Forms of address as politic behaviour in seventeenth-century Dutch private and business letters

Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004]Bijkerk, Annemieke. 2004. “Yours Sincerely and Yours Affectionately: On the Origin and Development of Two Positive Politeness Markers”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5 (2): 297–311. and Tiisala [2004]Tiisala, Seija. 2004. “Power and Politeness: Languages and Salutation Formulas in Correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5 (2): 193–206. ) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective (Nevala 2004aNevala, Minna. 2004a. “Accessing Politeness Axes: Forms of Address and Terms of Reference in Early English Correspondence”. Journal of Pragmatics 361: 2125–2160. ). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014)Rutten, Gijsbert and Marijke van der Wal. 2014. Letters as Loot: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the many changes occurring in the system of forms of address, which includes both nominal and pronominal forms, can be modelled sociopragmatically, with reference to both sociolinguistic factors and politic behaviour in the sense of Watts (2003)Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . We also observed differences between the private letters in our corpus and a limited number of business letters that we had at our disposal at the time, and it is this issue that we explore in this paper. On the basis of a recently compiled subset of business letters by seventeenth-century merchants (van der Wal and Rutten 2024van der Wal, Marijke and Gijsbert Rutten. 2024. “Comparing the Register of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Business Letters to Private Letters: Formulaic Language and French-Origin Items”. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 10 (2): 253–281. ), of whom we also have private letters, we first analyse the distribution of forms of address in the business letters against the background of what we know about private letters in general. We then compare qualitatively the use of forms of address in the business letters with private letters by the same writers, focussing on three prolific authors.