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Touching the Past
Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents
The study of ego-documents figures as a prominent theme in cutting-edge research in the Humanities. Focusing on private letters, diaries and autobiography, this volume covers a wide range of different languages and historical periods, from the sixteenth century to World War I. The volume stands out by its consistent application of the most recent developments in historical-sociolinguistic methodology in research on first-person writings.
Some of the articles concentrate on social differences in relation to linguistic variation in the historical context. Others hone in on self-representation, writer-addressee interaction and identity work. The key issue of the relationship between speech and writing is addressed when investigating the hybridity of ego-documents, which may contain both “oral” features and elements typical of the written language.
The volume is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 1] 2013. vii, 279 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 July 2013
Published online on 1 July 2013
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Preface & Acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii
- Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspectiveMarijke J. van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten | pp. 1–18
- A lady-in-waiting’s begging letter to her former employer (Paris, mid-sixteenth century)R. Anthony Lodge | pp. 19–44
- Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesGijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der Wal | pp. 45–66
- From ul to U.E.: A socio-historical study of Dutch forms of address in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century private lettersJudith Nobels and Tanja Simons | pp. 67–90
- Flat adverbs and Jane Austen’s lettersIngrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade | pp. 91–106
- Letters from Gaston B.: A prisoner’s voice during the Great WarCarita Klippi | pp. 107–128
- Written documents: What they tell us about linguistic usageFrance Martineau | pp. 129–148
- The rhetoric of autobiography in the seventeenth centuryPeter Burke | pp. 149–164
- “All the rest ye must lade yourself”: Deontic modality in sixteenth-century English merchant lettersArja Nurmi | pp. 165–182
- Cordials and sharp satyrs: Stance and self-fashioning in eighteenth-century lettersAnni Sairio | pp. 183–200
- Self-reference and ego involvement in the 1820 Settler petition as a leaking genreMatylda Włodarczyk | pp. 201–224
- Ego-documents in Lithuanian: Orthographic identities at the turn of the twentieth centuryAurelija Tamošiūnaitė | pp. 225–242
- The language of slaves on the island of St Helena, South Atlantic, 1682–1724Laura Wright | pp. 243–276
- Index | pp. 277–279
“Touching the Past presents a wide range of new insights and innovations in the subject areas of letter writing and ego-documents at large.”
Wim Vandenbussche, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
“This volume offers a timely contribution to the current research agenda in relation to the evaluation of the role of informal documents for our understanding of the social history of languages. All contributions are empirically strong, presenting data that have rarely seen the scholarly light before.”
Nils Langer, University of Bristol
“[T]he book will prove of considerable interest both to scholars already working in the field and to students approaching the complexities of language use in different social contexts in a historical perspective.”
Marina Dossena, University of Bergamo, in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, Vol. 1(2), 2015
“Key to the treatment of ego-documents as evidence for language habits and practices is the fact that they centre on the individual, so to place them at the centre of historical sociolinguistic study is to acknowledge the critical role that the individuals plays in language change. The papers that make up this volume represent a wealth of approaches that can be applied fruitfully to an exploration of the status of particular types of ego-documents for the kind of history being sought.”
Susan Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, in Journal of Historical Pragmatics Vol. 16:2 (2015)
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de Rijke, Persijn M.
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Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo
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FITZMAURICE, SUSAN
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Padilla-Moyano, Manuel
2015. A new view of Basque through eighteenth-century correspondence. In Language Variation - European Perspectives V [Studies in Language Variation, 17], ► pp. 169 ff.
Ayres-Bennett, Wendy
2014. From l’usage to le bon usage and back. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 173 ff.
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Langer, Nils
2014. Standard German in the eighteenth century. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 277 ff.
Rutten, Gijsbert, Rik Vosters & Wim Vandenbussche
2014. The interplay of language norms and usage patterns. Comparing the history of Dutch, English, French and German. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 1 ff.
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