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Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern EnglishEdited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 195] 2010
► pp. 111–133
Edited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 195] 2010
► pp. 111–133
Reporting and social role construction in eighteenth-century personal correspondence
Choosing who and what to report, writers adopt a position in interaction that serves their needs and expectations of the situation as well as the addressee’s expected needs. In this paper, we study reporting from a socio-pragmatic perspective with the aim of understanding the function of reporting in the communicative situations in which it occurs in eighteenth-century personal letters. Our analysis pays attention to the role of the reporter vis-à-vis the addressee, the reporting situation, the subject matter of the report, the identity of the person whose speech is reported, and the form of the reporting frame. The results suggest that reporting in eighteenth-century personal correspondence exhibits genre-specific characteristics but also relates to the writer’s role in the situation.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Culpeper, Jonathan & Minna Nevala
2012. Sociocultural processes and the history of English. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 365 ff. 
Evans, Mel
2017. Royal language and reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:1 ► pp. 30 ff.
GRUND, PETER J.
2023. Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in the Old Bailey Corpus. English Language and Linguistics 27:3 ► pp. 517 ff.
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