The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English

A pragmatic approach

Author
ORCID logoSusan Fitzmaurice | Northern Arizona University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027251152 (Eur) | EUR 110.00
ISBN 9781588111869 (USA) | USD 165.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027297396 | EUR 110.00 | USD 165.00
 
Google Play logo
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.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 95] 2002.  viii, 263 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“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.”
Cited by

Cited by 40 other publications

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2015. “Sure this is a great country for drink and rowing at elections”. In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 258],  pp. 270 ff. DOI logo
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2022. Osborne, Dorothy (Later Temple). In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 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.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2002018542 | Marc record