The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English PDF Author: Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588111869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English PDF Author: Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588111869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.

Letter Writing

Letter Writing PDF Author: Terttu Nevalainen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027222312
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.

The Material Letter in Early Modern England

The Material Letter in Early Modern England PDF Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137006064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Letters Familiar and Formal

Letters Familiar and Formal PDF Author: Arcangela Tarabotti
Publisher: Acmrs Publications
ISBN: 9780772721327
Category : Benedictine nuns
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Coerced into taking the veil, Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) spent her life protesting the practice of forcing girls into convents. Her fearless defense of women and attacks on patriarchal Venetian society earned her renown and access to the presses. Her publications, however, invited constant controversy. Tarabotti published her Letters Familiar and Formal to protect and enhance her literary reputation while also chronicling contemporary literary society and material existence in an early modern convent. The Letters flaunted Tarabotti's literary accomplishments, humiliated her critics, and advertised her powerful network of allies in Northern Italy and France. The Letters document how Tarabotti established herself as one of the most forceful proponents for women's self-determination in early modern Europe.

The Material Letter in Early Modern England

The Material Letter in Early Modern England PDF Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137006064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin

The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin PDF Author: William Mills Todd
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810117112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This text examines the tradition of familiar letter writing that developed in the early 1800s among the Arzamasians, a literary circle that included such luminaries as Pushkin, Karamzin and Turgenev, and argues that these letters constitute a distinct literary genre. Todd gives a thorough prehistory of the convention of correspondence and concentrates on the themes, strategies, and autobiographical functions of the letter for several master writers in Pushkin's time. It is written in an accessible style with translations, an annotated list of the Arzamasians, and an extensive index and a bibliography.

Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues

Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues PDF Author: Terry Walker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292604
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.

The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation

The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation PDF Author: Axel Hübler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027253972
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is the first historical investigation on the nonverbal component of conversation. In the courtly society of 16th and 17th century England, it is argued that a drift appeared toward an increased use of prosodic means of expression at the expense of gestural means. Direct evidence is provided by courtesy books and personal documents of the time, indirect evidence by developments in the English lexicon. The rationale of the argument is cognitively grounded; given the integral role of gestures in thinking-for-speaking, it rests on an isomorphism between gestural and prosodic behavior that is established semiotically and elaborated by insights from neurocognitive frequency theory and task dynamics. The proposal is rounded off by an illustration from present-day conversational data and the proof of its adaptability to current theories of language change. The cross-disciplinary approach addresses all those interested in (historical) pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, cultural semantics, semiotics, or language change.

Historical Sociopragmatics

Historical Sociopragmatics PDF Author: Jonathan Culpeper
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027286604
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009), this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics has a central focus on historical language use in its situational contexts, and how those situational contexts engender norms which speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. The chapters represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The reader will find English texts from the 15th century through to the 18th, a variety of genres (including personal correspondence, trial proceedings and plays), and both qualitative and (corpus-based) quantitative analyses. Importantly, attention is given to how contexts can be (re)constructed from written records, a sine qua non of the field. It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in pragmatics, especially socially-oriented pragmatics, and/or historical linguistics, especially the history of English.

The Pen and the People

The Pen and the People PDF Author: Susan Whyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199532443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, 'The Pen and the People' will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people.