Volume 39, Issue 1 -

This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the vernacular of epistolarity in England. Employing historical dictionaries and corpora, the study 1) locates the range of words for ‘sincerity’ from a time when the modern lexeme had yet to be borrowed in either vernacular, and 2) demonstrates that while it is clear that Middle English epistolarity was greatly influenced by Anglo-Norman, quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that sincerity markers were much less commonplace in Middle English performatives, which further suggests ways in which the communicative ideal and practice of sincerity were reanalyzed from one language to the next.

The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community. The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing. Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.

The concept of sincerity has links to honesty, openness, and authenticity, including of feelings. As expressions of sincerity become formalized in epistolary practice, however, a tension arises between sincerity and the articulation of it. An examination of a corpus of private family letters in French and Spanish from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that use of the word ‘sincerity’ is much more common as an epistolary formula in French, where it had a broader semantic range, while authors writing in Spanish use other methods to index truth and emotional openness. The most frequent users of this formula are shown to be less skilled writers and bilinguals writing in their second language, suggesting a greater reliance on preconstructed formulae, especially in situations of increased linguistic and social distance. Finally, some bilingual authors transfer the pattern into Spanish, indicating that fixed phrases and formulae are available in a bilingual’s linguistic repertoire for pragmatic redeployment.

This article is concerned with the history of yours sincerely , a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of the 1950s. This study investigates patterns of usage of closing formulae in a bestselling business letter-writing manual William Anderson’s Practical Mercantile Correspondence, A Collection of Modern Letters of Business, etc., whose first edition was published by Effiingham Wilson in 1836 in London. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period during which sincerely appears to have been gaining in popularity. The analysis of the repertoire of the closing formulae in Anderson shows that sincerely was starting to compete with truly for the same slot within the matrix of the extended type of closing formulae. This competition of sincerely with truly can be read as an indicator of a larger social and cultural change, which saw the rise of sincerity , reinterpreted as genuineness of feeling, as the new cultural buzzword.

This paper investigates the lexical representation of sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on data from the corpus of Lithuanian letters and employing the techniques of corpus, statistical and philological analysis, this paper explores the use, frequency and context of occurrence of the four sets of lexical stems: atvir - (‘open’, ‘frank’), nuošird - (‘sincere’, ‘honest’), šird - (‘heart’), and tikr - (‘authentic’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’). As each of these lexical stems foreground different semantic shades of sincerity, they are treated in this paper as lexical variables that inscribe different degrees of an author’s sincere attitude (stance) toward the addressee and the writing act itself. The findings suggest that in Lithuanian epistolarity the use of sincerity lexemes is constrained by the grammatical shape of the lexeme and genre-related factors, namely, formulaic vs. non-formulaic context. Frequent lexical inscription of sincerity lexemes in the speech acts of thanking, wishing and greeting suggests that sincerity (as a stance) is conventionally linked to these specific social acts. When these social acts are evoked in epistolary practice, they thus evoke a particular (sincere) stance meaning.