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Part of
Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English
Edited by Marina Dossena
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 117–134

“Across the ocean ferry”

Point of view, description and evaluation in nineteenth-century narrations of ocean crossings

ORCID logo | University of Bergamo, Italy

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’.

Published online: 12 February 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.4.06dos
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