The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English
A pragmatic approach
| Northern Arizona University
This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords.
This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.
This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 95] 2002. viii, 263 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
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vii
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Introduction
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1–15
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1. The pragmatics of epistolary conversation: Preliminary considerations
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17–33
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2. Context and the linguistic construction of epistolary worlds
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35–54
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3. Making and reading epistolary meaning
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55–86
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4. Sociable letters, acts of advice and medical counsel
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87–128
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5. Epistolary acts of seeking and dispensing patronage
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129–174
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6. Intersubjectivity and the writing of the epistolary interlocutor
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175–206
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7. Relevance and the consequences of unintended epistolary meaning
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207–231
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Making meaning in letters: a lesson in reading
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233–240
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References
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241–252
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Index
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253–258
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“This is a rich and stimulating book which carries much information and valuable insights for readers from different backgrounds. It is based on a well-chosen corpus of letters and it provides perceptive
and fruitful analyses of letters from a wide array of social contexts and with pragmatic functions characteristic of their historical period.”
and fruitful analyses of letters from a wide array of social contexts and with pragmatic functions characteristic of their historical period.”
Gerd Fritz, University of Giessen, in Pragmatics & Cognition, Vol. 13:2 (2005)
Cited by
Cited by 25 other publications
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Black, Andrew
Crane, Cori
D’Arcy, Alexandra
King, Jeremy
Kádár, Dániel Z.
Marcus, Imogen
Marcus, Imogen
Nevala, Minna & Minna Palander-Collin
Nyholm, Linda, Lisbet Nyström & Unni Å. Lindström
Padilla-Moyano, Manuel
Romaine, Suzanne
Van Hensbergen, Claudine
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Subjects
BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General