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Article published In:
Historical (socio)pragmatics at present
Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk and Irma Taavitsainen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2] 2017
► pp. 295–314

“Now to my distress”

Shame discourse in eighteenth-century English letters

| University of Helsinki

It is argued that shame has become increasingly important as a mechanism of social control in Western societies while our awareness of shame has simultaneously decreased. This paper explores the functions of the lexemes shame, disgrace and ignominy in the eighteenth-century section of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and investigates how shame-inducing situations were discussed in letter-writing. Direct expressions of shame emerge particularly as formulaic apologies and reflect breached social conventions, honour, inadequacy and immorality. Shame discourse in the two case studies, however, proved to be context-dependent, evasive and euphemistic, and shame was expressed through a range of negative emotions. An element of discomfort in eighteenth-century shame discourse indicates that shame had taboo connotations, but the formulaic presence of shame and its connection to the cultural keyword of honour underlines its role as a mechanism of social control.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, emotion discourse, face, historical semantics, historical sociopragmatics, Late Modern English, politeness, shame, taboo
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods and material
  • 3.Shame discourse in the ceece: corpus analysis
  • 4.Shameful situations discussed: theft, expulsion and secret families
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00007.sai
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Leitner, Magdalena & Andreas H. Jucker
2021. Historical Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 687 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 567 ff. DOI logo

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