Colliers, farmers, strikers. The discussion of work-related themes in Late Modern Scottish letters and diaries
Keywords:
Nineteenth-century correspondence, Late Modern English, labour discourse, evaluative language, emigrants’ lettersAbstract
In business discourse, the discussion of work relations is a very interesting branch of study, especially when it refers to contexts that are relatively distant in time and/or space. In this respect, emigrants’ letters and diaries are as invaluable sources of information today as they were when they were written. In this paper I intend to concentrate on nineteenth-century documents and focus on three main issues: the state of the job market, cases of conflict and negotiations, and the narration of accidents or other extraordinary events. The aim is to highlight the main linguistic strategies employed to convey meaning, in order to assess what topics were given prominence, and how they were narrated and evaluated. Data will be drawn from a corpus currently in preparation at the University of Bergamo; while its size does not allow quantitative findings to be offered yet, it is believed that qualitative observations on these unique materials may help shed useful light on the phenomena under discussion.
Downloads
References
Primary sources
Anon. (1840). The British mechanic’s and labourer’s hand book, and true guide to the United States: with ample notices respecting various trades and professions. London: Charles Knight & Co.
Anon. (1905). La più grande e completa grammatica italiana – inglese [...]. Manuale di conversazione [...] Dizionario [...] Segretario con 120 lettere italiane ed inglese [sic]. Lettere per l’operaio, lettere commerciali, lettere amorose. Carta per la cittadinanza. N.p.
Campbell, J. F. (1876). My circular notes. Extracts from journals, letters sent home, geological and other notes, written while travelling westwards round the world, from July 6, 1874, to July 6, 1875. Two vols. London: Macmillan & Co.
Macaulay, J. (1872). Across the ferry: First impressions of America and its people. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Ruxton, G. F. (1848). Life in the Far West. Blackwood’s Magazine (Jun.-Nov. 1848).
Secondary sources
Barrick, M. E. (1975). Ruxton’s Western proverbs. American Speech, 34(3), 215-225. Commons, J. R. (1907). Labor organization and labor politics, 1827-37. The
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 21(2), 323-329.
Dossena, M. (2001). The voice of witnesses in nineteenth-century accounts of
the Highland clearances. Review of Scottish Culture, 13, 40-50.
Dossena, M. (2004). Towards a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish
correspondence. Linguistica e Filologia, 18, 195-214.
Dossena, M. (2006a). Stance and authority in nineteenth-century bank correspondence. A case study. In M. Dossena, & S. M. Fitzmaurice (Eds.), Business and official correspondence: Historical investigations (pp. 175-192). Bern: Peter Lang.
Dossena, M. (2006b). Forms of self-representation in nineteenth-century business letters. In M. Dossena, & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), Diachronic perspectives on domain-specific English (pp. 173-190). Bern: Peter Lang.
Dossena, M. (forthcoming a). The study of correspondence: theoretical and methodological issues. In M, Dossena, & G. Del Lungo Camiciotti (Eds.), Letter writing in Late Modern Europe. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dossena, M. (forthcoming b). “John is a good Indian”. Reflections on native American culture in Scottish popular writing of the nineteenth century. In C. Sassi, & T. van Heijnsbergen (Eds.), Within and without empire: Scotland across the (post)colonial borderline. Newcastle u.T.: Cambridge Scholars.
Dossena, M. & Dury R. (2008). 19CSC, second-generation corpora and the history of English. In A. Martelli, & V. Pulcini (Eds.), Investigating English with corpora. Studies in honour of Maria Teresa Prat (pp. 401-412). Monza: Polimetrica.
Dury, R. (2006). A corpus of nineteenth-century business correspondence: Methodology of transcription. In M. Dossena, & S.M. Fitzmaurice (Eds.), Business and official correspondence: Historical investigations (pp. 193-205). Bern: Peter Lang.
Dury, R. (2008). Handwriting and the linguistic study of letters. In M. Dossena, & I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Eds.), Studies in Late Modern English correspondence: Methodology and data (pp. 113-135). Bern: Peter Lang.
Fairman, T. (2003) Letters of the English labouring classes 1800-34 and the English language. In M. Dossena, & C. Jones (Eds.), Insights into Late Modern English (pp. 265-282). Bern: Peter Lang.
Gerber, D. A. (2006). Authors of their lives: The personal correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Hubbard, C. (1968). The language of Ruxton’s Mountain Men. American Speech, 43(3), 216-221.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Revista de Lenguas para fines específicos is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional License.
