 138, 180, 195, 197, 200, 203 voice  5, 199 passive  124 W wealth  14–15, 69, 90 Whig  30, 32–37 women  17, 21, 34, 87–91, 105, 107, 112–113, 122–123, 130, 144, 164, 166–167, 169, 171, 173–176, 182, 186, 195,  216–217 writers  70, 75, 91, 171 word class  44

WordSmith  9, 38, 173 work  2–3, 14, 17, 19, 51, 57, 76, 115, 125, 140, 143–144, 164–165, 167–170, 176–177, 184, 186, 193, 203 Works of the Learned  61–62 writer  6–8, 11–13, 18–19, 22–23, 30, 35–36, 56–59, 61–63, 66–71, 75–76, 79, 91–92, 94, 96, 103, 105–107, 111–113, 115, 118–121, 125, 129, 131, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 151–152, 156, 158, 168, 173–176, 180–182, 186, 192, 211–213, 223, 225 writing  6, 8, 11–13, 18, 21–22, 56–57, 64, 66, 70–76, 79, 94, 101–103, 106–107, 115–117, 126, 128–130, 136–137, 139–141, 144–147, 151–152, 157–158, 164, 168–169, 171, 173, 175–176, 178, 181, 184, 186–187 private  6, 17, 92, 94–96, 187 public  92, 95 written (language)  5, 7–8, 12, 32, 93, 98, 129

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series A complete list of titles in this series can be found on www.benjamins.com 198 Limberg, Holger: The Interactional Organization of Academic Talk. Office hour consultations. xiv, 393 pp. + index. Expected September 2010 197 Dedaić, Mirjana N. and Mirjana Mišković-Luković (eds.): South Slavic Discourse Particles. 2010. ix, 166 pp. 196 Streeck, Jürgen (ed.): New Adventures in Language and Interaction. vi, 269 pp. + index. Expected July 2010 195 Pahta, Päivi, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.): Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English. 2010. viii, 241 pp. 194 Kühnlein, Peter, Anton Benz and Candace L. Sidner (eds.): Constraints in Discourse 2. 2010. v, 180 pp. 193 Suomela-Salmi, Eija and Fred Dervin (eds.): Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse. 2009. vi, 299 pp. 192 Filipi, Anna: Toddler and Parent Interaction. The organisation of gaze, pointing and vocalisation. 2009. xiii, 268 pp. 191 Ogiermann, Eva: On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. 2009. x, 296 pp. 190 Finch, Jason, Martin Gill, Anthony Johnson, Iris Lindahl-Raittila, Inna Lindgren, Tuija Virtanen and Brita Wårvik (eds.): Humane Readings. Essays on literary mediation and communication in honour of Roger D. Sell. 2009. xi, 160 pp. 189 Peikola, Matti, Janne Skaffari and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.): Instructional Writing in English. Studies in honour of Risto Hiltunen. 2009. xiii, 240 pp. 188 Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein (eds.): Genres in the Internet. Issues in the theory of genre. 2009. ix, 294 pp. 187 Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.): Early Modern English News Discourse. Newspapers, pamphlets and scientific news discourse. 2009. vii, 227 pp. 186 Callies, Marcus: Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English. The syntax–pragmatics interface in second language acquisition. 2009. xviii, 293 pp. 185 Mazzon, Gabriella: Interactive Dialogue Sequences in Middle English Drama. 2009. ix, 228 pp. 184 Stenström, Anna-Brita and Annette Myre Jørgensen (eds.): Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective. 2009. vi, 206 pp. 183 Nurmi, Arja, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.): The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800). 2009. vii, 312 pp. 182 Norrick, Neal R. and Delia Chiaro (eds.): Humor in Interaction. 2009. xvii, 238 pp. 181 Maschler, Yael: Metalanguage in Interaction. Hebrew discourse markers. 2009. xvi, 258 pp. 180 Jones, Kimberly and Tsuyoshi Ono (eds.): Style Shifting in Japanese. 2008. vii, 335 pp. 179 Simões Lucas Freitas, Elsa: Taboo in Advertising. 2008. xix, 214 pp. 178 Schneider, Klaus P. and Anne Barron (eds.): Variational Pragmatics. A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. 2008. vii, 371 pp. 177 Rue, Yong-Ju and Grace Zhang: Request Strategies. A comparative study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. 2008. xv, 320 pp. 176 Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.): Speech Acts in the History of English. 2008. viii, 318 pp. 175 Gómez González, María de los Ángeles, J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Elsa M. González Álvarez (eds.): Languages and Cultures in Contrast and Comparison. 2008. xxii, 364 pp. 174 Heyd, Theresa: Email Hoaxes. Form, function, genre ecology. 2008. vii, 239 pp. 173 Zanotto, Mara Sophia, Lynne Cameron and Marilda C. Cavalcanti (eds.): Confronting Metaphor in Use. An applied linguistic approach. 2008. vii, 315 pp. 172 Benz, Anton and Peter Kühnlein (eds.): Constraints in Discourse. 2008. vii, 292 pp. 171 Félix-Brasdefer, J. César: Politeness in Mexico and the United States. A contrastive study of the realization and perception of refusals. 2008. xiv, 195 pp. 170 Oakley, Todd and Anders Hougaard (eds.): Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. 2008. vi, 262 pp. 169 Connor, Ulla, Ed Nagelhout and William Rozycki (eds.): Contrastive Rhetoric. Reaching to intercultural rhetoric. 2008. viii, 324 pp.

168 Proost, Kristel: Conceptual Structure in Lexical Items. The lexicalisation of communication concepts in English, German and Dutch. 2007. xii, 304 pp. 167 Bousfield, Derek: Impoliteness in Interaction. 2008. xiii, 281 pp. 166 Nakane, Ikuko: Silence in Intercultural Communication. Perceptions and performance. 2007. xii, 240 pp. 165 Bublitz, Wolfram and Axel Hübler (eds.): Metapragmatics in Use. 2007. viii, 301 pp. 164 Englebretson, Robert (ed.): Stancetaking in Discourse. Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. 2007. viii, 323 pp. 163 Lytra, Vally: Play Frames and Social Identities. Contact encounters in a Greek primary school. 2007. xii, 300 pp. 162 Fetzer, Anita (ed.): Context and Appropriateness. Micro meets macro. 2007. vi, 265 pp. 161 Celle, Agnès and Ruth Huart (eds.): Connectives as Discourse Landmarks. 2007. viii, 212 pp. 160 Fetzer, Anita and Gerda Eva Lauerbach (eds.): Political Discourse in the Media. Cross-cultural perspectives. 2007. viii, 379 pp. 159 Maynard, Senko K.: Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse. Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice. 2007. xvi, 356 pp. 158 Walker, Terry: Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues. Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy. 2007. xx, 339 pp. 157 Crawford Camiciottoli, Belinda: The Language of Business Studies Lectures. A corpus-assisted analysis. 2007. xvi, 236 pp. 156 Vega Moreno, Rosa E.: Creativity and Convention. The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech. 2007. xii, 249 pp. 155 Hedberg, Nancy and Ron Zacharski (eds.): The Grammar–Pragmatics Interface. Essays in honor of Jeanette K. Gundel. 2007. viii, 345 pp. 154 Hübler, Axel: The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation. 2007. x, 281 pp. 153 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Written Reliquaries. The resonance of orality in medieval English texts. 2006. xii, 292 pp. 152 Warren, Martin: Features of Naturalness in Conversation. 2006. x, 272 pp. 151 Suzuki, Satoko (ed.): Emotive Communication in Japanese. 2006. x, 234 pp. 150 Busse, Beatrix: Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. 2006. xviii, 525 pp. 149 Locher, Miriam A.: Advice Online. Advice-giving in an American Internet health column. 2006. xvi, 277 pp. 148 Fløttum, Kjersti, Trine Dahl and Torodd Kinn: Academic Voices. Across languages and disciplines. 2006. x, 309 pp. 147 Hinrichs, Lars: Codeswitching on the Web. English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication. 2006. x, 302 pp. 146 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa: Collaborating towards Coherence. Lexical cohesion in English discourse. 2006. ix, 192 pp. 145 Kurhila, Salla: Second Language Interaction. 2006. vii, 257 pp. 144 Bührig, Kristin and Jan D. ten Thije (eds.): Beyond Misunderstanding. Linguistic analyses of intercultural communication. 2006. vi, 339 pp. 143 Baker, Carolyn, Michael Emmison and Alan Firth (eds.): Calling for Help. Language and social interaction in telephone helplines. 2005. xviii, 352 pp. 142 Sidnell, Jack: Talk and Practical Epistemology. The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community. 2005. xvi, 255 pp. 141 Zhu, Yunxia: Written Communication across Cultures. A sociocognitive perspective on business genres. 2005. xviii, 216 pp. 140 Butler, Christopher S., María de los Ángeles Gómez González and Susana M. Doval-Suárez (eds.): The Dynamics of Language Use. Functional and contrastive perspectives. 2005. xvi, 413 pp. 139 Lakoff, Robin T. and Sachiko Ide (eds.): Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. 2005. xii, 342 pp. 138 Müller, Simone: Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse. 2005. xviii, 290 pp. 137 Morita, Emi: Negotiation of Contingent Talk. The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. 2005. xvi, 240 pp. 136 Sassen, Claudia: Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk. Formalising structures in a controlled language. 2005. ix, 230 pp.

135 Archer, Dawn: Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760). A sociopragmatic analysis. 2005. xiv, 374 pp. 134 Skaffari, Janne, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita Wårvik (eds.): Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. 2005. x, 418 pp. 133 Marnette, Sophie: Speech and Thought Presentation in French. Concepts and strategies. 2005. xiv, 379 pp. 132 Onodera, Noriko O.: Japanese Discourse Markers. Synchronic and diachronic discourse analysis. 2004. xiv, 253 pp. 131 Janoschka, Anja: Web Advertising. New forms of communication on the Internet. 2004. xiv, 230 pp. 130 Halmari, Helena and Tuija Virtanen (eds.): Persuasion Across Genres. A linguistic approach. 2005. x, 257 pp. 129 Taboada, María Teresa: Building Coherence and Cohesion. Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. 2004. xvii, 264 pp. 128 Cordella, Marisa: The Dynamic Consultation. A discourse analytical study of doctor–patient communication. 2004. xvi, 254 pp. 127 Brisard, Frank, Michael Meeuwis and Bart Vandenabeele (eds.): Seduction, Community, Speech. A Festschrift for Herman Parret. 2004. vi, 202 pp. 126 Wu, Yi’an: Spatial Demonstratives in English and Chinese. Text and Cognition. 2004. xviii, 236 pp. 125 Lerner, Gene H. (ed.): Conversation Analysis. Studies from the first generation. 2004. x, 302 pp. 124 Vine, Bernadette: Getting Things Done at Work. The discourse of power in workplace interaction. 2004. x, 278 pp. 123 Márquez Reiter, Rosina and María Elena Placencia (eds.): Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. 2004. xvi, 383 pp. 122 González, Montserrat: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative. The case of English and Catalan. 2004. xvi, 410 pp. 121 Fetzer, Anita: Recontextualizing Context. Grammaticality meets appropriateness. 2004. x, 272 pp. 120 Aijmer, Karin and Anna-Brita Stenström (eds.): Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. 2004. viii, 279 pp. 119 Hiltunen, Risto and Janne Skaffari (eds.): Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to modern. 2003. viii, 243 pp. 118 Cheng, Winnie: Intercultural Conversation. 2003. xii, 279 pp. 117 Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina: Stance in Talk. A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. 2004. xvi, 260 pp. 116 Grant, Colin B. (ed.): Rethinking Communicative Interaction. New interdisciplinary horizons. 2003. viii, 330 pp. 115 Kärkkäinen, Elise: Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. 2003. xii, 213 pp. 114 Kühnlein, Peter, Hannes Rieser and Henk Zeevat (eds.): Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium. 2003. xii, 400 pp. 113 Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. Thornburg (eds.): Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. 2003. xii, 285 pp. 112 Lenz, Friedrich (ed.): Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person. 2003. xiv, 279 pp. 111 Ensink, Titus and Christoph Sauer (eds.): Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse. 2003. viii, 227 pp. 110 Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.): Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. 2003. viii, 343 pp. 109 Mayes, Patricia: Language, Social Structure, and Culture. A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. 2003. xiv, 228 pp. 108 Barron, Anne: Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context. 2003. xviii, 403 pp. 107 Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. 2003. viii, 446 pp. 106 Busse, Ulrich: Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus. Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns. 2002. xiv, 344 pp. 105 Blackwell, Sarah E.: Implicatures in Discourse. The case of Spanish NP anaphora. 2003. xvi, 303 pp. 104 Beeching, Kate: Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. 2002. x, 251 pp.

103 Fetzer, Anita and Christiane Meierkord (eds.): Rethinking Sequentiality. Linguistics meets conversational interaction. 2002. vi, 300 pp. 102 Leafgren, John: Degrees of Explicitness. Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. 2002. xii, 252 pp. 101 Luke, K. K. and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (eds.): Telephone Calls. Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. 2002. x, 295 pp. 100 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2. 2003. viii, 496 pp. 99 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1. 2003. xii, 388 pp. 98 Duszak, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. 2002. viii, 522 pp. 97 Maynard, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. 2002. xiv, 481 pp. 96 Haverkate, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. 2002. vi, 241 pp. 95 Fitzmaurice, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. 2002. viii, 263 pp. 94 McIlvenny, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. 2002. x, 332 pp. 93 Baron, Bettina and Helga Kotthoff (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002. xxiv, 357 pp. 92 Gardner, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. xxii, 281 pp. 91 Gross, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. xxviii, 341 pp. 90 Kenesei, István and Robert M. Harnish (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. xxii, 352 pp. 89 Itakura, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in first and second language contexts. 2001. xviii, 231 pp. 88 Bayraktaroğlu, Arın and Maria Sifianou (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. xiv, 439 pp. 87 Mushin, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative Retelling. 2001. xviii, 244 pp. 86 Ifantidou, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. xii, 225 pp. 85 Collins, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001. xx, 384 pp. 84 Andersen, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. 2001. ix, 352 pp. 83 Márquez Reiter, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and apologies. 2000. xviii, 225 pp. 82 Khalil, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. x, 274 pp. 81 Di Luzio, Aldo, Susanne Günthner and Franca Orletti (eds.): Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. xvi, 341 pp. 80 Ungerer, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. 79 Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude. 2000. viii, 273 pp. 78 Sell, Roger D.: Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. xiv, 348 pp. 77 Vanderveken, Daniel and Susumu Kubo (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. vi, 328 pp. 76 Matsui, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. xii, 251 pp. 75 Pilkington, Adrian: Poetic Effects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. xiv, 214 pp. 74 Trosborg, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. xvi, 256 pp. 73 Hester, Stephen K. and David Francis (eds.): Local Educational Order. Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. 2000. viii, 326 pp. 72 Marmaridou, Sophia: Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. 2000. xii, 322 pp. 71 Gómez González, María de los Ángeles: The Theme–Topic Interface. Evidence from English. 2001. xxiv, 438 pp. 70 Sorjonen, Marja-Leena: Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish. 2001. x, 330 pp. 69 Noh, Eun-Ju: Metarepresentation. A relevance-theory approach. 2000. xii, 242 pp. 68 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven case studies in English illocutionary development. 2000. xii, 196 pp.

67 Taavitsainen, Irma, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.): Writing in Nonstandard English. 2000. viii, 404 pp. 66 Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.): Historical Dialogue Analysis. 1999. viii, 478 pp. 65 Cooren, François: The Organizing Property of Communication. 2000. xvi, 272 pp. 64 Svennevig, Jan: Getting Acquainted in Conversation. A study of initial interactions. 2000. x, 384 pp. 63 Bublitz, Wolfram, Uta Lenk and Eija Ventola (eds.): Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to create it and how to describe it. Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24-27 April 1997. 1999. xiv, 300 pp. 62 Tzanne, Angeliki: Talking at Cross-Purposes. The dynamics of miscommunication. 2000. xiv, 263 pp. 61 Mills, Margaret H. (ed.): Slavic Gender Linguistics. 1999. xviii, 251 pp. 60 Jacobs, Geert: Preformulating the News. An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. 1999. xviii, 428 pp. 59 Kamio, Akio and Ken-ichi Takami (eds.): Function and Structure. In honor of Susumu Kuno. 1999. x, 398 pp. 58 Rouchota, Villy and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Current Issues in Relevance Theory. 1998. xii, 368 pp. 57 Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.): Discourse Markers. Descriptions and theory. 1998. x, 363 pp. 56 Tanaka, Hiroko: Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation. A Study in Grammar and Interaction. 2000. xiv, 242 pp. 55 Allwood, Jens and Peter Gärdenfors (eds.): Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and cognition. 1999. x, 201 pp. 54 Hyland, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. 1998. x, 308 pp. 53 Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French. 1998. xii, 418 pp. 52 Gillis, Steven and Annick De Houwer (eds.): The Acquisition of Dutch. With a Preface by Catherine E. Snow. 1998. xvi, 444 pp. 51 Boulima, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. 1999. xiv, 338 pp. 50 Grenoble, Lenore A.: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. 1998. xviii, 338 pp. 49 Kurzon, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. 1998. vi, 162 pp. 48 Kamio, Akio: Territory of Information. 1997. xiv, 227 pp. 47 Chesterman, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. 1998. viii, 230 pp. 46 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling. 1997. xvii, 282 pp. 45 Paltridge, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. 1997. x, 192 pp. 44 Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca and Sandra J. Harris: Managing Language. The discourse of corporate meetings. 1997. ix, 295 pp. 43 Janssen, Theo and Wim van der Wurff (eds.): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb. 1996. x, 312 pp. 42 Kotthoff, Helga and Ruth Wodak (eds.): Communicating Gender in Context. 1997. xxvi, 424 pp. 41 Ventola, Eija and Anna Mauranen (eds.): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. 1996. xiv, 258 pp. 40 Diamond, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a close-knit social network. 1996. viii, 184 pp. 39 Herring, Susan C. (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives. 1996. viii, 326 pp. 38 Fretheim, Thorstein and Jeanette K. Gundel (eds.): Reference and Referent Accessibility. 1996. xii, 312 pp. 37 Carston, Robyn and Seiji Uchida (eds.): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. 1998. x, 300 pp. 36 Chilton, Paul, Mikhail V. Ilyin and Jacob L. Mey (eds.): Political Discourse in Transition in Europe 1989–1991. 1998. xi, 272 pp. 35 Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. 1995. xvi, 624 pp. 34 Barbe, Katharina: Irony in Context. 1995. x, 208 pp. 33 Goossens, Louis, Paul Pauwels, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and Johan Vanparys: By Word of Mouth. Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective. 1995. xii, 254 pp. 32 Shibatani, Masayoshi and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. In honor of Charles J. Fillmore. 1996. x, 322 pp.

31 Wildgen, Wolfgang: Process, Image, and Meaning. A realistic model of the meaning of sentences and narrative texts. 1994. xii, 281 pp. 30 Wortham, Stanton E.F.: Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom. 1994. xiv, 178 pp. 29 Barsky, Robert F.: Constructing a Productive Other. Discourse theory and the Convention refugee hearing. 1994. x, 272 pp. 28 Van de Walle, Lieve: Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit. A pilot study in linguistic politeness. 1993. xii, 454 pp. 27 Suter, Hans-Jürg: The Wedding Report. A prototypical approach to the study of traditional text types. 1993. xii, 314 pp. 26 Stygall, Gail: Trial Language. Differential discourse processing and discursive formation. 1994. xii, 226 pp. 25 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth: English Speech Rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal interaction. 1993. x, 346 pp. 24 Maynard, Senko K.: Discourse Modality. Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language. 1993. x, 315 pp. 23 Fortescue, Michael, Peter Harder and Lars Kristoffersen (eds.): Layered Structure and Reference in a Functional Perspective. Papers from the Functional Grammar Conference, Copenhagen, 1990. 1992. xiii, 444 pp. 22 Auer, Peter and Aldo Di Luzio (eds.): The Contextualization of Language. 1992. xvi, 402 pp. 21 Searle, John R., Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren: (On) Searle on Conversation. Compiled and introduced by Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren. 1992. vi, 154 pp. 20 Nuyts, Jan: Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On cognition, functionalism, and grammar. 1991. xii, 399 pp. 19 Baker, Carolyn and Allan Luke (eds.): Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. Papers of the XII World Congress on Reading. 1991. xxi, 287 pp. 18 Johnstone, Barbara: Repetition in Arabic Discourse. Paradigms, syntagms and the ecology of language. 1991. viii, 130 pp. 17 Piéraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte and Marlene Dolitsky (eds.): Language Bases ... Discourse Bases. Some aspects of contemporary French-language psycholinguistics research. 1991. vi, 342 pp. 16 Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Discourse Description. Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text. 1992. xiii, 409 pp. 15 Komter, Martha L.: Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews. A study of talks, tasks and ideas. 1991. viii, 252 pp. 14 Schwartz, Ursula V.: Young Children's Dyadic Pretend Play. A communication analysis of plot structure and plot generative strategies. 1991. vi, 151 pp. 13 Nuyts, Jan, A. Machtelt Bolkestein and Co Vet (eds.): Layers and Levels of Representation in Language Theory. A functional view. 1990. xii, 348 pp. 12 Abraham, Werner (ed.): Discourse Particles. Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. 1991. viii, 338 pp. 11 Luong, Hy V.: Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings. The Vietnamese system of person reference. 1990. x, 213 pp. 10 Murray, Denise E.: Conversation for Action. The computer terminal as medium of communication. 1991. xii, 176 pp. 9 Luke, K. K.: Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. 1990. xvi, 329 pp. 8 Young, Lynne: Language as Behaviour, Language as Code. A study of academic English. 1991. ix, 304 pp. 7 Lindenfeld, Jacqueline: Speech and Sociability at French Urban Marketplaces. 1990. viii, 173 pp. 6:3 Blommaert, Jan and Jef Verschueren (eds.): The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication. Selected papers from the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 1987. Volume 3: The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication. 1991. viii, 249 pp. 6:2 Verschueren, Jef (ed.): Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. Selected papers from the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 1987. Volume 2: Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. 1991. viii, 339 pp. 6:1 Verschueren, Jef (ed.): Pragmatics at Issue. Selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 17–22, 1987. Volume 1: Pragmatics at Issue. 1991. viii, 314 pp. 5 Thelin, Nils B. (ed.): Verbal Aspect in Discourse. 1990. xvi, 490 pp. 4 Raffler-Engel, Walburga von (ed.): Doctor–Patient Interaction. 1989. xxxviii, 294 pp. 3 Oleksy, Wieslaw (ed.): Contrastive Pragmatics. 1988. xiv, 282 pp. 2 Barton, Ellen: Nonsentential Constituents. A theory of grammatical structure and pragmatic interpretation. 1990. xviii, 247 pp. 1 Walter, Bettyruth: The Jury Summation as Speech Genre. An ethnographic study of what it means to those who use it. 1988. xvii, 264 pp.