Cover not available
Part of
Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster and Susan Fitzmaurice
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 299] 2019
► pp. 197–218

Chapter 6
“With kindest regards”

Relational work, social identity and (hyper)politeness in Late Modern English documents

| Università degli Studi di Bergamo

In Late Modern times, both usage guides and letter-writing manuals commented on language etiquette, providing guidance on how to address specific recipients according to their rank, age, and gender, how to approach certain topics, and how to convey mutual status relying exclusively on language. Guides and manuals, however, cannot always be assumed to be accurate representations of what actually occurred in usage. In this contribution I intend to investigate these materials alongside authentic ones, in order to assess the extent to which texts convey their writers’ awareness of asymmetrical social status by placing particular emphasis on politeness moves. Special attention is paid to business discourse, where identity construal issues are crucial for the maintenance of successful networks.

Keywords: nineteenth-century English, business discourse, usage guides, correspondence, politeness theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Providing guidance: Politeness in model texts
  • 3.Social status awareness and the politeness cline
    • 3.1Negotiating status in business
    • 3.2Negotiating status beyond business
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.07dos
References

Primary sources

19CSC, Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence
in preparation. Marina Dossena, and Richard Dury compilers University of Bergamo Italy
Anon
1905 La più grande e completa grammatica italiana – inglese […]. Manuale di conversazione […] Dizionario […] Segretario con 120 lettere italiane ed inglese [sic]. Lettere per l’operaio, lettere commerciali, lettere amorose. Carta per la cittadinanza. N.p.Google Scholar
Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing
[URL] (accessed September 2018).
Nietz Collection of Nineteenth-century Schoolbooks
[URL] (accessed September 2018).
Bax, Marcel, and Dániel Z. Kádár
(eds.) 2011 Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness. Special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12/1-2.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Jane Demmen
2011 “Nineteenth-Century English Politeness: Negative Politeness, Conventional Indirect Requests and the Rise of the Individual Self.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1–2): 49–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dierks, Konstantin
2000 “The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750–1800”. In Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. by David Barton, and Nigel Hall, 31–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dossena, Marina
2006 “Forms of Self-representation in Nineteenth-Century Business Letters”. In Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English, ed. by Marina Dossena, and Irma Taavitsainen, 173–190. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2008a “ ‘We beg leave to refer to your decision’: Pragmatic Traits of Nineteenth-Century Business Correspondence”. In Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data, ed. by Marina Dossena, and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 235–255.Google Scholar
2008b “Prescriptivism a Century Ago: Business Correspondence Taught to Emigrants – A Case Study”. In Perspectives on Prescriptivism, ed. by Joan C. Beal, Carmela Nocera, and Massimo Sturiale, 41–58. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2010a “ ‘Be pleased to report expressly’: The Development of Public Style English in Nineteenth-Century Business and Official Correspondence”. In Eighteenth-Century English. Ideology and Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey, 293–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010b “Building Trust through (Self-)Appraisal in Nineteenth-Century Business Correspondence”. In Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English, ed. by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-Collin, 191–209. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Handwritten Communication in Nineteenth-Century Business Correspondence”. In Communicating Early English Manuscripts, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker, and Päivi Pahta, 133–146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2012 “The Study of Correspondence: Theoretical and Methodological Issues”. In Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, ed. by Marina Dossena, and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, 13–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “ ‘There is reason to believe however…’: The Construction of Trust as Reliability in Late Modern English Correspondence and Non-Literary Prose”. In Trust and Discourse, Organizational Perspectives, ed. by Katja Pelsmaekers, Geert Jacobs, and Craig Rollo, 181–200. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Dossena, Marina, and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti
(eds.) 2012 Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dossena, Marina, and Susan M. Fitzmaurice
(eds.) 2006 Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Dury, Richard
2006 “A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Business Correspondence: Methodology of Transcription”. In Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations, ed. by Marina Dossena, and Susan M. Fitzmaurice, 193–205. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Fitzmaurice, Susan
2010 “Changes in the Meanings of Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Discourse Analysis and Historical Evidence”. In Historical (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 87–115. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Fukushima, Saeko
2015 “In Search of Another Understanding of Politeness: From the Perspective of Attentiveness”. Journal of Politeness Research 11 (2): 261–287. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul H.
1975 [1989] “Logic and Conversation”. In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. by Paul H. Grice, 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler, and Nicole Studer-Joho
(eds.) 2013 Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen
(eds.) 2004 Letter Writing. Special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics .Google Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Annick Paternoster
2015 “Historicity in Metapragmatics. A Study on ‘Discernment’ in Italian Metadiscourse”. Pragmatics 25 (3): 369–391. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas
2007 “Text Types and the Methodology of Diachronic Speech Act Analysis”. In Historical Pragmatics: What It Is and How to Do It, ed. by Susan M. Fitzmaurice, and Irma Taavitsainen, 139–166. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts
2005 “Politeness Theory and Relational Work”. Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 9–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Linda C.
2012 “Teaching Grammar and Composition through Letter Writing in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England”. In Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, ed. by Marina Dossena, and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, 229–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016a “Introduction”. In Forms of Address: Five Hundred Years of Letters, ed. by Linda C. Mitchell. Special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly 79 (3): 343–344.Google Scholar
2016b “Entertainment and Instruction: Women’s Roles in the English Epistolary Tradition”. In Forms of Address: Five Hundred Years of Letters, ed. by Linda C. Mitchell. Special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly 79 (3): 439–454.Google Scholar
Mugglestone, Lynda
2006 “English in the Nineteenth Century”. In The Oxford History of English, ed. by Lynda Mugglestone, 274–304. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Palander-Collin, Minna, and Minna Nevala
(eds.) 2005 Letters and Letter Writing. Special issue of European Journal of English Studies .Google Scholar
Paternoster, Annick, and Francesca Saltamacchia
2017 “(Im)politeness Formulae and (Im)politeness Rules: Metadiscourse and Conventionalisation in 19th Century Italian Conduct Books”. In Studies on Language Norms in Context, ed. by Elena Maria Pandolfi, Johanna Miecznikowski, Sabine Christopher, and Alain Kamber, 263–301. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Poster, Carol, and Linda C. Mitchell
(eds.) 2007 Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Schultz, Lucille M.
2000 “Letter-Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Schools in the United States”. In Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. by David Barton, and Nigel Hall, 109–130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shvanyukova, Polina
2014 “ ‘A cargo of coffee, sugar, and indigo’: Transatlantic Business Correspondence in Nineteenth-Century Business Letter-Writing Manuals”. Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 3: 73–90.Google Scholar
Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa
2003 “ ‘Best patterns for your imitation’: Early Modern Letter-Writing Instruction and Real Correspondence”. In Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to Modern, ed. by Risto Hiltunen, and Janne Skaffari, 167–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard
2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Paternoster, Annick
2022. Introduction. In Historical Etiquette, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.