Chapter 4
Singular, plural, or collective?
Grammatical flexibility and the definition of identity in the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants
Emigrants’ letters have finally become the object of linguistic investigation since language historians have joined historians in
their study of correspondence as a valuable research tool. In historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, in particular, letters
have proved useful in studies of interaction strategies meant to convey greater or lesser distance from other participants in the exchange. In
this contribution I intend to further my analysis of such strategies in a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ letters, currently
in preparation at the University of Bergamo, Italy; the aim is to study how the use of personal pronouns may vary depending on the topics at
hand and the author’s attitude towards them. After an overview of the material currently available, my contribution will follow an integrated
approach in which basic quantitative findings provide preliminary data; this will be supplemented with an outline of what pragmatic moves
appear to be most prominent, in order to define how morphosyntactic patterns are used in different communicative contexts with different
illocutionary aims. To that end, both close readings of the documents and qualitative analyses are shown to be indispensable.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.119CSC and beyond
- 1.2Stance, attitude, and pragmatics
- 2.Stance and pronouns
- 2.1Me, myself, and I – not forgetting YOU
- 2.2WE: inclusion and/or exclusion
- 2.3Third parties: within the network and beyond
- 3.Concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E.
2024.
“I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters.
Corpus Pragmatics 8:1
► pp. 77 ff.
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