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Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster and Susan Fitzmaurice
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 299] 2019
► pp. 171–196

Chapter 5
Promoting negative politeness in nineteenth-century England

The case of letter-writing manuals

| Università degli Studi di Bergamo
In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.
Keywords: business correspondence, letter-writing guides, requests, negative politeness
Article outline
  • 1.Investigating politeness dimension in nineteenth-century letter-writing guides
  • 2.Towards a negative politeness society: Making requests in pre-nineteenth and nineteenth-century England
  • 3.Inventory of linguistic strategies for making requests in nineteenth-century commercial model letters
    • 3.1Inventory of linguistic strategies of making requests: Percy Sadler’s Art of the English Correspondence (AEC)
      • 3.1.1Direct requests
      • 3.1.2Indirect requests
    • 3.2Inventory of linguistic strategies of making requests: ULW, CLW and SELW
  • 4.Discussion of the findings
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.06shv
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Paternoster, Annick
2022. Introduction. In Historical Etiquette, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Rogos-Hebda, Anna
2021. Review. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 56:1 ► pp. 749 ff. DOI logo
Bartali, Valentina
2020. Andreas H. Jucker: Review of “Politeness in the History of English: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day”. Corpus Pragmatics 4:4 ► pp. 485 ff. DOI logo
Jucker, Andreas
2020. Politeness in the History of English, DOI logo

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