Politeness in British Correspondence: 1650-1920

Abstract

This work has been undertaken as an attempt to examine changes in aspects of polite language between 1650 and 1920. Part of the research, discussed in Chapter 7: The Dative Alternation, was also carried out as a furthering of the hypothesis put forward in Flack (2018). This work looked at the dative alternation between 1410 and 1680 and posited that the prepositional dative construction was used to signify distance between correspondents who were socially or politically removed from one another. Other aspects of politeness investigated include honorific language, modal verbs, terms of deference and the lemmas pleas* and pray*.
Three research questions were selected to help evaluate the results of the analysis:
RQ1: Has the usage and/or frequency of deferential language changed during the time period of the study?
RQ2: Have markers of social deixis changed and/or declined during the time period of the study?
RQ3: Is the use of the Dative Alternation as a politeness marker evident from the 17th to early 20th centuries?
The data set from which language was analysed was created by searching the Archer and CLMET corpora for relevant search terms. Parameters of the search were ‘British’ ‘Letters’ and the date ranges of interest. The data was subdivided into 50-year sections so as to enable a picture of changing language to be created. Data was then analysed both qualitatively and quantitively to extract both numerical and social trends. Correspondents were also separated into four social groupings in order to investigate markers of social deixis.
Results showed that deferential language had partly changed during the time-period selected. Lemmas used for analysis of RQ1 were humbl*, beg*, troubl*, and worth*. Some of these lemmas showed a marked decrease during the 270 years, whereas others remained in fairly constant use. Markers of social deixis (RQ2) were found to have reduced greatly between 1650 and 1920, and the usage of the dative alternation (RQ3) was found to have changed; it was still being used to show respect but not necessarily social or political distance.
Overall, the findings show many changes in both the formality and language of British correspondence, and suggestions for further research are included within the relevant chapters.