In:Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster and Susan Fitzmaurice
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 299] 2019
► pp. 171–196
Chapter 5Promoting negative politeness in nineteenth-century England
The case of letter-writing manuals
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.06shv
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.06shv
Abstract
In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.
Article outline
- 1.Investigating politeness dimension in nineteenth-century letter-writing guides
- 2.Towards a negative politeness society: Making requests in pre-nineteenth and nineteenth-century England
- 3.Inventory of linguistic strategies for making requests in nineteenth-century commercial model letters
- 3.1Inventory of linguistic strategies of making requests: Percy Sadler’s Art of the English Correspondence (AEC)
- 3.1.1Direct requests
- 3.1.2Indirect requests
- 3.2Inventory of linguistic strategies of making requests: ULW, CLW and SELW
- 3.1Inventory of linguistic strategies of making requests: Percy Sadler’s Art of the English Correspondence (AEC)
- 4.Discussion of the findings
- 5.Concluding remarks
Notes Primary sources References
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