Letter-writing manuals and the evolution of requests markers in the eighteenth century
Palabras clave:
Letter-writing manuals, requests, eighteenth century, please, prayResumen
In eighteenth century England the middle classes were looking for assistance guides to help them to move upwards in society. Among those help books we find letter-writing manuals, a very popular text-type in the Late Modern English period, which provided information on how to write letters on any occasion. It is also in the eighteenth century when we observe the beginning of the replacement of pray by please as the default courtesy marker in requests, which would not be fully accomplished until the beginning of the twentieth century. The epistolary genre in general is a good source for the analysis of requests due to the interactive character of letters. Letter-writing manuals in particular offer an organised collection of letters and other correspondence texts according to topic, senders or receivers, among others, which makes them ideal for the study of pragmatic features. Therefore a diachronic study of pray and please constructions in this text-type will provide insights regarding the shift of request markers, their main function and the processes of change. The popularity of letter-writing manuals, instruction books for specific purposes, may have influenced the replacement.
Descargas
Citas
Primary sources
Anon. (1756). The complete letter-writer: or, new and polite English secretary. Containing directions for writing letters on all occasions, ... To which is ... The second edition. London: S. Crowder and H Woodgate. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO>.
Anon. (1800). The complete young man’s companion; or, Self instructer: being an introduction to all the various branches of useful learning and knowledge. ... Manchester: Sowler and Russell. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO>.
Anon. (1773). The court letter writer; or the complete English secretary for town and country. London: S. Bladon. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. >http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO>.
Fisher, G. (1735). The instructor: or, young man’s best companion: ... To which is added, the family’s best companion, ... By George Fisher, ... London: A. Bettersworth et al. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. .
Fordyce, D. (1790). The new and complete British letter-writer; or, young secretary’s instructor in polite modern letter-writing. ... By David Fordyce, M.A. London: C Cook. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. .
Hallifax, C. (1755). Familiar letters on various subjects of business and amusement. Written in a natural, easy manner; and publish’d, principally, for the service of ... The third edition, revised and corrected. London: R. Baldwin. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ ECCO>.
Hicks, W. (1701). Wits academy: or, the muses delight. Being the newest academy of complements. Consisting of merry dialogues upon various occasions, ... With a perfect collection of all the newest and best songs and catches, ... The eighth edition, with additions. London: W. Richardson. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO>.
Tavernier, J. (1759). The entertaining correspondent; or, newest and most compleat polite letter writer. In three parts. ... To which is prefixed, a large introduction, ... Berwick: R. Taylor. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. .
Secondary sources
Akimoto, M. (2000). “The grammaticalization of the verb ‘pray’.” In O. Fischer, A. Rosenbach & D. Stein. (Eds.). Pathways of change. Grammaticalization in English, (pp. 67-84). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Bannet, E. T. (2005). Empire of letters: Letter manuals and transatlantic correspondence, 1680-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J. & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood: N. J. Ablex.
Brant, C. (2006). Eighteenth-century letters and British culture. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brinton, L. (2006). “Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English.” In A. van Kemenade & B. Los (Eds.), The handbook of the history of English, (pp.307-334). London: Blackwell.
Brinton, L. & Traugott, E. C. (2005). Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J. & Kytö, M. (1999). “Modifying pragmatic force hedges in Early Modern English dialogues.” In A. H. Jucker, F. Lebsanft & G. Fritz (Eds.). Historical dialogue analysis. (pp. 293-312). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dossena, M. (2010). “Be pleased to report expressly’: the development of a public style in late modern English business and official correspondence.” In R. Hickey (Ed.), Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and change, (pp. 293-308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Faya Cerqueiro, F. (2007). “The courtesy markers pray and please in the late 18th century: evidence from the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose.” In M. Losada Friend, P. Ron Vaz, S. Hernández Santano & J. Casanova (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN conference. Huelva: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva.
Faya Cerqueiro, F. (2008). “Who requests whom and how they do it: use of request markers in Late Modern English letters.” In M. J. Lorenzo Modia (Ed.), Proceedings of the 31st AEDEAN international conference (pp. 269-278). A Coruña: Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade da Coruña.
Faya Cerqueiro, F. (2009). “‘Please in nineteenth-century English: origin and position of a courtesy marker”. In C. Prado-Alonso, L. Gómez-García, I. Pastor-Gómez & D. Tizón-Couto (Eds.), New trends and methodologies in applied English language research. Diachronic, diatopic and contrastive studies (pp. 25-35). Bern, etc.: Peter Lang.
Fitzmaurice, S. M. (1998). “The commerce of language in the pursuit of politeness in eighteenth-century England.” English Studies,79 (4), 309-328.
Fitzmaurice, S. M. (2000). “Like talking on paper? The pragmatics of courtship and the eighteenth-century familiar letter.” Language Sciences, 22, 359-383.
Gold, D. L. (2006). “A little-noticed English construction: Subjectless imperative please to + infinitive.” Neophilologus, 90, 107-117.
Görlach, M. (1999). Nineteenth-century England: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Görlach, M. (2001). Eighteenth century English. Heidelberg: Winter.
Hopper, P. & Traugott, E. C. (2003). Grammaticalization (2nd ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hunt, M. R. (1996). The middling sort: Commerce, gender and the family in England,
-1780. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Jucker, A. H. (1994). “The feasibility of historical pragmatics.” Journal of Pragmatics, 22 (5), 533-536.
Jucker, A. H. (2000). “English historical pragmatics: Problems of data and methodology.” In G. di Martino & M. Lima (Eds.), English diachronic pragmatics, (pp. 17-55). Napoli: CUEN.
Langford, P. (1984). “The eighteenth century (1688-1789).” In K. O. Morgan (Ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Britain, (pp. 352-418). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Österreicher, W. (1997). “Types of orality in text.” In E. J. Bakker & A. Kahane (Eds.), Written voices, spoke signs, tradition, performance, and the epic text. (pp. 190-214). Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Palander-Collin, M. (2010). “Correspondence.” In A. H. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), Historical pragmatics, (pp. 651-677). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Porter, R. (1982). English society in the eighteenth century. London: Penguin.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2006). “Eighteenth-century prescriptivism and the norm of correctness.” In A. van Kemenade & B. Los (Eds.), The handbook of the history of English, (pp. 539-557). London: Blackwell.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2009). An introduction to late modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. & Faya Cerqueiro, F. (2007). “Saying please in Late Modern English”. In J. Pérez-Guerra et al. (Eds.), ‘Of varying language and opposing creed’: New insights into Late Modern English, (pp. 421-444). Bern: Peter Lang.
Traugott, E. C. (2000). “Promise and pray-parentheticals.” Eleventh International conference on English historical linguistics (ICEHL XI), Santiago de Compostela, September 2000. In Elizabeth C. Traugott. Papers Available On-line. <http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/ect-papersonline.html>. Stanford University
Traugott, E. C. & Dasher, R. B. (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Bergen, L. & Denison, D. (2007). “A corpus of late eighteenth-century prose.” In J. C. Beal, K. P. Corrigan & H. L. Moisl (Eds.), Models and methods in the handling of unconventional digital corpora, vol. 2, (pp. 228-46). Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave.
OED. Oxford English dictionary. OED Online, March 2000-. Simpson, J.A. (Ed.). March 2011. . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Descargas
Publicado
Cómo citar
Número
Sección
Licencia
Aquellos autores/as que tengan publicaciones con esta revista, aceptan los términos siguientes:
- Los autores/as conservarán sus derechos de autor y garantizarán a la revista el derecho de primera publicación de su obra, el cuál estará simultáneamente sujeto a la Licencia de reconocimiento de Creative Commons que permite a terceros compartir la obra siempre que se indique su autor y su primera publicación esta revista.
- Los autores/as podrán adoptar otros acuerdos de licencia no exclusiva de distribución de la versión de la obra publicada (p. ej.: depositarla en un archivo telemático institucional o publicarla en un volumen monográfico) siempre que se indique la publicación inicial en esta revista.
- Se permite y recomienda a los autores/as difundir su obra a través de Internet (p. ej.: en archivos telemáticos institucionales o en su página web) antes y durante el proceso de envío, lo cual puede producir intercambios interesantes y aumentar las citas de la obra publicada. (Véase El efecto del acceso abierto).
Revista de Lenguas para fines específicos is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional License.
