“Across the ocean ferry”
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Marina Dossena
Abstract
This contribution aims to outline the main ways in which solidarity is elicited in nineteenth-century narratives of ocean crossings. In addition to materials transcribed for the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence (19CSC) and those available in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW), my analysis will take into consideration Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895) and Edmondo De Amicis’s Sull’oceano (1889), in order to compare texts written by authors of varying levels of education, both in English and in Italian. Special attention will be given to the representation of dialogue and personalization strategies; the methodological framework of corpus-based discourse studies will combine with recent approaches to historical pragmatics and sociolinguistics, especially in relation to ‘language history from below’.
Abstract
This contribution aims to outline the main ways in which solidarity is elicited in nineteenth-century narratives of ocean crossings. In addition to materials transcribed for the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence (19CSC) and those available in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW), my analysis will take into consideration Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895) and Edmondo De Amicis’s Sull’oceano (1889), in order to compare texts written by authors of varying levels of education, both in English and in Italian. Special attention will be given to the representation of dialogue and personalization strategies; the methodological framework of corpus-based discourse studies will combine with recent approaches to historical pragmatics and sociolinguistics, especially in relation to ‘language history from below’.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Studying real-time change in the adverbial subjunctive 13
- Political perspectives on linguistic innovation in independent America 37
- Five Hundred Mistakes Corrected 55
- Transatlantic perspectives on late nineteenth-century English usage 73
- “Provincial in England, but in common use with us” 99
- “Across the ocean ferry” 117
- Legitimising linguistic devices in A Cheering Voice from Upper Canada (1834) 135
- Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness 153
- ‘[B]ut sure its only a penny after all’ 179
- Assigned gender in a corpus of nineteenth-century correspondence among settlers in the American Great Plains 199
- Index 219
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Studying real-time change in the adverbial subjunctive 13
- Political perspectives on linguistic innovation in independent America 37
- Five Hundred Mistakes Corrected 55
- Transatlantic perspectives on late nineteenth-century English usage 73
- “Provincial in England, but in common use with us” 99
- “Across the ocean ferry” 117
- Legitimising linguistic devices in A Cheering Voice from Upper Canada (1834) 135
- Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness 153
- ‘[B]ut sure its only a penny after all’ 179
- Assigned gender in a corpus of nineteenth-century correspondence among settlers in the American Great Plains 199
- Index 219
