Cover not available
Part of
Late Modern English: Novel encounters
Edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg
[Studies in Language Companion Series 214] 2020
► pp. 333–356

“I am desired (…) to desire”

Routines of power in the British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1827–1830)

| Adam Mickiewicz University
Historical pragmatic analyses have underlined the discourse dependence and pragmatic sensitivity of speech acts. As a result, researchers’ attention has shifted from form, structure and tokenisation of utterances to interactive frameworks. This paper follows suit and argues that speech acts in historical correspondence – in this paper, the letters of the British Colonial Office on the Cape Colony – bear a close resemblance to speech events, interactional moves or speech actions. It presents a qualitative approach to speech act identification and classification that relies on the routines of power and the notion of macro-speech act. In the process of speech act identification, co-textual features and outcomes (perlocutionary effects) serve as crucial reference points. The findings confirm the significance of the status differentials for an early nineteenth-century specialised discourse domain of institutional correspondence.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Speech acts and macro speech acts
  • 3.Historical context and data
  • 4.Routines of power
    • 4.1Writer performed speech act vs. described speech act
    • 4.2Macro-speech acts
    • 4.3Macro-speech acts: Discussion
    • 4.4Initiation: Response dyads
    • 4.5Micro-speech acts
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Primary source
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.15wlo
References (42)
Primary source
Theal, George McCall. 1897–1905. Records of the Cape Colony (1793–1869). London: Public Record Office.Google Scholar
References
Aijmer, Karin. 1996. Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Archer, Dawn. 2007. Developing a more detailed picture of the English courtroom (1640–1760): Data and methodological issues facing historical pragmatics. In Methods in Historical Pragmatics, Susan Fitzmaurice & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 185–217. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Speech acts. In Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 379–418. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Austin, John L. [1962] 1975. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bach, Kent & Harnish, Robert M. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca & Harris, Sandra. 1996. Requests and status in business correspondence. Journal of Pragmatics 28: 635–662. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Olshtain, Elite. 1984. Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics 5(3): 196–213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2008. Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power. In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, Derek Bousfield & Miriam A. Locher (eds), 17–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Archer, Dawn. 2008. Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640–1760. In Jucker & Taavitsainen (eds), 45–84.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Nevala, Minna. 2012. Sociocultural processes and the history of English. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 365–391. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Dossena, Marina. 2010. “We beg to suggest”: Features of legal English in Late Modern English business letters. In The Language of Public and Private Discourse in a Historical Perspective, Nicholas Brownlees, Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti & John Denton (eds), 46–64. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Faya-Cerqueiro, Fátima. 2011. Letter-writing manuals and the evolution of requests markers in the eighteenth century. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 17: 295–318.Google Scholar
Freund, William M. 1989. The Cape under the transitional governments, 1795–1814. In The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, Richard Elphick & Hermann Giliomee (eds), 324–357. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman.Google Scholar
Harris, Sandra. 2003. Politeness and power: Making and responding to “requests” in institutional settings. Text 23(1): 27–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. Politeness and power. In The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, Carmen Llmamas, Louise Mullany & Peter Stockwell (eds), 122–129. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2011. The limits of politeness re-visited: Courtroom discourse as a case in point. In Discursive Approaches to Politeness, Linguistic Politeness Research Group (eds), 85–108. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haverkate, Henk. 1984. Speech Acts, Speakers, and Hearers: Reference and Referential Strategies in Spanish [Pragmatics & Beyond V:4]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holtgraves, Thomas. 2005. The production and perception of implicit performatives. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 2024–2043. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. & Taavitsainen, Irma. 2000. Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(eds). 2008. Speech Acts in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. Complimenting in the history of American English. In Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 243], Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker & Jukka Tuominen (eds), 257–276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. 2000. Explicit performatives in Old English: A corpus-based study of directives. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1(2): 301–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lutzky, Ursula & Kehoe, Andrew. 2017. “I apologise for my poor blogging”: Searching for apologies in the Birmingham Blog Corpus. Corpus Pragmatics 1: 37–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel & Jefferson, Gail. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel, Jefferson, Gail & Sacks, Harvey. 1977. The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2): 361–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1979. Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Peter. 1991. Speech Act Theory, Discourse Structure and Indirect Speech Acts. PhD dissertation, University of Leeds.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma & Jucker, Andreas H. 2007. Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English. In Methods in Historical Pragmatics, Susan Fitzmaurice & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 107–137. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. Speech acts now and then: Towards a pragmatic history of English. In Jucker & Taavitsainen (eds), 1–23.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, & Jucker, Andreas H. 2010. Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English. In Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.), 159–181. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Terkourafi, Marina. 2002. Politeness and formulaicity. Evidence from Cypriot Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics 3: 179–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid & Faya-Cerqueiro, Fátima. 2007. Saying Please in Late Modern English. In Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed. New Insights into Late Modern English, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso & Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds), 421–444. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1977. Context and cognition. Knowledge frames and speech act comprehension. Journal of Pragmatics 1: 211–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Graham. 2012. “that thought never ytt entered my harte”: Rhetoricalities of sincerity in Early Modern English. English Studies 93(7): 809–832. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Włodarczyk, Matylda. 2013. British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820–1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49(3): 399–428.Google Scholar
. 2015. Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness: Responses of the Colonial Office to letters from William Parker, 1820 settler. In Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 4], Marina Dossena (ed.), 153–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
. 2016. Genre and Literacies: Historical (Socio)pragmatics of the 1820 Settler Petition. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.Google Scholar
. 2017. Social identities in an institutional network: Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century. Token: Journal of English Linguistics 6: 133–171.Google Scholar