Band 8, Heft 1

The paper investigates the choice of writing system as the visual representation of identity in a specific multilingual and multi-ethnic context of antiquity, namely, the Achaemenid Empire. In particular, the discussion focuses on the linguistic and socio-cultural environment in Lydia and Hellespontine Phrygia, the western satrapies of the Persian Empire, where various languages and writing systems were available. Through the cases study analyzed here it has been possible to detect the symbolic status of a language – as well as that of its writing system – in the expression of ethnic identity at the local community level. In the case of Lydia, the analysis of the seals inscriptions provides evidence of identity negotiation from individuals of the local elite who were engaging with Persian power. The bullae from Daskyleion reflect a different linguistic practice in the context of power relations. Interestingly, even though the central imperial authority did not take advantage of any specific language use, including Aramaic, as a means to impose power, the presence of seals in Aramaic in the Daskyleion archive seems to suggest that it had status as an international prestige language, imbuing the inscriber of any ethnicity with the might of imperial power.

This article explores how women from the lower ranks of Chilean society mobilized a dynamic address system through affective letter-writing to negotiate their familial position and identity at the end of Chile’s Nitrate Era. Inspired by the third wave in historical sociolinguistics and in dialogue with the glottopolitical perspective, the study foregrounds the interactive nature of ego-documents by analyzing indexical connections between address choice, emotions and unequal gendered relationships between partners. The pragmatic analysis of a set of letters written by women between 1913 and 1928 shows insightful connections between address choice, speech acts, emotions and politeness strategies. By linking textual evidence to the material conditions in which letter-writing is embedded, the article illustrates how women writers negotiated their position and personae within the family structure by inscribing letter-writing in a system of patriarchal reciprocity. This suggests that address choices and the expression of emotions are an index of gendered reciprocal practices that allowed women to preserve their familial structure in the context of industrialization and labor migration.

This study applies the methods of variational pragmatics, a discipline situated at the intersection of pragmatics and variationist sociolinguistics, to historical data to explore the effect of the macro-social factors gender and region on request choices in Scottish and English private letters written between 1570 and 1700. It specifically examines gender variation regarding the choice of request strategies and of internal downgrading modification, e.g. the use of modal auxiliaries or hedges. Overall, the analysis only finds limited evidence for gender differences in the private correspondence data. The requestive behaviour of Scottish and English female and male letter-writers displays similar directness levels and both genders also employ mitigating modifiers to a similar degree. It is shown that the requestive style of women and men is determined by the situational circumstances of a letter rather than by gender. Moreover, when zooming in on the level of direct realisation strategies, the analysis provides evidence that the macro-social factor region has a greater impact on the choice of realisation strategies than gender.

This paper investigates the linguistic outcomes of contact situations in 43 Norwegian urban towns, comparing the urban varieties’ noun systems to those of the rural dialects surrounding each town. Two questions are explored: i) Is the morphology of the urban Norwegian varieties always more simplified, in terms of paradigmatic complexity and repertoire of inflectional suffixes, when compared to neighbouring rural varieties? ii) Can the noun morphology of urban Norwegian varieties best be explained as resulting from levelling and standardisation processes or as grammatical simplification between dialects in contact? We find that the urban varieties’ noun systems form a close, yet consistently simplified, match to their neighbouring rural varieties. The urban varieties can, however, not easily be placed on a scale between traditional rural dialects and standard language, indicating that the noun systems in the urban varieties of Norway are best understood as resulting from simplification rather than standardization.

This study uses corpus data and analytical statistics to analyze the negative reinforcer particles pas and mie in medieval French. This paper first undertakes a survey of the chronological and geographical distribution of the particles pas and mie , and then a variation analysis of the use of these two negative reinforcer particles to better understand the use of reinforced French negation between 1100 and 1505. The historical findings, namely the loss of written mie , compared with the modern dialectal negation (spoken mie maintained in the dialects of the northeastern francophone regions) suggest that the disappearance of written mie corresponds with a shift in written norms during the fourteenth century rather than a change in the spoken language. Specifically, the observed written change in negative reinforcer particles is hypothesized as attributable to the fourteenth century expansion of a supra-regional scripta originating in Paris.