Changing styles of letter-writing?
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Tanja Säily
Abstract
We analyse the social embedding of stylistic change in the frequencies of nouns, lexical verbs and personal pronouns in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Our visualization methods show that the frequency of nouns exhibits a consistent decrease, while that of verbs and pronouns tends to increase over time. This suggests a colloquialization of the letter genre, which is particularly prominent in letters by women and the upper ranks as well as those written to socially close recipients. In the later eighteenth century, however, there is a convergence across genders and social ranks indicating the development of a shared, polite style among the increasingly highly educated middle and upper classes in the corpus.
Abstract
We analyse the social embedding of stylistic change in the frequencies of nouns, lexical verbs and personal pronouns in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Our visualization methods show that the frequency of nouns exhibits a consistent decrease, while that of verbs and pronouns tends to increase over time. This suggests a colloquialization of the letter genre, which is particularly prominent in letters by women and the upper ranks as well as those written to socially close recipients. In the later eighteenth century, however, there is a convergence across genders and social ranks indicating the development of a shared, polite style among the increasingly highly educated middle and upper classes in the corpus.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
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Part I. Pragmatics and prescriptivism
- Researching understatement in the history of English 10
- The rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization in English 33
- Gender, genre, and prescriptivism 60
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Part II. Political, legal and medical text types
- A manipulative technique in a congressional debate 86
- Is legal discourse really “outside the ravages of time”? 101
- Duties, offices, and conduct 129
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Part III. The language of late modern letters
- Changing styles of letter-writing? 154
- “No criticism or remarks & pray burn it as fast as you read it” 180
- Filled-in petition forms and hand-drafted petitions to the Foundling Hospital 198
- “Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say” 225
- Index 251
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Pragmatics and prescriptivism
- Researching understatement in the history of English 10
- The rise and fall of sentence-internal capitalization in English 33
- Gender, genre, and prescriptivism 60
-
Part II. Political, legal and medical text types
- A manipulative technique in a congressional debate 86
- Is legal discourse really “outside the ravages of time”? 101
- Duties, offices, and conduct 129
-
Part III. The language of late modern letters
- Changing styles of letter-writing? 154
- “No criticism or remarks & pray burn it as fast as you read it” 180
- Filled-in petition forms and hand-drafted petitions to the Foundling Hospital 198
- “Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say” 225
- Index 251
