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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 26:3 (2025) ► pp.354–379

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“If this be Irish gratitude, I could wish myself a Frenchman”

Exploring (im)politeness in intimate discourse in the context of historical letter writing through an analysis of reproaches in CORIECOR

ORCiD logo with link | University of Extremadura
Published online: 14 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.24011.sot
Abstract
This article provides an initial approach to historical (im)politeness strategies in the context of letter writing. It uses a sub-corpus of coriecor which contains letters written by Irish immigrants that relocated to the US and their intimates. The article focusses on reproaches (Albelda Marco, Marta. 2023. “Rhetorical Questions as Reproaching Devices”. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 11 (2): 176–199. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Tulimirović, Bojana. 2023. “Reproach as a Core Value: The Analysis of the Communicative Potential of the Routine Formulae ‘qué broma es esta’ and ‘de qué vas’”. Pragmalingüística 311: 579–603. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and it applies Archer, Dawn. 2017. “(Im)politeness in Legal Settings”. In Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Daniel Z. Kádár (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness, 713–737. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar model to all instances of this speech act extracted from the data. This results in two different sub-corpora, one containing what is here defined as “Face Enhancing Reproaches” (fer) and “Face Aggravating Reproaches” (far). These two sub-corpora are contrasted through the Sketch Engine software and the most predominant lemmas in fer (still, before, what, your, account, home, uneasy, dear, like and wish) are analysed and discussed in relation to their function for (im)politeness purposes. This article sheds light on the face-enhancing value of these linguistic items to encode this speech act within the specific context in question.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Historical corpus linguistics and reproaches
    • 2.1Analysing (im)politeness in historical data: The model for this study
  • 3.Methodology and data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Still
    • 4.2Account
    • 4.3Uneasy
    • 4.4Dear
    • 4.5Before
    • 4.6Your
    • 4.7Home
    • 4.8Wish
    • 4.9What and like
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
References (41)
Corpora
coriecor Visualized. Irish English in Writing across Time (A Longitudinal Historical Perspective). Accessed 3 March 2025, at [URL]
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