The Language of Daily Life in England, (1400-1800) (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800)

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Lüneburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Herman Parret

Jef Verschueren

Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Deborah Schiffrin

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

University of Trondheim

Aichi University

Paul Osamu Takahara

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

Jacob L. Mey

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board University College London

Japan Women’s University

University of California at Los Angeles

Universität Basel

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Georgetown University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

University of California at Santa Barbara

Srikant Sarangi

Teun A. van Dijk

Cardiff University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Volume 183 The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) Edited by Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin

The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) Edited by

Arja Nurmi Minna Nevala Minna Palander-Collin University of Helsinki

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The language of daily life in England (1400-1800) / edited by Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala, and Minna Palander-Collin. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 183) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  English language--Variation--History. 2.  English language--Social aspects-History.  I. Nurmi, Arja. II. Nevala, Minna. III. Palander-Collin, Minna, 1967PE1074.7.L34

2009

427--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 5428 3 (hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8972 8 (eb)

2009000376

© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgements The language of daily life in the history of English: Studying how macro meets micro Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

vii 1

section 1.  Variation and social relations Negotiating interpersonal identities in writing: Code-switching practices in Charles Burney’s correspondence Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

27

Patterns of interaction: Self-mention and addressee inclusion in the letters of Nathaniel Bacon and his correspondents Minna Palander-Collin

53

Referential terms and expressions in eighteenth-century letters: A case study on the Lunar men of Birmingham Minna Nevala

75

section 2.  Methodological considerations in the study of change Methodological and practical aspects of historical network analysis: A case study of the Bluestocking letters Anni Sairio

107

Grasshoppers and blind beetles: Caregiver language in Early Modern English correspondence Terttu Nevalainen

137

Lifespan changes in the language of three early modern gentlemen Helena Raumolin-Brunberg

165

section 3.  Sociohistorical context Singular you was/were variation and English normative grammars in the eighteenth century Mikko Laitinen

199

 Table of contents

Encountering and appropriating the Other: East India Company merchants and foreign terminology Samuli Kaislaniemi

219

Everyday possessions: Family and identity in the correspondence of John Paston II Teo Juvonen

253

appendix.  Editions in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence

279

Name index

303

Subject index

309

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this volume has been supported by the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), funded by the Academy of Finland as part of its Centre of Excellence programme (2000–2005 as the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English, 2006–2011 with the new name and a slightly different composition). The research unit has provided the writers and editors with not only the physical requirements of corpus compilation and research but also an inspiring research environment among leading scholars in the field of English historical linguistics. The writers of this book have (with the exception of Päivi Pahta) been involved in the compilation of the corpora used as research material in the volume. Other corpus compilers particularly deserving mention are Mr Jukka Keränen and Ms Tanja Säily. Without the material, research of this nature would not be possible. We would also like to thank the Social Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England (SoReaL) project, funded by the University of Helsinki (2005–2007), and Mr Mikko Hakala for help in editing the appendix. We are grateful to the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Ms Jenni Laitinen for help in preparing the index. We are thankful to Professor Andreas H. Jucker for initially accepting the book to the series, and Professor Anita Fetzer as the current editor of the series for greenlighting the publication of the manuscript. We would like to thank Ms Isja Conen and the team at Benjamins for their support during the editorial process.

The language of daily life in the history of English Studying how macro meets micro Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

1.  The language of daily life This book stems from the experiences gained during the fifteen years we have been involved in compiling and doing research on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), which by now has grown into a small corpus family, altogether covering the years 1403–1800.1 The corpus contains a stratified sample of male and female informants from different geographical locations and as such provides a rich source of material for the study of language variation and change in the history of English. The letters included in the corpus are personal correspondence between identifiable individuals, who share their concerns and joys over a geographical and temporal distance. The topics discussed cover a wide variety of mundane issues ranging from business matters and estate management to family news and little everyday incidents. The corpus was intended for sociolinguistic studies from the outset, and we can still say that historical sociolinguistics provides the broad framework for our work, although the theoretical orientations applied to the data today are perhaps more varied than originally envisioned. One of the purposes of this book is to illustrate some relevant ways of using the corpus and the kinds of contextualizations we can make on the basis of the data. Historical sociolinguistics, just like sociolinguistics focusing on present-day language use, comprises many different approaches addressing a variety of research questions. Historical sociolinguistics has drawn on correlational sociolinguistics, but increasingly also on a variety of fields such as interactional sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics, discourse studies, contact linguistics and sociology of language.

.  The research reported here was supported by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence funding for the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki (www.eng.helsinki.fi/varieng), the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (www.helsinki.fi/collegium) and the Academy of Finland.

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Differences of approach arise from the social theory underlying each tradition —  although this is seldom explicitly spelled out — but significantly also from the focus of research. This is the case whether it is the status and function of language(s) in speech communities, variation and change (in the grammar and phonology) of the language system, or the interactive construction and organization of discourse. All sociolinguistic traditions regard language as a social phenomenon and, accordingly, study language in relation to its users and contexts of use, or they “share in their practice an orientation to the use of language in the social contexts of everyday life” (Eggins & Slade 1997:  33). However, defining the components of language users’ social space or establishing the relationship between language, individual and society is far from being a straightforward task, and one of the central points of controversy has been the significance of “macro” and “micro” in language use and analysis. Stratificational sociolinguistic models have accentuated correlations of linguistic forms with broad macro-societal categories like class or gender, while pragmatic, discourse and conversation analytic approaches have emphasized the importance of situated meaning-making and individual experience on the micro-level, even dismissing the existence of any objective reality as scholarly fabrications. Although macro-  and micro-levels have often been regarded as opposite or even mutually exclusive, they are nowadays also understood as different aspects of language use and analysis that can be incorporated within the same model (e.g., Carter & Sealey 2000; Deumert 2003). In sociolinguistics today, cross-disciplinary, multi-layered approaches are increasingly called for as a way of reaching beyond traditional paradigms and established categories (e.g., Cheshire 2005; Schilling-Estes 2002). Experimenting with and developing such cross-fertilizations is also one of the goals of the Centre of Excellence for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), where all the contributors of this book work as researchers or doctoral students. The variety of specific research aims as well as methods is also illustrated in this book, although it is not necessarily easy to classify each study as a representative of a particular paradigm. All the chapters have a common aim of opening up new insights into the role of language in society and in our everyday lives, which often means combining perspectives, like sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches and/or quantitative and qualitative methods. Our second aim relates to this. As research on the CEEC has produced baseline, population-level evidence of language variation and change in Renaissance English (e.g., Laitinen 2007; Nevala 2004; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003 and (Eds) 1996; Nurmi 1999; Palander-Collin 1999), we felt that this book would take on a different task of enriching and complicating the environments of variation and change by specifically bringing in the individual, who uses language to communicate for



The language of daily life in the history of English

specific purposes, to create his or her role in the situation and to maintain and form relationships with others. In other words, language variation and change are located at individual language users, who choose from a variety of options how to express themselves in a given situation and who eventually change language. Thus, language variation and change are matters of “daily life”. All the studies in this book focus on particular linguistic forms, expressions or phenomena as the starting point, but the questions asked are often different. Section 1 explores language variation as a means of identity and role construction in letters, while Section 2 concentrates on questions of language change from the perspective of individuals, their networks and parental input, and Section 3 particularly highlights the social contexts of language use. These approaches address various facets of language in society and partly stem from different theoretical discussions, providing complementary pictures from Late Medieval to Late Modern English. Moreover, we do not see ourselves as detached from what goes on in present-day sociolinguistics, as our broad aim is to understand mechanisms of language variation and change, both being relevant processes in all time periods.

2.  Methodological background: Contexts of variation and change We have been influenced by various theoretical insights that in the following presentation are classified under three headings:  correlational sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics. We do not believe in strictly separating these approaches, but present them in this order to highlight how shifting perspectives bring different research questions as well as linguistic features to the fore. At the same time we shall illustrate the types of contextualizations that are required and possible in each approach. One of the essential differences in these approaches seems to relate to their emphasis on either the macro-societal or the micro-interactional level. Moreover, synchronic analysis focusing on a certain period in time and diachronic analysis studying language change in subsequent periods of time is also a relevant distinction that has particularly been discussed in the context of historical pragmatics. 2.1  Correlational sociolinguistics In the context of the CEEC project, the different research orientations in this book perhaps also illustrate the epistemology of science, namely how new questions arise on the basis of what we already know. When the CEEC project was originally launched in 1993 with the aim of testing present-day sociolinguistic theories, findings and methods in historical context, this was a new type of

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research enterprise, with Romaine (1982) and Milroy (1992) as the predecessors. The theoretical framework was predominantly correlational and variationist, since the idea was to see how social factors like gender or class affect the diffusion of morphosyntactic change. Correlational research based on the CEEC has produced results on the diffusion of morphosyntactic changes in the population, such as the replacement of ye by you, -th by -s and the which by which, showing, for example, that region, i.e., contact between speakers, tends to be the most dominant social factor in the spread of change (Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). This type of research on the corpus has also provided evidence for a new dating of the decline of do in affirmative statements (Nurmi 1999), and shown that grammaticalization processes are socially embedded (Palander-Collin 1999; Laitinen 2007). Correlational studies typically provide information on language variation and change in relation to fairly broad and partly abstract social categories like gender, class, age and education. Variation and change are studied in tandem, as variation is regarded as a prerequisite of change. Research often focuses on linguistic phenomena that form a variable, so that the speaker has to choose between a set of variant forms every time he or she uses a certain grammatical category. While Labov (1972) studied phonological variation, historical correlational sociolinguistics has focused predominantly on morphosyntactic variation, which is more salient in written data. Correlational studies are typically based on plentiful and representative corpus data and, therefore, produce baseline evidence of language variation and change on the population level. Correlational studies have been criticised for their simplistic treatment of social categories, which does not allow for an individual speaker’s situated understanding and construction of his or her social position to be taken into account. Relevant social categories appear to be determined and isolated by the scholar and they are forced on the informants irrespective of what the categories mean(t) to them. This may be true up to a point, but it is also a matter of focus whether we wish to establish the big picture on the population level or zoom in on specific situations or individual usages. Some research questions, like the spread of morphosyntactic change in the population, are best addressed on the macro-level, whereas others, like situated meaning-making processes, require a micro-level analysis (Carter & Sealey 2000; Deumert 2003; Tagliamonte 2002), but both are relevant components of language use. The broad perspective and situation-specific analyses can also be combined, which often means combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The studies in this book combine macro-  and micro-level analyses in various ways. First of all, they focus on specific contexts in the history of English, such as the Paston family in the fifteenth century, Katherine and William Paston in the



The language of daily life in the history of English

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the Bluestockings in the eighteenth century. In each case, relevant general developments and theoretical considerations are also addressed and the individuals and their language use are viewed in a more general social or societal context. The macro-societal context with categories like rank, gender and education has been established with the help of socio-historical research, but in practice early English society was, of course, a complex reality (see e.g., Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003:  30–43). For instance, hierarchical status differences were well-established, although contemporaries were not unanimous about the number and division of relevant categories. Moreover, social mobility was possible, and also many of the letter writers in the CEEC moved from one social rank to another during their lifetimes. For men, upward mobility was possible at least through education and the accumulation of wealth, while women’s status was often secured through marriage (for mechanisms of social mobility, see Stone & Stone 1984). Thus, status differences and societal contexts may be operationalised in various ways, and only research will tell which categories were linguistically relevant. Our original social categories were rather fine-grained (see e.g., Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (Eds) 1996), but in practice rougher tri-  or dipartite divisions such as upper–middle–lower or gentry vs non-gentry tend to bring forth more salient differences in usage. This is understandable as the extreme ends of the social scale are most likely to move in different circles and have access to different discourses as part of their daily experience. 2.2  Interactional sociolinguistics Personal letters were originally selected as research material because they have been shown to be close to spoken language in many ways (Biber & Finegan 1989, 1992). On the other hand, language change typically emerges from spoken language. Thus, a genre like personal letters may provide the best possible access to early phases of change in the history of a language. Moreover, as personal letters are authentic communication between identifiable correspondents, and their background is often known on the basis of such sources as the editors’ and historians’ archival work and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, they provide access to earlier patterns of interaction and can be studied from the interactional perspective. Although interactional sociolinguistics is usually associated with ethnographic methods and the study of face-to-face conversation in present-day speech communities, its emphasis on the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse suits historical sociolinguistic approaches equally well. Interactional sociolinguistics also explicitly seeks to bridge the gap between those approaches that claim

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communicative practices to be reflections of the macro-societal conditions and constructivist approaches claiming that social worlds are constructed through discourse (Gumperz 2001: 218). For Gumperz (1982: 29–30), our interactions take place in the broad sociocultural context and imply some, but not necessarily complete, sharing of grammatical and social rules: Language differences play an important, positive role in signalling information as well as in creating and maintaining the subtle boundaries of power, status, role and occupational specialization that make up the fabric of our social life. (Gumperz 1982: 6)

The interactional approach to language practices of past informants has its limitations. Entire sequences of letters have not necessarily been preserved, and it may be difficult or impossible to reconstruct the interactive intentions of the correspondents from the evidence we have. Thus, questions like “(1) how and by what signalling devices language functions to evoke the contextual presuppositions that affect interpretation, and (2) what presuppositions are at work in particular talk exchanges” (Gumperz 2001:  219), in that they essentially rely on the interactants’ interpretations, may prove impossible to answer for a historical linguist. On the other hand, the CEEC material allows us to reconstruct informants’ social networks up to a point and make decisions on their social roles in the situation, as when the informant is interpreted as a master writing to a servant in order to tell him to do something. If the interactional focus is applied to historical sociolinguistics, also the question of language change has to be addressed from the perspective of language as a communicative tool. Thus, questions like “What kind of functions do particular linguistic items serve in interaction?” or “What kind of social meanings do they have?” become important in understanding change as well as variation. Due to the interactional emphasis, the linguistic items or phenomena studied are often somewhat different from isolated morphosyntactic features and do not necessarily form an easily identifiable variable. The focus of analysis may be the “entire way of using language”, or discourse style, in particular settings. This is illustrated in many of our contributions in their choice of the linguistic phenomena studied, such as code-switching or referential forms that are chosen for their interactional significance and are analysed in relation to other linguistic features and/or their social and textual function in the context. 2.3  Historical (socio)pragmatics Historical sociolinguistics could also be said to be the starting point for other historical research on human interaction, such as historical pragmatics. In the first



The language of daily life in the history of English

article which tackles the definition of historical pragmatics, Stein (1985: 347–348) distinguishes between two overlapping approaches to sociohistorical linguistics: the first studies how the social and stylistic meanings of individual linguistic items affect linguistic change, whereas the other studies the ways in which changes in the outside world influence changes in individual language structure. Historical pragmatics, according to Stein (1985: 348), falls under this second type of sociohistorical linguistics and in its wider sense comprises cognitive-related research topics, such as the use of address. In practice, the frame of reference for historical pragmatics most clearly comes from present-day pragmatics, an approach which is overwhelmingly synchronic. Arnovick, for instance, sees historical pragmatics as “a marriage of pragmatics, a field typically concerned with spoken language, and historical linguistics” (1999: 10), and in Jucker’s (2000: 90) opinion, historical pragmatics can be defined as the study of historical data from a pragmatic perspective: the diachronic study of pragmatic elements or the study of language change from a pragmatic perspective. Consequently, incorporating the diachronic component of language change into historical pragmatics and legitimising change as a relevant area of study has been the focus of many definitions and discussions. According to Bax (1991; see also Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 6), historical pragmatics is a sub-category of linguistics which aims to study 1. the description and the understanding of conventions of language use in communities that once existed and that are no longer accessible for direct observation, and 2. the description and the explanation of the development of speech conventions in the course of time. (Bax 1991: 200) Jacobs and Jucker (1995: 11; also Jucker 1998: 4) call those historical pragmatics approaches which study the first aim, i.e., the synchronic description and understanding of language conventions, pragmaphilological. They concentrate on the contextual analysis of historical texts, including the writer (addresser) and the reader (addressee) and the social and interpersonal aspects of their relationship, the overall method and setting of text production and reception, as well as the way in which texts are used to achieve a particular goal. Pragmaphilology is also concerned with the similarities and differences of both written and spoken language and the realisations of certain communicative tasks found in both. The second aim is called diachronic pragmatics (Jacobs & Jucker 1995:  13; Jucker 1998: 4). It focuses on different historical stages of the same language and attempts to give pragmatic explanations for either change in language in general or for development of smaller pragmatic units like speech acts and discourse markers,

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as well as politeness phenomena. When change is studied on the basis of a particular linguistic form and its historical development, it is called form-to-function mapping. If, on the other hand, the starting point is speech functions and their realisations in time, it is called function-to-form mapping. But as is generally the case with classifying and categorising, the distinction between the two different approaches is not rigid. Both pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics may overlap due to change in linguistic form and function (Arnovick 1999: 11; Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 13). (See also Traugott 2004.) Brinton (2001:  138–140), after noting that pragmatics and discourse analysis mostly cover the same topics, divides the field of discourse analysis into “historical discourse analysis”, “discourse-oriented historical linguistics” and “diachronic(ally oriented) discourse analysis” on the basis of whether the approach is synchronic or diachronic. Historical discourse analysis, like discourse analysis in general, has a synchronic orientation and incorporates form-to-function and function-to-form mapping, while discourse-oriented historical linguistics studies discourse-pragmatic factors in language change or discourse motivations behind diachronic phonological, morphological, syntactic or semantic changes. The third approach, diachronic discourse analysis, involves a synthesis of discourse and diachrony in the sense that discourse change is treated on a par with phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structure. This is a less well-developed area than the other two but potentially of great interest. Correspondence would seem a particularly good candidate for studying changing discourse patterns in historical time periods. A need for a multiplicity of perspectives has been voiced also, for instance, in Kryk-Kastovsky’s (1998, 2002) work, who calls diachronic pragmatics a “younger sister” of synchronic pragmatics, and emphasises the need for an intermediate stage between the two, for example, in the study of grammaticalisation. Similarly, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2003: 7) note, following Arnovick’s notion of a “marriage”, that the “cross-fertilization” of different methods in both diachronic and synchronic studies has benefited both pragmaticists and historical linguists, and has led to terminological expansion (cf. Fitzmaurice 2000: 3). This means that both the scopes of acceptable data and research questions have been extended as a result of this cooperation. As Jacobs and Jucker (1995: 26) point out: The use of the term historical pragmatics does not only delimit a field of scientific enquiry; it should also bring together researchers who share an interest in both language history and pragmatics. … Pragmatics has learnt to look for communicative behaviour beyond the limits of the spoken word, and historical linguistics has learnt to ask questions that go beyond the immediate sentence and text boundaries of historical texts. … The time has come for interdisciplinary research efforts.



The language of daily life in the history of English

Bearing in mind the sociolinguistic starting point of the CEEC project and the wealth of social data we have gathered on the informants, we are also concerned with different views on how sociolinguistics and pragmatics are generally related to each other. In other words, is there a properly societal aspect to pragmatics? Pragmatics can be thought of as a subcategory of sociolinguistics (e.g., Stein 1985), or it can be distinguished from sociolinguistics as a separate but interrelated discipline (e.g., Levinson 1992/1983; Thomas 1995). A componential approach sees sociolinguistics and pragmatics as separate methodologies. Each component is limited to its own domain, and studies on welldefined objects are conducted by using established methods (Mey 1993: 46). As an advocate for looking at pragmatics as a component equal to phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, Levinson (1992/1983: 29) keeps sociolinguistics on a separate plane from grammar. He admits, however, that the width of scope may vary, so that whereas in the narrow interpretation pragmatics is concerned only with linguistically encoded aspects of context, the wider scope includes access to sociolinguistic information (see also Leech’s (1983) “sociological interface” of pragmatics). In her study, Thomas (1995:  185, 187) sees pragmatics as “parasitic” upon sociolinguistics. She admits that there may be some areas of overlap between sociolinguistics and pragmatics, e.g., in code-switching and code-mixing, but emphasises that these overlaps do not change the fact that sociolinguistics is static, whereas pragmatics is dynamic. The static approach, for her, means studying the linguistic correlates of relatively stable social variables, i.e., the linguistic resources, whereas the dynamic approach is more concerned with changeable features and the manner in which people use language to achieve different goals. It is one of our goals in this book to combine the “static” and the “dynamic” approaches in order to see how different social variables affect language use in written interaction, and, on the other hand, to see how the fact that the material is a written and delayed type of interaction shows in the way social relationships are strategically maintained and/or altered. The functional approach Thomas adopts towards pragmatics is further developed by the view that sees pragmatics as a perspective. This so-called “umbrella model” considers pragmatics as an aspect of language which is interrelated and influenced by structure and semantics (Östman 1988:  155). Pragmatics can be used for a functional tool not only for the “dimensions” of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, but also for, e.g., sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics (Verschueren 1995: 11–12, 1999: 269). In this way, sociological, psychological and emotive factors can be included in the study of language use. Labelling pragmatics as a perspective means rejecting disciplinary limitations. This can, however, lead to overgeneralisations, so that any study on language use can have a pragmatic interpretation: everything is pragmatics.

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Rather than looking at pragmatics as a loosely-knit method for covering language use, we prefer an approach where pragmatics can be attached to, and make use of other disciplines, but still be primarily defined in terms of linguistic methodology. Mey’s (1993) view of pragmatics as the study of the conditions of language use within the context of society is near to the sense in which we use the term “historical (socio)pragmatics” in this book, combining macro-societal structures with micro-social situations. Mey sees pragmatics as both societal, i.e., dictated by the norms of society, and social, i.e., as something that is created in interaction. Pragmatics is “the societally necessary and consciously interactive dimension of the study of language” (Mey 1993: 315). In historical sociolinguistics, we look at the social diffusion of language change, and by taking historical pragmatics as a starting point, we can see how these changes are manifested in interaction. The reasons for combining what could be called traditional sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches naturally vary according to the object of study. In order to describe, for example, how personal pronouns or referential terms are used in correspondence, one has to go beyond the immediate context into the social, as well as societal, dimension. The form which language takes in our corpus material can be said to be influenced, and in some cases even dictated, by social conventions. Background information on correspondents — which includes details on e.g., social status and mobility, as well as on the relationship between the writer and the recipient — has to be carefully examined in order to reach reliable conclusions about social and pragmatic reasons for variation and change in the use of the linguistic feature under study. In the course of the compilation of the correspondence corpora we have been fortunate enough to be able to collect data on the letter writers and their correspondents, and in this way our understanding of the reasons leading to particular linguistic contexts has been broadened. This has already become evident in our previous studies on (strategic) language use in early English correspondence (see e.g., Nevala 2004; Nurmi 1999; Palander-Collin 1999). In sum, historical (socio)pragmatics is used in this book as an umbrella term to cover the partly overlapping areas of diachronic, social, societal, individual and interactional variation and change in the language of early English correspondence. We are interested in who the correspondents are, what kind of language they use, why they use certain linguistic features and in what kinds of situations. In other words, we are interested in everything that makes personal interaction a social phenomenon.

3.  Social theory and sociolinguistics Sociolinguists have repeatedly been criticised for the absence of social theory in their work, although sociological counterparts can easily be found for the



The language of daily life in the history of English

extreme forms of macro-sociolinguistics and micro-pragmatics (see e.g., Layder 2003/1997: 1–28; Coupland 2001). The lack of explicit social theory perhaps results from sociologists’ and linguists’ different sets of questions and levels of abstraction. It may be difficult to operationalise social theory for the purposes of empirical linguistic research, or perhaps questions like the diffusion of morphological change do not immediately seem relevant to social theory. Obviously, we cannot force all the contributors into a particular way of thinking, but would briefly like to discuss the question of “macro” and “micro” from the perspective of social theory. We suggest that integrationist understandings of society and language use, which recognise both the relevance of macro-societal structures and micro-situational meaning-making, provide a suitable framework in which our work can be situated (see Coupland 2001:  15–20). Carter and Sealey (2000), relying on Layder (2003/1997) in particular, also discuss how the sociological concepts of structure and agency in the sense of realist social theory could benefit sociolinguistic analysis. Layder (2006/1994) explores three key sociological dualisms, individual–society, agency–structure and micro–macro, which as concepts are also frequently employed in linguistic studies. For him, these dualisms are not antagonistic but linked. For example, the individual has subjective experiences, otherwise the notion of individual identity would be impossible, but at the same time the individual is never free of social involvements and commitments. The individual is also an active agent who does things which affect social relationships, but within the confines of what the structure, i.e., the objective features of social life, makes possible for the individual to do. Layder (2006/1994: 5) defines structure as social organisations, institutions and cultural products that are “part of a pre-existing set of social arrangements that people enter into at birth and which typically endure beyond their lifetimes”. These dualisms overlap with each other and with micro and macro analyses. If micro analysis is concerned with face-to-face conduct, it relates to self-identity, subjective experience and to the individual’s agency, while macro analysis with its focus on remote, impersonal, large-scale phenomena and patterned distribution of groups of people or resources in society is linked to structure. “The common element in both structures and macro phenomena is that they refer to reproduced patterns of power and social organization” (Layder 2006/1994: 6). Layder’s domain theory (2003/1997) develops these ideas further as a “moderate” form of objectivism incorporating both the notion of systematic and objective knowledge and the analysis of subjectivity to understand social life in general and face-to-face encounters in particular. Layder (2003/1997: 2, 78) proposes a model of four social domains that are always related to each other over time and space and bound together by social relations and positions, power, discourses and practices:  (1) psychobiography, (2) situated activity, (3) social settings and (4) contextual resources. Layder’s (2003/1997:  2–5) domains situate individuals



 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

in a complex web of their personal feelings, attitudes and predispositions, the current face-to-face transaction, the particular setting of a specific location or social organisation and the society-wide distribution and ownership of resources along gender, race and class lines. It may be an extremely complicated task to incorporate all the four domains within the same empirical study of language use, but domain theory might offer tools of contextualisation for linguists interested in language in society and help us incorporate various linguistic aspects and levels of use within the same model of language variation and change. The CEEC data and the background information we have collected on the informants allow this type of contextualisation. First, personal psychobiographies are reflected in such variables as the informants’ family relations, education, social and geographical mobility and professional history. We have, for instance, assumed that the level of education affects the informant’s stylistic literacy and style-shifting practices. Even personal feelings and attitudes in the current situation may sometimes be interpreted from the letters. Second, the current transaction can be situated in terms of the mutual roles of writer and recipient in the situation and the purpose of the letter. Most likely, different linguistic strategies are adopted if a son studying at the university writes to his father to ask for more money or to tell about the progress of his studies. Third, the social setting of letter writing was governed by genre-specific conventions and norms explicated in letter-writing manuals, but also various other institutional practices may have been relevant. Family correspondence, for instance, tends to be more informal and involved than letters written to more distant acquaintances, which often concern business, administrative or legal matters, although these letters are written between individuals rather than their respective organisations. Finally, in terms of the society-wide distribution of resources, social hierarchies were one of the pervasive features of early and late modern society, as pointed out in Section 2.1 above. Status differences are overtly coded in the closing and opening formulae of the letters, but other linguistic choices may also reflect such differences. In line with domain theory, we see that these factors are simultaneously present in any communicative situation. Since educational resources, for instance, were mainly available to upper-class men, they had primary access to written modes and were able to express themselves in different capacities in letters to family, friends and acquaintances. Or, as women were mostly active in the family sphere, their letters are typically written on family matters, possibly in a familial rather than an official type of language.

4.  Letters as research material Correspondence is real communication between identifiable people. Most letters follow certain genre conventions, such as opening and closing formulae, dates and



The language of daily life in the history of English 

such, some of them changing over time. Personal correspondence typically performs one or, more commonly, both of the following functions. On the one hand, letters communicate information (personal, political or social news, business matters, or a combination of some of these) across geographical distances, in a varying length of time. On the other hand, letters also serve the purpose of maintaining and negotiating social relations, whether kinship, friendship or a more distant relationship such as between a suitor and a benefactor. A typical letter throughout the centuries covered by this volume contains a mixture of information and management of social relationships by expressing affection, respect or other feelings towards the recipient. Following Görlach’s (1999:  141) categorisation, letters as a genre can be characterised as independent, original, written, non-fictional, non-technical prose with no accompanying elements (such as images or music).2 On the other hand, correspondence is also very heterogeneous, ranging the whole scale of possibilities from conventional to unconventional and formal to informal, and covering any number of topics. Letters as a text type show some typical characteristics as well. Biber (2001:  98–99) identifies many linguistic features commonly attested in letters, expressing interactiveness and personal involvement (e.g., first-  and secondperson pronouns), personal stance (e.g., modals, private verbs, and emphatics) and structural reduction (e.g., that deletion, and indefinite pronouns). In addition to these, Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008) identified frequently occurring personal and kinship names and titles as typical of correspondence, as well as temporal expressions. Thus, various forms of person, social and time deixis are frequently expressed. These can be directly related to the formal constraints of letter writing, such as opening and closing formulae and the dating of letters, as well as tracking the course of correspondence. Letters also turned out to be written in less standardised orthography than the comparison corpora of published materials (for details see Nurmi & Palander-Collin 2008). When we regard letters as research material, two advantages appear. Letters provide access to linguistic features from past ages which are not otherwise easily reached. Firstly, correspondence between intimates is carried out in informal registers, and, in the case of less literate writers, exhibits some characteristics of spoken language (e.g., add-on strategies). This makes letters a genre which is more likely to approach the vernacular of the past. Even when writers are more educated and aware of the conventions of written language in general and letter writing

.  However, there are also letters with drawings and musical notations, so this classification of letters as simply text is not entirely accurate. Also the layout of textual elements is considered important in letter writing (see e.g., Nevala 2004: 39).

 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

in particular, correspondence still provides us with access to the language of the private sphere, allowing us to glimpse the daily life of ordinary folk as well as well-known public figures. Secondly, letters are real interaction between specific people. This provides us with an opportunity to study features of interactive language use in real communicative contexts, avoiding, for example, the pitfalls of fictive representations of conversation. Unlike many genres of published writing, letters are commonly more focused on the mundane, and, while individual writers may use them as a means of highly articulate self expression, letters are seldom as polished as anything intended for publication. 4.1  Corpora of Early English Correspondence The main research material in this volume consists of the original Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and its two complementary parts, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE) and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement (CEECSU). The corpora were compiled to provide a research tool for the study of stratificational sociolinguistics during earlier stages of English, with the intent of both testing the applicability of present-day sociolinguistic methods in historical linguistics and providing a social context for linguistic change. During the course of corpus compilation and use the CEEC corpus family has established its suitability for both quantitative and qualitative research in stratificational and interactional sociolinguistics as well as socio-pragmatics. (For a discussion of the compilation principles, see e.g., Laitinen (2007); Nevala (2004); Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) and (Eds) (1996); Nurmi (1999); Palander-Collin (1999); Raumolin-Brunberg & Nevalainen (2007).) Table 1.  Corpora of Early English Correspondence. Corpus CEEC CEECE* CEECSU* Total

Timespan

Wordcount

Collections

Writers

Letters

1410?–1681 1653–1800 1402–1681 1402–1800

2.7 million 2.2 million 0.4 million 5.3 million

96 77 19 192

778 194 94 1,066

6,039 4,921 859 11,819

*May 2007 version; some writers appear in all three versions of the corpus.

The main structural units of the CEEC corpus family are collection, writer and letter. Table 1 shows the relevant statistics for the three corpora.3 A collection is .  Two parts of the corpus are published:  the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC). CEECS



The language of daily life in the history of English 

usually based on a single edition of one person’s or family’s or other group’s letters. So the collection labelled Osborne contains the letters of Dorothy Osborne, while Paston is a selection from the Paston letters. Collections such as Original 1 refer to our sampling of printed volumes presenting a selection of letters by a great variety of authors from the holdings of the British Library. The Appendix at the end of this volume is organised according to collection, and provides the bibliographical references for each edition, as well as the word counts of our selection and the years covered. All corpus examples in the volume include a collection reference giving the page number of the edition. In selecting suitable collections for the corpus, the most vital consideration, in addition to content, was the quality of editing. We have sought out editions which preserve as much of the original language as possible, maintaining original spelling and clearly indicating doubtful readings. Particularly in the case of older editions, or editions prepared for non-linguistic use, the editorial principles employed have not always been spelled out, if expressed at all. In those cases we have made an estimate of the reliability of the edition based on the appearance of, for example, non-standard spelling and morphology. A number of suspect editions, and editions without any expressed editorial principles, were also spot-checked against the original manuscripts in the British Library and the Public Record Office. It turned out most editions were quite accurate in their representation of the language of the manuscripts. In cases where editorial descriptions were lacking, the differences were such as could be inferred from the published text even without seeing the manuscript, modernised punctuation and capitalisation being the most common, but also, for example, the placing of the date at the beginning or end of the letter. Only a few editions proved too unreliable to use, and some (e.g., Marchall, Pitt2) were re-edited from the manuscripts by our team. The most important unit from the theoretical and methodological point of view is the letter writer. Each letter writer has a unique identifier, and in practice most research is carried out tracing the linguistic patterns of individuals, even if often further grouped according to social variables. The letter writers, our informants, have been selected according to criteria of social representativity. While the poor literacy of earlier centuries places limitations on this principle, our aim has been to reach maximal coverage of the literate proportion of the population. Social variables forming the main dimensions of informant selection were gender and

contains a selection of copyright-free collections from the CEEC, and PCEEC presents the bulk of the original corpus, with added part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing. Both published versions can be obtained through the Oxford Text Archive and ICAME.

 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

social rank, but other characteristics tracked included social mobility, domicile and education. A sender database containing extensive background information on each of our informants provides much necessary data for the interpretation of research results. Our preference was for informants who had produced a good body of material and on whom there was a fair amount of background information available. Particularly in the earlier centuries it was necessary to make concessions on both these grounds, and to include people with only one letter extant, or people with insufficient data on their lives, because they were representative of a social category (most typically the lower ranks or women) otherwise poorly represented. While the most central people of the corpus are the letter writers, letter recipients are also taken into account, as register variation is most straightforwardly tracked through this variable. Much of the recipient information is being transferred into a comprehensive electronic database, containing all the same social variables as the sender database, which will provide a major resource in the research focused on interactional sociolinguistics and socio-pragmatics. The third basic unit of the corpus is the letter. The letters from each informant were chosen according to several criteria. Authenticity was a key factor. Our highest priority was to include autograph letters from reliable editions faithfully representing the language forms used by the writer. In the interest of social representativity, however, copies and scribal letters have also been included, particularly for the earlier centuries and in the case of women and the lower social ranks. Another key factor in letter selection was the search for informal registers, which meant the inclusion of as high a proportion of letters to family members and close friends as possible. This was complemented by a selection of letters to more distant recipients, typically written in an official or business context. Whenever possible, a variety of recipient types was included for each writer. This was not always possible, partly because of the random survival of letters and the differing needs of letter writers for written communication, but also because many early letter editors had a clear (although often unstated) preference for either official and “historically valuable” letters, leaving family correspondence unedited in archives, or, more rarely, an interest in the everyday and familial connections, with more distant or official letters disregarded. In addition to these two main criteria for letter selection, the usual corpus linguistic principles of selecting good texts (without any notable gaps, of a reasonable length, and so on) were kept in mind. Also letters with extensive foreign language passages were seldom included. Over the past fifteen years of corpus compilation and research, the CEEC corpus family has shown a remarkable robustness in tracing concomitant linguistic and social changes over the four centuries covered by the material.



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5.  Structure of the volume The volume is divided into three subsections, “Variation and social relations”, “Methodological considerations in the study of change” and “Sociohistorical context”. The division reflects the different focal points adopted in the papers included, although all papers deal with language variation and change in a narrower or broader social context. The sections and the included papers are presented below. 5.1  Section 1: Variation and social relations The first subsection focuses on letters as the type of data that can be used to study language variation from the interactional perspective in the historical context. In these three papers, variation in code-switching, self-mention and addressee inclusion patterns and referential terms and expressions are particularly linked to the ways in which the writers negotiate their identities in the communicative context of the letter, situating themselves and others in social space. Päivi Pahta and Arja Nurmi discuss code-switching in Charles Burney’s eighteenth-century letters to family members, friends and acquaintances, and explore reciprocity in code-switching practices by looking at Fanny Burney’s and Thomas Twining’s letters to Charles Burney. The most common language used by Burney in code-switches is French, but the array of different classical and contemporary languages in his letters is impressive and may be one of the outcomes of his extensive journeys on the continent. The analysis shows that the frequency of switches to different recipients varies and reflects both Burney’s knowledge of the recipient’s command of foreign languages as well as the intimacy of the relationship. There is also reciprocity in switching patterns so that the same languages and similar phrases are used by both correspondents. Code-switching serves both interpersonal and textual functions. Some of the switches are clearly related to the writer’s identity work, such as the use of professional terminology or French to show social status, but others are prefabricated, conventionalised chunks that may simply be void of identity-relevant meaning. The overall uses of code-switching are very similar to those found in present-day languages. Dealing with the late-sixteenth-century correspondence of a Norfolk gentleman Nathaniel Bacon and his circle, Minna Palander-Collin explores how the interpersonal and identity functions of language are enacted through the use of self-mention and addressee inclusion patterns, as they overtly bring in the writer and recipient to the letter. The results show both quantitative and qualitative differences in self-mention and addressee inclusion patterns according to Bacon’s relationship to the addressee. The highest frequencies of self-mention and direct addressee inclusion characterise close relationships where the social distance

 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

between the correspondents is small as well as those relationships where Bacon wrote in the role of a superior (e.g., master to servant). Qualitatively, self-mention and addressee inclusion were involved in different discourse patterns like friendship discourse to social inferiors and humiliative obedience discourse to social superiors. Finally, ranks below the gentry and professionals seemed to be more mixed in their usage of self-mention and addressee inclusion patterns as their experience of and access to the variety of styles was undoubtedly different from a gentleman’s linguistic repertoire. In the final paper of this subsection, Minna Nevala explores referential terms and expressions in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century letters of the so-called Lunar Society of Birmingham, with Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton and James Watt as its founding members. These Lunar men formed a close-knit social group, which could even be called a community of practice due to its common aspirations. The analysis includes all the references to these three men, and in order to obtain enough data, the Lunar letters included in the CEECE were complemented from other sources. Nevala takes the concept of social deixis as her starting point and asks whether the social identity of the referent can be expressed in the reference. Since referential terms are often derived from direct address forms, which are socially deictic, explicitly coding the referent’s social status, the answer is that referential terms should be regarded as equally important. Moreover, the idea of social deixis includes the contextual role of the referent in addition to the absolute status. Although referential terms do not show much variation in the material, they still serve a variety of interpersonal functions, indexing social networks and strategically indicating local stance. The analysis shows how letters are not merely communication between the writers and their recipients, as reference terms are variously used to attend to the face of the writer, the recipient or the referent. Thus, they contribute to the indexing of in-group and out-group affiliations of all the three parties. 5.2  Section 2: Methodological considerations in the study of change The second subsection focuses on the methodological aspects in the study of variation and change in the language of both individual informants and informant groups or networks. The section begins with Anni Sairio’s article on the reconstruction of social networks, giving methodological tools that can be employed in situating individuals in their social contexts and in testing patterns of linguistic influence and diffusion of language change in a network. Using social network analysis (SNA), Sairio analyses the strength of relational ties in the Bluestocking network in eighteenth-century English polite society. In particular, she looks at the frequencies of pied piping and preposition stranding in Elizabeth Montagu’s correspondence



The language of daily life in the history of English 

with her closest network members in order to see whether strong network connections favour the use of familiar and stigmatised linguistic constructions. The results suggest that stigmatised forms are favoured when the recipients are below Montagu’s own social rank but avoided in letters to her social superiors. Terttu Nevalainen deals with motherese, a specific issue among interactional factors in language change, applying recent research on the development of sociolinguistic competence in children and adolescents. She discusses how parents and other caregivers talked about and communicated with children in their personal correspondence, by reconstructing patterns of child-directed language on several levels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unfortunately, studying the whole acquisition process would be methodologically impossible as texts written by young children are rare, but in a case study, Nevalainen analyses the patterns of discourse and linguistic models which Lady Katherine Paston transmitted in her letters to her teenage son in the mid-1620s. Features of her child-directed discourse style include both negative (directives) and positive politeness (approval, belonging, sharing). As to language change, the results show that, compared with the language community at large, Katherine Paston was neither ahead of her contemporaries nor did she lag behind them. This means the linguistic model she provided to her son was fairly middle-of-the-road. Unlike modern parents, who tend to use more standard forms when talking to their children, she did not particularly reinforce current supralocal usages when she wrote to her son, as her language contained local features. In the final article in this section, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg looks at the participation of individual informants in ongoing linguistic change between 1500–1700. The article examines the lifespan linguistic changes of three English gentlemen, Sir Walter Ralegh, Philip Gawdy and John Chamberlain, with regard to the diffusion of several morphological and syntactic changes, ranging from the indicative third-person singular suffix -th vs the sibilant -s to the possessives mine and thine vs their shorter variants my and thy. Raumolin-Brunberg finds that there is considerable individual variation in the adoption of the innovative forms, and she discusses possible reasons for the resulting linguistic profiles of her three informants, namely the effects of communal and generational change, as well as regional and social accommodation. Considering the lifespan changes this analysis reveals, Raumolin-Brunberg suggests that apparent-time analysis and the roles of generational and communal changes as descriptive models should be reconsidered. 5.3  Section 3: Sociohistorical context The final section of the volume presents three case studies of language in a particular sociohistorical context. Mikko Laitinen discusses the early stages of

 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi

language prescription in the eighteenth century, when normative grammars were first becoming widely published and read. He illustrates the standardisation of the second-person past tense form of be into you were and the stigmatisation of you was from three different angles. First, Laitinen charts the general distribution of the competing variants in the multi-genre ARCHER corpus and the CEECE, showing that the use of you was was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. He goes on to describe the gender distribution of the variable, and reports that both the initial increase of you was as well as its decline were led by male informants. Finally, Laitinen looks at the ways in which grammarians and other professionals use you was and you were, and shows that the prescribed new standard form you were is adopted more quickly by them than by other letter writers of the period. In an even more specific historical context, Samuli Kaislaniemi discusses three Japanese loanwords (goshuin, tono and tatami) adopted by East India Company merchants in the early seventeenth century. Each word illustrates a specific set of problems in its adaptation, showing a mixture of cultural misunderstandings, false generalisations and semantic shift. The words were most common in correspondence between merchants working in Japan, but they were also included in letters sent to London, and in these cases they were often glossed. Kaislaniemi tracks the different patterns of adoption and adaptation for the three words, setting them into their original Japanese context as well as in the mercantile jargon of the English merchants. Finally, Teo Juvonen combines the historical and linguistic descriptions of possession in a case study of the letters of John Paston II. Juvonen describes possession as a component of identity, comprising both the material and the social, the first being more defined by legal considerations and the second expressing e.g., familial bonds. Linguistically, Juvonen takes an equally broad perspective of ownership, including any expression of a possessive relation in the qualitative part of his study. The second half narrows the possessive expressions down for a quantitative study charting the connections between different possessee types and possessive structures.

References Corpora CEEC = Corpus of Early English Correspondence. 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi & Minna Palander-Collin at the Department of English, University of Helsinki.



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CEECE = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. Compiled by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Tanja Säily & Anni Sairio at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. CEECS = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler. 1998. Compiled by Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. CEECSU = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Supplement. Compiled by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Tanja Säily & Anni Sairio at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. PCEEC = Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi & Minna Palander-Collin, with additional annotation by Ann Taylor. Annotated by Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk & Terttu Nevalainen. Helsinki: University of Helsinki and York: University of York.

Other references Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999. Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bax, Marcel M.H. 1991. “Historische Pragmatik:  Eine Herausforderung für die Zukunft.” In Diachrone Semantik und Pragmatik: Untersuchungen zur Erklärung und Beschreibung des Sprachwandels, Dietrich Busse (Ed.), 197–215. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Biber, Douglas. 2001. “Dimensions of variation among 18th-century speech-based and written registers.” In Towards a History of English as a History of Genres, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Manfred Görlach (Eds), 89–109. Heidelberg: Winter. Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1989. “Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres.” Language 65 (3): 487–517. Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1992. “The linguistic evolution of five written and speech-based English genres from the 17th to the 20th century.” In History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen & Irma Taavitsainen (Eds), 688–704. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel. 2001. “Historical discourse analysis.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E.  Hamilton (Eds), 138–160. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Carter, Bob & Sealey, Alison. 2000. “Language, structure and agency: What can realist social theory offer to sociolinguistics?” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (1): 3–20. Cheshire, Jenny. 2005. “Syntactic variation and beyond: Gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 9 (4): 479–508. Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. “Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory.” In Sociolinguistics and Social Theory [Language in Social Life Series], Nikolas Coupland, Srikant Sarangi & Christopher N. Candlin (Eds), 1–26. Harlow: Longman Pearson Education. Deumert, Ana. 2003. “Bringing speakers back in? Epistemological reflections on speaker-oriented explanations of language change.” Language Sciences 25: 15–76. Eggins, Suzanne & Slade, Diana. 1997. Analysing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell.

 Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2000. “Some remarks on the rhetoric of historical pragmatics.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 1–6. Görlach, Manfred. 1999. English in Nineteenth-century England. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 2001. “Interactional sociolinguistics:  A personal perspective.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton (Eds), 215–228. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Jacobs, Andreas & Jucker, Andreas H. 1995. “The historical perspective in pragmatics.” In Historical Pragmatics:  Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, Andreas H.  Jucker (Ed.), 3–33. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 1998. “Historical pragmatics: An interdisciplinary approach.” In Anglistentag 1997 Giessen:  Proceedings, Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes & Andreas H.  Jucker (Eds), 3–7. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Jucker, Andreas H. 2000. History of English and English Historical Linguistics. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett. Jucker, Andreas H.  & Taavitsainen, Irma. 2003. “Introduction.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (Eds), 1–25. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara. 1998. “Methodological issues in synchronic and diachronic pragmatics.” In Scripta Manent, Stanislaw Puppel (Ed.), 125–134. Poznań: Motivex. Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara. 2002. Synchronic and Diachronic Investigations in Pragmatics. Poznań: Motivex. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Laitinen, Mikko. 2007. Agreement Patterns in English. Diachronic Corpus Studies on Commonnumber Pronouns. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Layder, Derek. 2006/1994. Understanding Social Theory. London: Sage Publications. Layder, Derek. 2003/1997. Modern Social Theory. Key Debates and New Directions. London: Routledge. Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London/New York: Longman. Levinson, Stephen. 1992/1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mey, Jacob. 1993. Pragmatics. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change:  On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English [Language in Society 19]. Oxford: Blackwell. Nevala, Minna. 2004. Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-pragmatic Functions. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics:  Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England [Longman Linguistics Library]. London: Longman Pearson Education. Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. (Eds). 1996. Sociolinguistics and Language History. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Nurmi, Arja. 1999. A Social History of Periphrastic do. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nurmi, Arja & Palander-Collin, Minna. 2008. “Letters as a text type:  Interaction in writing.” In Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data, Marina Dossena & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Eds), 21–49. Bern: Peter Lang. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004–2008. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.



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Östman, Jan-Ola. 1988. “Implicit involvement in interactive writing.” In The Pragmatic Perspective: Selected Papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference, Marcella Bertucelli-Papi & Jef Verschueren (Eds), 155–178. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Palander-Collin, Minna. 1999. Grammaticalization and Social Embedding:  i think and methinks in Middle and Early Modern English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena & Nevalainen, Terttu. 2007. “Historical sociolinguistics:  The Corpus of Early English Correspondence.” In Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Diachronic Databases, vol. 2, Joan C.  Beal, Karen P.  Corrigan & Herbert L.  Moisl (Eds), 148–171. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-historical Linguistics. Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. “Investigating stylistic variation.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (Eds), 375–401. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Stein, Dieter. 1985. “Perspectives on historical pragmatics.” Folia Linguistica Historica 6 (1): 347–355. Stone, Lawrence & Stone, Jeanne C.  Fawtier. 1984. An Open Elite? England 1540–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2002. “Comparative sociolinguistics.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (Eds), 729–763. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in Interaction. London/New York: Longman. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2004. “Historical pragmatics.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward (Eds), 538–561. Oxford: Blackwell. Verschueren, Jef. 1995. “The pragmatic perspective.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics Manual, Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman & Jan Blommaert (Eds), 1–19. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.

section 1

Variation and social relations

Negotiating interpersonal identities in writing Code-switching practices in Charles Burney’s correspondence Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi This study examines code-switching in eighteenth-century interpersonal communication, focusing on the correspondence of musician and music historian Charles Burney. The paper builds on our previous work on code-switching in the history of English texts, and draws on insights gained in research in interactional sociolinguistics. The results show variation in code-switching practices with regard to the relationship between the writer and recipient. Code-switching is more frequent in letters written between correspondents who have a close relationship. Switches can have a locally meaningful function, organising discourse, indicating stance, or indexing the writer’s identity. Switching can also be seen as a style which in itself indexes particular types of social memberships and relationships. My dearest Padre — I have just got your direction, in a Letter from my Mother, an account that you seem to be in health & spirits (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1792; BurneyF I, 228)

1.  Introduction One of the commonplaces in research on language use is the fundamental principle put forth by pioneers in sociolinguistics that there are “no single-style speakers” (Labov 1970: 19).1 The verbal repertoire (Hymes 1984: 44) of each language user is a complex of linguistic resources, “a set of ways of speaking” consisting of

1.  The research reported here has been supported (in part) by the project on Multilingualism as a Problematic Resource, funded in the Finland Distinguished Professor programme by the Academy of Finland and the University of Jyväskylä (Pahta), and by the Academy of Finland (Nurmi).

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“speech styles, on the one hand, and contexts of discourse, on the other, together with relations of appropriateness obtaining between styles and contexts” (Hymes 1996:  33; original emphasis). The speaker’s varying use of these resources, i.e., intraspeaker variation, in the various contexts of discourse is conditioned by a wide range of language-external factors prevailing in the communicative situation. Some of these factors are speaker-related social identity features, like age, gender and profession or features deriving from the speaker’s life experiences, whereas some are connected with other circumstances in the context of discourse, including the other participants in the communicative situation and their social characteristics, and the nature of the relationship between the interlocutors (see e.g., Biber 1994). The linguistic resources that speakers draw on are mobilized in different ways in different situations, and the choices that speakers make depend on and reflect their understanding and interpretation of the situation at hand and their communicative ends, and index their social identities and relationships with others (Blommaert 2005: 10–13). Present-day bilingual speakers are known to use the multilingual resources available to them in their everyday communication to negotiate their interpersonal identities in social interaction in various ways.2 In a similar fashion, speakers traditionally characterised as monolingual can draw on foreign languages known to them, thus indexing their social identity or their relationship with the interlocutor by their multilingual practices (see e.g., Rampton 1995, 2006). In this study we observe multilingual practices in eighteenth-century interpersonal communication. Our primary concern is code-switching, i.e., the alternation of elements from more than one language, in the letters of Charles Burney, a musician and music historian, and his correspondents. We discuss Burney’s code-switching habits as acts of identity in interaction with his correspondents, offering a microlevel view on the meanings and functions of code-switching in the context of Burney’s social networks and in relation to his varying relationships with the members of those networks. In addition to examining Burney’s own code-switching practices as a resource in the negotiation of his interpersonal roles in the letters he wrote to different recipients, we complement the view by comparing them to the patterns of switching in the letters he received from two correspondents, his daughter Fanny Burney and his friend and collaborator Thomas Twining, in order to search for reciprocity. This allows us to make some observations on code-switching in the letters between Charles Burney and his correspondents engaging in interaction that bears some resemblance to conversational activity in speech.

2.  For recent research, see e.g., the studies in the special issue of Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 37, issue 3: Conversational Code-switching.



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

In addition to describing the code-switching patterns of Burney and his correspondents, our study tests varying means of approaching patterns of reciprocity in their letters. Our approach includes qualitative and quantitative techniques in the search of the multilayered multilingual practices evidenced in these writings, building and expressing intricate interpersonal relationships in the course of the correspondence, and hinting at the greater picture of the often multilayered connections between members of the network. Our corpus-based study draws on research carried out in the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982), combining insights from sociolinguistics, pragmatics and conversation analysis to the study of multilingualism and language contact phenomena (e.g., Auer 1984, 1998; Bailey 2000; Cashman 2005; Li Wei 2005) and applying them to the analysis of written communication in a historical perspective. Section 2 first briefly describes the frame of reference we have used for analysing code-switching in this study. We then introduce the corpus material in Section 3, and our informants, Charles Burney and his correspondents, in Section 4. Section 5 describes the language repertoire in Burney’s correspondence and provides a quantitative view of the distribution and frequency of codeswitching in his correspondence with different recipients. Finally, we focus on code-switching as a communicative resource by which Burney acts out his social identities and interpersonal relationships, and examine the same phenomenon in reciprocity in Sections 6 and 7. Section 8 provides a conclusion.

2.  Code-switching The term code-switching is variously defined by different scholars in research on language contact.3 For many researchers it is a specific subtype of language alternation. Muysken (2000), for example, uses the term code-switching only for changes of language that occur at a sentence boundary, and the term code-mixing for changes of language that take place within sentence boundaries. Auer (1984), on the other hand, reserves the term code-switching only for those changes of language that have local meaning in the context in which they occur. In this study, as in our earlier research, the term code-switching is used as an umbrella term to refer to any identifiable changes from one language to another within a communicative episode, in this case a single letter, or a sequence of letters between two correspondents. Our definition of the term thus excludes alternation of expressions from different registers

3.  Cf. Clyne (2003: 72), who points out that the term has become “so polysemous and unclear that it is necessary to find more precise terms to map out boundaries and interfaces”.

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within one language, which is sometimes also referred to as code-switching — a phenomenon which for clarity’s sake we prefer to call style-shifting. Code-switching, in the general sense in which we use the term, is a common linguistic phenomenon in multilingual contexts. In Gumperz’s (1982: 131) terms we can speak of code-switching as a contextualisation cue, as one of the many linguistic or non-verbal procedures which can be used for signalling contextual presuppositions, both social and interactional. In recent research on spoken data, code-switching is often seen as a multifunctional and polysemous phenomenon that can simultaneously have both macro-level social functions and several microlevel discursive or interactional functions (see e.g., Bailey 2000), although many scholars stress the nature of code-switching as an essentially conversational activity, i.e., one which takes place in conversational contexts (Li Wei 2005: 276). The results on spoken data show that switches can be used for communicative effect and for building stance both on the ideational and interpersonal levels (cf. Biber & Finegan 1989). Switches can emphasise, elaborate or evaluate. A switch can have a discourse-organising function: it can mark episode boundaries or topic shifts, separate reconstructed dialogue, reported speech or a direct quotation from the speaker’s own ideas, or a metadiscursive comment from narration. Switching also serves to index and negotiate speaker identities or interpersonal relationships. It can specify a particular addressee as the recipient of the message, establish groupmembership, intimacy or social distance, or signal power or prestige (see e.g., Milroy, Li Wei & Ching 1992). It is what language users “do” to construct their social identities in interaction (Cashman 2005:  302). In the interactional frame, the “sequential implicativeness of language choice” (Auer 1984: 5) has also become obvious. Several studies on code-switching within the framework of conversation analysis show that code-switching (in a conversational turn or utterances within a turn) influences subsequent language choices by the same or other speakers. The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in historical codeswitching research (see e.g., Wenzel 1994; Wright 1998; Schendl 2002; Pahta 2004; Nurmi & Pahta 2004; Pahta & Nurmi 2006). This research has shown that some of the functions and meanings of code-switching identified in present-day spoken data can also be found in written texts surviving from past periods. These include, for example, the frequent occurrence of code-switching in quotations and in other types of text-  and discourse-organising functions. Various kinds of genre-  or domain-specific switching patterns typical of particular communicative situations can also be detected, including code-switching connected with the in-group language use of merchants, lawyers, the clergy, or medical professionals (Wright 1998; Nurmi & Pahta 2004; Pahta 2004), or letter-writing conventions, such as the use of code-switched dates or politeness formulae at the beginnings and endings of letters (Nurmi & Pahta 2004; Pahta & Nurmi 2007).



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

The interactional nature of code-switching has so far received little attention in historical code-switching research. Although written letters are obviously a different genre from spoken conversation, they provide evidence of language use in an interactional situation that has many similarities to conversation. Thus, our study examines the letters written by eighteenth-century informants essentially as communication between interlocutors in writing, seeking to provide a diachronic view on code-switching as a resource in the construction and negotiation of interpersonal identities in social interaction.

3.  Material Our data comes from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE). The primary material is the selection of the letters written by Charles Burney, altogether 40,000 words in 50 letters from the period 1762–1784. This particular material was chosen on the basis of our earlier research (Pahta & Nurmi 2007), which shows that Charles Burney’s letters contain code-switching more often and into more languages than those of the average writer in CEECE. Our earlier research also indicates that Burney’s code-switching practices vary in relation to different recipients, and thus his letters offer us a better opportunity to examine the role of code-switching in the construction and negotiation of the writer’s interpersonal identities and social roles than those of most other writers in the corpus. The CEECE also includes some letters written to Charles Burney by the same people to whom he wrote, which provides an opportunity to examine similarities and differences in the switching patterns of Burney’s correspondents and to compare their practices with his. It also facilitates the search for possible patterns of reciprocity in code-switching practices, i.e., makes it possible to examine codeswitching as a rough equivalent of conversational activity in writing between the correspondents. In this study, we have included letters written to Burney by his daughter Fanny Burney (12,000 words, 15 letters, written 1778–1800) and friend Thomas Twining (27,000 words, 25 letters, written 1773–1785).4 In the corpus sample, the actual letters between the correspondents, however, are only seldom direct replies. Fanny’s letter to her father around 13 August 1779 seems to have received a reply on 29 August, and the exchange of letters between Charles Burney and Thomas Twining in 1773 (TT 7 April, CB 28 April, TT’s short note 8 May, TT’s longer letter 28 May, TT 22 July, CB 30 August, TT 16 October) is something like

4.  More details on the letter collections Burney, BurneyF and Twining can be found in the Appendix to this volume.

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

a more direct answer–reply pattern, as is the pair of letters ten years later (TT 22 October 1783, CB 10 November 1783) and the sequence in the following year (TT 26 June 1784, CB 31 July 1784, TT 27 August 1784).5 The nature of the correspondence between Burney and the two recipients in this study prevents a systematic sequential analysis of code-switching practices, but allows some general observations on reciprocity. Foreign language passages have been coded into CEECE by corpus markup, which allowed us to retrieve the data by searching for the mark-up brackets. Decisions on what in fact constitutes a code-switch in the corpus material, i.e., not a borrowing, have been revisited in individual cases during the course of our work, as the larger patterns have become more apparent.6

4.  Charles Burney and his correspondents The central figure in this study is Charles Burney (1726–1814), a musician and a music historian (Wagstaff 2004). His father was a dancer, musician and portrait painter. Burney was educated at Shrewsbury and Chester Free Schools, where he showed a talent for music from early on. He was apprenticed to Thomas Arne, the composer, in 1744 and moved to London. Once in London, Burney found a patron in Fulke Greville, and married his first wife, Esther Sleepe in 1749. The couple had several children; in this study we will encounter Charles Burney Jr, Frances (Fanny) Burney and Susanna Phillips (née Burney). Burney composed music, but started also writing about it in the late 1740s. In 1751 he moved his family to King’s Lynn for health reasons. He was widowed in 1762, and remarried in 1767. During his second marriage Burney travelled

5.  The seemingly long intervals between answers and replies are frequently commented on by the correspondents. So, on 30 August 1773 Burney explains how various disagreeable impediments have prevented him from answering Twining’s “admirable Letter of May 28th” (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining; Burney 138), and on the 10th of November 1783 he begins his letter with “excuses for letting so kind, so afflicting, so comforting, & so admirable a Letter, remain near 3 weeks unanswered” (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining; Burney 387). Twining for his part responds to Burney’s comment on the length of his letter (“I am as much ashamed of the Length of this Letter as of the Time you have waited for it.” Charles Burney to Thomas Twining; Burney 148) with “You say you were ashamed of the length of it” (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney; Twining I, 84), thus confirming he is replying to the letter sent nearly a month previously. 6.  The brackets take the form of (\exempli gratia\). For a discussion of this phenomenon in earlier letter material, see Nurmi and Pahta 2004.



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

extensively, which may to some extent explain his command of an impressive array of languages. In 1770 he made a tour of France and Italy to collect material for his General History of Music (4 vols), published in 1776–1789. Burney received the degree of DMus from Oxford in 1769, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1772, but still continued to give music lessons and to write about music. He also became a corresponding member of the Institut National de France in 1810. The fact that Burney was a well-educated and a well-travelled man is reflected in the wide repertoire of languages in which he had some degree of fluency. The recipients of Burney’s letters provide the “interlocutors”, who, though most of them in practice passive and silent in this study, have an important role as Burney’s perceived partners in the negotiation of his interpersonal identity. The network studied here is by no means an exhaustive set of Burney’s correspondents, merely the sample included in CEECE. There are two main kinds of recipients, family members and others, but within these two groups there are further subdivisions into more and less intimate addressees. Furthermore, there is more background information preserved on some members of the network than others, which makes the assessment of the nature of their relationship with Burney in some cases quite difficult. CEECE contains Charles Burney’s letters to various members of his family. Elizabeth Allen (1728–1796) was Burney’s second wife. She was the widow of Stephen Allen, a good friend of Burney’s in King’s Lynn. The couple married in 1767 (Wagstaff 2004). The two letters addressed to her are from a period before their marriage, but after their first spouses had died. There is no information on Elizabeth Allen’s language skills, but she was admired for both her beauty and her education, so it is feasible she may have had some learning in foreign languages. Burney comments in a surviving fragment of his memoirs how, apart from his first wife, few of the Lynn ladies were readers except for Mrs Stephen Allen, “a beautiful woman who had educated herself, & by her passion for reading had acquired the superficies of general literature in a superior degree” (Klima, Bowers & Grant (Eds) 1988: 115–116). Three of Burney’s children are among the recipients in our sample. Burney’s son, Charles Burney Jr7 (1757–1817) was a schoolmaster and book collector (Troide 2004). He was educated at Cambridge, but was forced to leave the university in disgrace in 1777 after stealing books from the university library and selling them. Burney senior was appalled at his son’s behaviour, but managed to

7.  We refer to him as Charles Burney Jr simply to distinguish him from his father in this study — the abbreviation Jr is not commonly added to his name.

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

arrange for Charles Jr to be further educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, where he received his MA in classical studies in 1781. Charles Burney Jr was then employed at Dr William Rose’s private school at Chiswick, where he succeeded Rose as headmaster in 1786. The younger Burney distinguished himself in the classics, and published many translations, commentaries, editions and reviews of Greek and Latin works. Later he gained honorary doctorates of law both from Aberdeen and from the University of Glasgow. In 1807 he was reinstated at Caius College, Cambridge, and received his MA by royal mandate in 1808. This was followed by rapid advancement in the church. Burney became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1802 and professor of ancient literature at the Royal Academy in 1810. His immense private library was purchased by the British Museum in 1818. Charles Burney Jr married Dr William Rose’s daughter Sarah (1759–1821) in 1783, and they had one son (Troide 2004). The younger Burney was obviously very skilled in classical languages, but there is no information on his knowledge of contemporary languages, and nothing is known for certain of his wife’s education. However, since Burney became a schoolmaster, and his wife was daughter to one, it is likely that they had knowledge of at least French. Of the two Burney daughters included in our sample, Frances Burney (1752–1840) was the elder (Rogers 2004). Fanny, as she was known in the family, was educated at home, and in her early years she developed a taste for reading and a passion for writing. She taught herself French as a teenager. Fanny acted as her father’s amanuensis while he was writing his magnum opus on music history. The family’s contacts with the London musical and literary circles brought her in touch with a variety of distinguished people, and in 1776 she became part of Hester Lynch Thrale’s (later Piozzi) circle. Her first novel, Evelina was published in 1778, and the subsequent fame gave Fanny access to e.g., Elizabeth Montagu’s refined literary circle (see Sairio in this volume). The latter half of the 1780s Fanny spent at court, attending to Queen Charlotte. After her release from the demanding duties, she made visits to literary friends, and during one of them became acquainted with a group of French emigrants, including Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay (1754–1818), who was to become her husband in 1793. In 1802 she followed her husband to France, where they lived with short interruptions until 1815. Some of the letters Fanny wrote to her father are included in CEECE and were examined for this study. Burney’s other daughter appears in our study under her married name, Susanna Phillips (1755–1800) (Wagstaff 2004). In 1764 Burney took two of his daughters, Esther and Susanna, to France “in order to abridge the time necessary in England for learning a little bad French, by dipping them over head and ears in it, where being boarded in a house where nothing else was spoken, they must



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

drink or drown; and they being young and the Organs of speech ductile, they wd acquire a better pronunciation & idiom in a few weeks, than at home in as many years, where it is book French wch children learn & English translated” (Klima et al. (Eds) 1988: 156–157). Among Burney’s other correspondents, there is a clearly identifiable group of friends, an inner circle, and a few more distant connections, an outer circle. Samuel Crisp (1707–1783) was a playwright and a close friend of both Charles Burney and his daughter Fanny. The son of a wealthy London merchant, Crisp was educated at Eton, and studied arts and music in Italy for some years. The Burneys were frequent visitors in Crisp’s home at Chessington (Sambrook 2004). Unfortunately no letters from Crisp to Burney are available for this study. In Crisp’s letters to other recipients, switches into French, Italian and Latin appear, so it seems he had at least some command of these languages. Another close friend was Thomas Twining, a vicar, classical scholar and translator, as well as a talented musician. He was a great help to Charles Burney in the writing of Burney’s General History of Music (Lane-Poole 2004). Twining’s command of Latin and Greek is clearly evidenced in his own publications, and his letters to Burney show evidence of his well-rounded skills in contemporary languages as well. Several of the letters he wrote to Charles Burney are inluded in CEECE; our material in fact contains more letters from Twining to Burney than vice versa (see Nurmi & Pahta forthcoming). The last recipient of Burney’s letters included in this study that can be regarded as a member of the inner circle is Hester Lynch Thrale (1741–1821), or Hester Piozzi after her second marriage. She was a friend of the Burney family (Franklin 2004). Her parents were keen to educate their daughter, and she mentions in her autobiography how “they had taught me to read and speak and think and translate from the French, till I was half a Prodigy” (Lobban (Ed.) 1910: 5). She was also taught Italian, Latin and Spanish at an early age (Lobban (Ed.) 1910: 11). With her second husband, Gabriel Mario Piozzi, she travelled in France, Italy and Germany for three years in the 1780s. Unfortunately, no letters from her to Burney are available for this study. In addition to the inner circle, there are three more distant recipients of Burney’s letters. The first of these, Charles Davy (1722/3–1797), was a clergyman with an interest in music. He studied at Cambridge, and settled in Norfolk after his studies (Cooper 2004). As far as it is possible to ascertain on the basis of the extant letters, it seems that Davy and Burney corresponded fairly formally, mostly on matters related to music and Davy’s translations in the field. The second more distant recipient was John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich (1718–1792). He was one of Burney’s patrons. In this case the distance is also due to the social distance of rank. Lord Sandwich was an educated man, a

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respected scholar and orientalist, who had a great interest in music as well (Rodger 2004/2006). The last recipient included in this study is Rev. Montagu North (1712–1779), D.D., who was installed Canon of Windsor in 1775. He and his older brother Roger were friends of Burney. His father, Roger North, wrote an informative manuscript “Memoirs of Music”, which Burney quoted in his General History of Music (Klima et al. (Eds) 1988: 110–111).

5.  The repertoire and frequency of code-switching Charles Burney’s letters display a command of a wide repertoire of languages, although it is evident that he was more fluent in some than in others. In addition to his travels on the continent (see Section 4), he also had a great many connections with international circles in England. This can be seen from the passage quoted in example (1), where Burney describes a tea party at his house in a letter to Mrs Thrale.

(1) I had a Congress of out-landish folks at Tea — a Sigr Fontana, a very intelligent Florentine — a Germans Meister das Sprache — an Irish Gentn — wth a Portugal, & a Dutch Jew, his Companion. (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1797; Burney 289)8

Details of Burney’s and his correspondents’ language selection in the switched passages are shown in Table 1, recording the non-English segments in Charles Burney’s letters to all recipients, and in Fanny Burney’s and Thomas Twining’s letters to Charles Burney. In addition to English, Burney used six other languages in the sample of his correspondence included in this study. French and Italian are the two most frequently occurring foreign languages. The frequency of French seems to echo its contemporary role as the language of culture and social interaction among the upper social strata, whereas Italian was the dominant language in music, Burney’s professional domain. Classical languages, the languages of education and scholarship, also occur in the data. In addition, there are some occasional instances of other contemporary European languages.

8.  It can be seen from this example that Burney’s German skills were by no means impeccable, since rather than Meister der Sprache he writes Meister das Sprache.



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

Table 1.  Language repertoire in Charles Burney’s correspondence (N = number of code-switched segments, ASL = average length of code-switched segments in words). Writer

Language

N

N/1000 w

ASL

Charles Burney

French German Greek Italian Latin Spanish Total

56 3 3 38 16 2 118

1.4 0.1 0.1 1.0 0.4 0.1 3.0

2.9 2.3 2.7 2.3 2.2 2.0 2.6

Fanny Burney

French Italian Latin Total

21 4 2 27

1.7 0.3 0.2 2.2

4.2 1.3 1.5 3.6

Thomas Twining

French Greek Italian Latin Total

78 1 33 20 132

2.9 0.0 1.2 0.7 4.9

2.3 1.0 1.5 2.2 2.1

The length of the switched segments in Burney’s letters varies between one and 33 words; the average length is 2.6 words. French segments tend to be somewhat longer than the others. Burney’s letters typically contain passages with frequent code-switching, often to more than one language in the course of a short space. This is illustrated in example (2), containing switches to both French and Italian, and example (3), with segments in Latin and French.

(2) But, en attendant, let me tell you that our dear Pacchierotti is come back, (entre nous, par une Trame de ma facon) Though such is the distracted state of Opera Governmt, it is very doubtful whether any Theatrical use will be made during the whole winter of his Talents — but he is here — & I shall now & then hear him — I have made him very fond of a Cantata by Haydn, lately come from Vienna. “Ah, come il core mi palpita” — It is so much in his best style of singing that it seems fatta apposta per lui (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1783; Burney 398)



(3) How can you be so ungrateful to complain of the Emptiness of the Place you are in, when surrounded with Wisdom, Learning, & Beauty; to wch you can, ad Libitum, contribute the Seasoning of Wit. — I feel very comfortable that you and the dear & sweet Mrs Crewe club Chatation together. Pray put her in mind of me again & again. And don’t let my Master think to diddle me daddle me out of all my breeding — Cook up I entreat you, selon son goût, mille Jolies Choses de ma Part — here comes the postman, or I shd have been my own Cook (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1779; Burney 258–259)

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

In Fanny Burney’s letters, French is the most commonly occurring foreign language, with isolated instances of Italian and Latin. Her switched passages tend to be longer than those of her father’s, particularly the French passages; the average length of all code-switched segments is 3.6 words. On the other hand, the frequency of switched segments in her letters is somewhat lower than in her father’s letters. In Thomas Twining’s letters, too, the most frequent foreign language is French. Twining code-switches more frequently than either Burney or his daughter, but the switched segments in his letters are shorter; the average length of the code-switched segments is 2.1 words. Table 2.  Code-switching in letters by Charles Burney to different recipients.

F A M I L Y

O T H E R

Recipient

Words

Letters

Letters with CS

% CS

Elizabeth Allen Charles Burney Jr Fanny Burney Sarah Burney Susanna Phillips

1,174 2,711 5,115 1,490 3,011

2 4 10 3 3

0 2 7 0 3

0 50 70 0 100

Family total

13,501

22

12

55

Samuel Crisp Charles Davy Montagu North Lord Sandwich Hester Lynch Thrale Thomas Twining

3,552 881 1,159 2,746 6,840 10,772

5 2 2 4 11 4

3 0 1 0 10 4

60 0 50 0 91 100

Other total

25,950

28

18

64

Total

39,451

50

30

50

An analysis of the distribution of code-switched segments in the material shows that Charles Burney’s code-switching practices vary both quantitatively and qualitatively in letters written to different recipients. Table 2 presents our quantitative findings in letters written by Burney to different recipients. On the basis of their relationship to Burney, we initially divided the recipients into two categories, “family” and “other”, using a stable social categorization that in some earlier studies of language use based on the correspondence corpora has proved salient (see e.g., Nevala 2004; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003:  198–200; Palander-Collin 2002, 2006). The first category includes Elizabeth Allen, i.e., Burney’s second wife-to-be; his daughters Fanny Burney and Susanna Phillips; his son Charles Burney Jr; and his daughter-in-law Sarah Burney. Among the “other” recipients, Samuel Crisp and Thomas Twining can be regarded as Burney’s close friends, and Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi) was a member of the same literary circle. Charles Davy and Montagu North were Burney’s acquaintances and Lord Sandwich his long-time patron.



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

The table shows the number of words in the letters addressed to each recipient, the total number of letters, and the number of letters containing code-switching, as well as the percentage of letters in which code-switching appears. The two most notable things in this table are Burney’s practice of varying his code-switching according to recipient, and the lack of a clear-cut difference between family and other recipients in his code-switching practices. Table 3 provides the corresponding information on Fanny Burney’s and Thomas Twining’s letters to Charles Burney. When the figures are compared with Table 2, it is evident that on this level of quantification they both reciprocated with Burney in their code-switching practices. Table 3.  Code-switching in letters by Fanny Burney and Thomas Twining to Charles Burney. Writer

Words

Letters

Letters with CS

% CS

Fanny Burney Thomas Twining

12,102 26,689

15 25

12 24

80 96

The patterns of variation emerge even more clearly in Table 4, where instances of Burney’s code-switching are given in more detail. The table includes the raw frequencies of switched segments, normalised frequencies per 1,000 words, and the number of switched segments related to the number of letters. The last column shows the average length of the switched segments in words. Table 4.  Charles Burney’s code-switching frequency by recipient. Recipient

CS segments CS segments/1,000 w CS segments/letter ASL

F A M I L Y

Elizabeth Allen Charles Burney Jr Fanny Burney Sarah Burney Susanna Phillips Family total

0 3 10 0 19 32

0.0 1.1 2.0 0.0 6.3 2.4

0.0 0.8 1.0 0.0 6.3 1.5

0.0 2.3 2.7 0.0 2.2 2.4

O T H E R

Samuel Crisp Charles Davy Montagu North Lord Sandwich Hester L. Thrale Thomas Twining Other total

7 0 1 0 33 45 86

2.0 0.0 0.9 0.0 4.8 4.2 3.3

1.4 0.0 0.5 0.0 3.0 11.3 3.1

1.1 0.0 2.0 0.0 3.2 2.4 2.6

118

3.0

2.4

2.6

Total

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

According to this data, Burney code-switches most often in his letters to his daughter Susanna Phillips, and friends Hester Lynch Thrale and Thomas Twining. Switching is also fairly frequent in letters to his other daughter Fanny and his friend Samuel Crisp. On the other hand, there are no code-switches in letters to Elizabeth Allen, Sarah Burney, Charles Davy or Lord Sandwich. In the first two cases it may be assumed that Burney’s knowledge of the recipient’s insufficient or lacking command of foreign languages influenced his own performance. In the case of Davy and Sandwich, it is possible that the lack of intimacy in the relationships caused Burney to avoid switching as a communicative strategy. Since the recipients who are most frequently the targets of Burney’s switching are among his intimates, it is plausible that regardless of the recipients’ knowledge of foreign languages Burney did not regard switching as appropriate in more distant relationships. Table 5.  Charles Burney’s code-switching to recipients by language (switches/1,000 words). Recipient

French

German

Greek

Italian

Latin

Spanish

F A M I L Y

Elizabeth Allen Charles Burney Jr Fanny Burney Sarah Burney Susanna Phillips Family total

0.0 0.4 1.2 0.0 2.7 1.1

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

0.0 0.4 0.8 0.0 2.7 1.0

0.0 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.2

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.3 0.1

O T H E R

Samuel Crisp Charles Davy Montagu North Lord Sandwich Hester L. Thrale Thomas Twining Other total

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.9 2.6 1.6

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.4 0.0 0.1

0.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.1

1.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.5 1.0 1.0

0.6 0.0 0.9 0.0 1.0 0.3 0.5

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.0

Total

1.4

0.1

0.1

1.0

0.4

0.1

Table 5 shows Burney’s switching patterns to each recipient with regard to frequency of switched passages in the various languages he employed. The frequency of switching seems to correlate with the wide selection of languages that are used in the correspondence. The patterns of reciprocity are also fairly clear. As is seen when comparing these frequencies with Table 1, Fanny Burney writers and receives both French and Italian quite frequently. While she also occasionally resorts to Latin in letters to her father, he does not reciprocate. Thomas Twining and Charles Burney employ amongst themselves almost the whole range of languages attested in our material (only Spanish is not found in Twining’s letters to Burney, although there is an instance of it in Burney’s letters to Twining).



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

Table 6 confirms the pattern of the frequency of switching for Burney’s two correspondents. Fanny Burney switches as frequently when writing to her father as he to her, but the switched segments in her letters are longer than in his. Thomas Twining code-switches in his letters to Burney slightly more often than Burney does in letters to him, but Twining’s switched passages are slightly shorter than Burney’s (see Table 4). Table 6.  The code-switching frequency of Charles Burney’s correspondents. Writer Fanny Burney Thomas Twining

CS segments

CS segments/1,000 w

CS segments/letter

ASL

27 132

2.2 4.9

1.8 5.3

3.6 2.1

6.  Code-switching practices in Charles Burney’s letters Charles Burney’s letters contain instances of the common types of code-switching that we identified in an earlier study on eighteenth-century letters in CEECE (see Pahta & Nurmi 2007). This earlier study, based on 725,000 words by 86 informants in 1,237 letters contained in the then available version of the corpus, showed that various types of prefabricated chunks play a substantial role in the code-switching practices of many eighteenth-century letter-writers. These included proverbs and citations repeating utterances that were formulated by other speakers or writers, or conventionalised and formulaic items, such as fixed phrases used in interactional routines like leavetaking. This is perhaps the easiest form of switching, which does not require any fluency in the second language. In Burney’s letters this is seen in examples like (4) to (7), illustrating code-switched proverbialised quotations or polite formulae, which, if nothing else, portray Burney as a member of the welleducated social ranks of his age.

(4) Never complain of want of νους or of spunk — for yr Critique is full of Fire. (Charles Burney to Samuel Crisp, 1771; Burney 89)9



(5) As there are many Bipeds who are insensible to the Charms of Wealth, Honour, Ambition, & even Love, so there are others that know not the fascinating Power of certain Figures, & dispositions over our souls, when the Congenial Spirit, the Idem velle et idem Nolle, operate in favour of those we call our Friends — the thing, however subsists, & its effects have been so often proved, & recorded that there can be no doubt of its having always existed. (Charles Burney to Charles Burney Jr, 1781; Burney 317–318)10

9.  Here Burney gives a free translation of νους as ‘spunk’. 10.  ‘(To want) the same in intentions and disinclinations’, Sallust, Bellum Catilinae.

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi



(6) you are a good honest sort of a shop-keeper, a man of real business, who hates to waste Peoples Precious time in palaver, & useless words — Quid multa? Pauca Verba — shall be his Motto. (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1781; Burney 323)11



(7) I must, & ought to run away as I did yesterday — so once more addio — & portez vous bien — C. B. (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1778; Burney 246)

However, some eighteenth-century writers in CEECE code-switch quite freely and fluently from one language to another, using code-switched segments beyond mere conventionalised or ready-made expressions as a resource to organise their discourse and to create subtle meanings, suggesting a more than basic command in the language in question. Charles Burney is one of the writers whose switching patterns are more varied than those of most other informants in CEECE, and his letters contain more examples of fluent switching between languages than those of most other writers. Accordingly, the proportion of prefabricated or conventionalised chunks is smaller in his letters. In Charles Burney’s language use, code-switching frequently serves as a resource for indicating various kinds of shifts and transitions, or changes in footing, involving a change in the writer’s alignment in relation to the situation at hand (Goffman 1981). These include discourse-organising switches, as in example (8), where the French discourse marker coincides with a topic shift, or example (9), where the switched segment is a parenthetic aside, a metadiscursive comment reflecting the writer’s attitude towards the main topic.

(8) Here’s no news yet! & so we’ll have no Politics — they sour the blood, & are not half so exhilerating as Quibbles & nonsense — á propos — here has been our Frd Jemmy Mathias to day, singing like a bird — of wisdom, as he is — & has taken up all the precious time I intended to bestow on you, with his old songs & saws (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1779; Burney 277)



(9) others will be yet curious in their enquiries after a Balon being sent out on discoveries and in pursuit of Comets, Meteors, & double-stars. — Tout cela viendrá, soyez sure — and Fanny, or at least, her Children, will live to see many things in these Aerial voyages wch elder sons & daughters of mother Earth have hitherto thought beyond the reach of human ken. (Charles Burney to Susanna Phillips, 1783; Burney 403)12

In addition to metadiscursive comments, Burney’s code-switches often occur in other contexts indicating stance, i.e., his attitudes, feelings, judgements, or

11.  ‘What penalty? Few words.’ These were common phrases. 12.  ‘All this will happen, you can be sure.’



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

commitments concerning the propositional content of the utterance (Biber & Finegan 1989). These include emphasis in expressions concerning precision, as in examples (10) and (11), or in apologies, as in (12). (10) I believe you wd do justement comm[e] ca (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1781; Burney 324) (11) You must perceive though I have not said it, totidem verbis, that The Italians are far behind us in the construction of their Instruments & in their performance upon them; but that in singing, the first & most essential part of music, they are before all the world. (Charles Burney to Montagu North, 1771; Burney 96) (12) But I forget that I am writing, & my Pen prattles away your Time about Tweedledum & Tweedledee … Perdona! amica mia Colendissima! (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1778; Burney 243)13

Emotional colouring, as in the previous example, frequently triggers code-switching in Burney’s letters, including expressions of both positive (example 13) and negative emotions (example 14). (13) Love me, & teach your Husband & Bratty to love me as well as I love ye all, & shall be Molto Contento — Love to the good Mrs H. & honest Kate —  (Charles Burney to Susanna Phillips, 1784; Burney 416) (14) but that there are certain Diavolini degl’Impedimenti, or mischievous Sylphs & Gnomes that successfully forge Fetters for Resolution, even wise Folks will deny; & yet, I seem surrounded with an Army of them, that prevent me from doing every thing I wish & intend. (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1777; Burney 236)

Example (15) illustrates Burney’s ironical code-switched remarks, also connected with commentary, emphasis and emotional colouring. (15) What a nonsense Letter is this to send to a learned Lady! Well, vive la bagatelle! (Charles Burney to Hester Lynch Thrale, 1781; Burney 324)

On the other hand, code-switching is also clearly a resource by which Charles Burney expresses his interest and professional knowledge in music. (16) His voice was in good order, & he sang divinely — his 1st song a Grasiosa —  or rather mezza bravura Air of Bertoni, which I had never heard before; but so elegant & fanciful that I shd have been less surprised had I been told that the Catilena was Pacchierotti’s — his 2d Air a Cantabile in the gran gusto by Anfossi — and the 3d air, Rasserena il mesto ciglio, of Gluck, wch we got encored. (Charles Burney to Susanna Phillips, 1783; Burney 404)

13.  ‘Pardon me! My most worshipful friend!’

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

7.  Reciprocity in code-switching practices Since Burney’s letters show some variation in switching practices according to the recipient, it is interesting to compare the similarities and differences in the letters of two of his correspondents, his daughter Fanny and his friend Thomas Twining. The following two subsections explore the patterns of reciprocity in their code-switching practices. 7.1  L  ike father, like daughter? Correspondence between Charles Burney and Fanny Burney There are many similarities in the code-switching practices of Charles and Fanny Burney. This is hardly surprising, since, in addition to the familial relationship, Fanny worked as her father’s amanuensis, and thus, the ties between them are close in two important social domains. Both Charles and Fanny use formulaic and conventionalised expressions. These include routine expressions used in greetings and leavetakings (example 17) as well as various words and phrases on their way to becoming part of the English vocabulary, like incog in example (18), an eighteenth-century variant of the originally Latin incognito, which has been integrated into English lexicon.14 (17) Adieu, adieu, I shall present Hetty with this bit of paper to write down her dream upon, for she is now fast asleep at my Elbow. (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1764; Burney 47) (18) I have so earnestly desired to continue incog (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1778; BurneyF III, 41)

Since father and daughter are equally involved in various artistic pursuits, both literary and musical, it is not unexpected to find them employing special terminology, e.g., for literary concepts or musical genres, thus reflecting their professional and personal interests and life styles (examples 19 and 20). (19) — I am just come from the Comick Opera, wch is here Called the Comedie Italienne (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1764; Burney 41)

14.  Incognito appears in standard Present-day English dictionaries like the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary as part of the English lexicon. The first entries in the OED date from the mid-seventeenth century. Cf. Nurmi and Pahta (forthcoming), which notes that in Thomas Twining’s correspondence nearly a third of all switched passages has an entry in the OED, the first citation in many cases originating from the literary circle of which the Burneys were also members.



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

(20) & as soon as I have read myself into a forgetfulness of my old Dramatis persona, — lest I should produce something else as Witless as the last. (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1779; BurneyF III, 347)

The use of French in the Burneys’ letters also reflects the role of French in contemporary society, particularly among the upper classes, among whom the Burneys increasingly associated (example 21). (21) Cecilia’s Notoriety & publicity among les Gens comme il faut (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1782; Burney 354)

Both Charles and Fanny use code-switching as a structuring device to separate different sections or levels of text or discourse. Especially Fanny code-switches frequently for speech representation, including direct and indirect speech, and quotations (for more on this topic, see Nevala & Palander-Collin forthcoming). These are in the language of the original utterance, so that Fanny reports her French husband’s words in the original French in (example 22), and a second-hand quotation in example (23). (22) The Gardener says I must insert mille choses aimables de sa part & says he has not forgot he was promised some gooseberries (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1795; BurneyF III, 144) (23) I always think of the words that so long impressed M. Beaumez, “il faut étre ou Coquin, ou fou,” to have any thing to do with them (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1794; BurneyF III, 38)

Switching attains a very different function in expressions which can be seen as emotionally loaded, expressing stance in a foreign language. Tenderness, for example, might be more difficult or embarrassing to express in English (example 24), or perhaps the strength of the emotion might be more emphasised in English (examples 25–27; see also examples 13–14 above). (24) Il caro Amico va partire subito, subito, & there is not the least hope of getting a day for the party I had planned (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney and Suzanna Phillips, 1784; Burney 419)15 (25) The fatal knell then, is knolled! & down among the Dead Men sink the poor Witlings, — for-ever & for-ever & for-ever! — I give a sigh whether I will or not to their memory, for, however worthless, they were mes Enfans (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1779; BurneyF III, 345–346) (26) Bambino is quite well. (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1795; BurneyF III, 144)

15.  ‘The dear friend will leave quickly, quickly.’

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

(27) M. d’A. has here un petit heritier du nom (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1795; BurneyF III, 358)16

Switching is also frequently resorted to for reasons of decorum and, possibly, humour. Whether the description of Fanny’s appearing before Mrs Crewe en déshabillé is intended to be decorous or humorous, is of course difficult to determine without more intimate knowledge of the father–daughter relationship. It is quite possible that the switching is in fact intended to be humorous, in order to allow mention of a state of dress which is less than socially suitable. (28) I rejoice very much that Mrs. Crewe is in Town, & her spirited kindness in her menaced visit at your Bed Side reconciles me completely to the bold deed of appearing before her en Robe de Chambre et en pantoufles. (Fanny Burney to Charles Burney, 1794; BurneyF III, 37)

Finally, it is often the case that switching seems to serve no particular local function at all. On these occasions it is plausible that the expressions used are merely fashionable terms at the time, and show an attunement to the current idiom used in their social circles. Examples (29) and (30) represent instances of this kind. (29) Mrs Rishton, writes word to D. Y. that she has read Cicely 3 Times over, herself, & her sposo, like Sr Jos. wth Evelina is unable to eat & drink for it — he brings the bk constantly to table at dinner & supper — (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney and Mr and Mrs Phillips, 1782; Burney 343) (30) The weather is now delicious, and though I hate being in London, yet I feel but little appetite for Ches. when neither yourself nor the Phills are there — don’t tell Kate — & therefore I have made a bargain wth Sir Jos. at a venison dinner he gave yesterday, to club horses, & go in his Chariot, like Cavalieri, to Norbury. He has long promised, he says, & long wished, to go thither; & it is now determined that we get there by dinner, on tuesday, & stay till thursday. (Charles Burney to Fanny Burney, 1784; Burney 440)

7.2  F  riends and collaborators: Correspondence between Charles Burney and Thomas Twining The relationship between Charles Burney and Thomas Twining was apparently quite close. Twining was permitted to know of and attempt to help in the cover-up of Charles Burney Jr’s Cambridge scandal, which speaks strongly of a certain degree of intimacy. Twining also corresponded to some extent with Fanny and Charles Jr, so he can be regarded as a friend of the whole family. The main connection between

16.  ‘A little heir to his name.’



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

Twining and Burney, however, was in the writing of Burney’s history of music: Twining was a respected classical scholar (as well as a seemingly talented amateur musician), and was able to offer comments on Burney’s manuscript (for further information on Twining’s code-switching see Nurmi & Pahta forthcoming). Some of the switching in their letters can be regarded as conventionalised, as in examples (31) and (32), containing expressions that have become common in English.17 (31) I made my escape to the House of a Friend in a small Village, ten or twelve Miles from a Market Town, where I recd your last kind communication, & where I am at work upon the opus Magnum, in Peace and Quiet, for I can do nothing at it in London on acct of eternal Interuptions, nor at Lynn for eating & drinking. (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 139) (32) Though he is passé as a composer, &, to the generality of the world, as a player, I shall always think his musical talents & his natural taste very respectable (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1777; Twining I, 148)

In examples (33) and (34), in the two Burneys’ correspondence, quotations are often given in the original language. But unlike the correspondence between Burney and his daughter, example (33) also includes some Greek, indicating a level of formal education which gives access to literature in both classical languages. (33) And I think the very passage in Euclid upon which those who think otherwise have founded their opinions, is in our Favour. He says that the Diatonic Tetrachord moves from the acute to the grave by the Intervals of Tone, Tone, & Semitone: κατα τόνον, καί τονον, καί ἡμιτόνιον. (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 142)18 (34) Lord Bacon talks somewhere about a certain “viscositas mentis”. Now I have always felt a great deal of this glew in my mind. (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1784; Twining I, 256)

Similarly, code-switched comments on the discussed topics are common (examples 35–36). Sometimes these comments seem to include emotional colouring, and to function like exclamations.

17.  Both magnum opus and passé are recorded in Present-day English dictionaries. Opus magnum is recorded in use in the OED for the first time in c. 1704 and the first citation of passé is from Fanny Burney’s diaries in 1775. 18.  Burney provides an English translation of the Greek preceding the switched passage: “Tone, Tone, & Semitone”.

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

(35) as a player, he was always deficient in Time; as a composer, laboured; & as a Critic, jamais de bonne Foi, changing his opinions according to his Interest, as often as Caprice. (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 144)19 (36) For a week, or nearly, after my removal hither, I cou’d do nothing — mais, rien du tout (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1781; Twining I, 218)20

Since a great deal of the two men’s correspondence dealt with Burney’s magnum opus on the history of music, it is not surprising to find Italian musical terms appearing frequently in their letters (examples 37 and 38), sometimes in metaphorical uses, as in example (39). (37) He said it was the kind of Recitativo Cantante (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 398) (38) that he got much from Lulli (particularly the method of modulating in legatura) & from Bononcini’s famous Camilla. (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1773; Twining I, 80) (39) the flute-players & instrumental performers — all this is a crescendo of interest & amusement (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1775; Twining I, 102)

Emotional colouring and various exclamations also appear in both writers’ letters, as in examples (40)–(44). If we consider code-switching as an index of intimacy, this may well be a means of regulating the strength of emotional expression, perhaps softening or strengthening the tone in comparison with an English expression. This seems to apply to the expressions of personal emotion (as in examples 41 and 42) as well as to the expression of emotion more generally (examples 40 and 44). (40) but what we do cón amore is usually done at a Jerk (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 148) (41) Ah! je respire! — vous m’avez soulage! (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1774; Twining I, 88)21 (42) I have been pretty much repandu, as a Correspondent, since I first communicated to the Public my design of attempting a Histy of Music. … You seem to me to get to the Root of my Besogne, while others are playing at See-saw on the Branches. I have often seen with disgust the grossierté of Strong Compliments (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 138)22

19.  ‘never sincere’. 20.  ‘just nothing at all’. 21.  ‘I breathe more easily! You have relieved me!’ 22.  ‘widely spread … labour … vulgarity.’



Code-switching in Charles Burney’s correspondence 

(43) Indeed, next to such a Dread as yours of being thought a Pushing Fellow, there is nothing that would Mortify me more than to find myself á Charge to my Friends. (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 140) (44) When He told you of poor Corelli’s Disgrazia at Naples, I suppose he sunk his own, at the same place. (Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, 1773; Burney 145)

Many of the switches appear to have no particular local function in the letters, unless we consider the appearance of fluency in foreign languages, and, particularly in the case of French, a certain wish to be regarded as a member of the upper classes as such. It may also well be that the use of French idioms in written (and possibly spoken) language was so commonplace that expressions such as the following were barely noticeable as switches for the correspondents. (49) One was that you were much en liaison with one Mr. Bewly … (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1781; Twining I, 197) (50) I will write again as soon as I have read thro’, or made some progress in, the Essay on Tune. En attendant — You guess at my joys & sorrows (Thomas Twining to Charles Burney, 1781; Twining I, 197)

8.  Conclusion Our case study of Charles Burney’s code-switching practices shows that there is considerable variation in the quantity of code-switching in the letters by the same informant. To some extent this variation is conditioned by the interpersonal relationship between the writer and the recipient, so that Burney uses his multilingual resources in different ways with different interactants. The general tendency observed in Burney’s correspondence seems to be that a close relationship between the writer and the recipient is a prerequisite for frequent and multilingual code-switching. In this sense, switching in our data is very much an in-group phenomenon. However, the in-group cannot be defined in terms of stable social categories or simple dichotomies like family–others, for the individual interpersonal relationships between the writer and the recipient seem to be more significant. Interestingly, similar variation in the quality of code-switching was more difficult to establish. While the switched segments occur in a range of discourse functions, there was no significant alteration between letters addressed to different correspondents. Conventionalised, prefabricated chunks are in all cases most frequent, but our informants also code-switch quite freely and fluently from one language to another and are able to use multilingual resources to organise their discourse and to create subtle, often emotive meanings. On the basis of our

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi

observations it seems possible that code-switching is linked to a more general style shift in letters to more intimate correspondents. In that case the appearance of code-switching in personal correspondence could be regarded as a linguistic phenomenon that goes hand in hand with an informal style. This hypothesis would require the study of further linguistic variables to confirm it. On the other hand, it is also true in our data that “[l]anguage alternation can be void of identity-relevant meaning in some contexts, and yet in others extremely rich in the identity-work it accomplishes” (Auer 2005: 409). Some code-switches can be seen as an integral part of identity expression in these letters (professional terms, for example, or the use of French as a signifier of social status), and provide evidence of Burney and his correspondents making intersubjectively understood choices to achieve their interactional goals (cf. Li Wei 2005:  376). Others seem purely conventionalised, exhibiting very little identity work in the local context in which they occur. These findings could suggest that code-switching itself is a style indexing particular types of social memberships and relationships (cf. Auer 2005: 406). In a diachronic perspective, the findings also provide evidence of at least some continuity in the use of multilingual resources in social interaction.

References Auer, Peter. 1984. Bilingual Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Auer, Peter. 2005. “A postscript:  Code-switching and social identity.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 403–410. Auer, Peter. (Ed.). 1998. Code-switching in Conversation:  Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge. Bailey, Benjamin. 2000. “Social/interactional functions of code switching among Dominican Americans.” Pragmatics 10: 165–193. Biber, Douglas. 1994. “An analytical framework for register studies.” In Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, Douglas Biber & Edward Finegan (Eds), 31–56. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1989. “Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect.” Text 9 (1): 93–124. Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cashman, Holly R. 2005. “Identities at play:  Language preference and group membership in bilingual talk in interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 301–315. CEECE = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. Compiled by Samuli Kaislaniemi, Mikko Laitinen, Minna Nevala, Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Tanja Säily & Anni Sairio at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. Clyne, Michael. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Thompson. 2004. “Davy, Charles (1722/3–1797).” Rev. Philip Carter. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7309, accessed 24 April 2006.



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Franklin, Michael J. 2004. “Piozzi, Hester Lynch (1741–1821).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22309, accessed 24 April 2006. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell. 1984. “Sociolinguistics:  Stability and consolidation.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 45: 39–45. Hymes, Dell. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Towards and Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis. Klima, Slava, Bowers, Garry & Grant, Kerry S. (Eds). 1988. Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney 1726–1769. Edited from Autograph Fragments. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Labov, William. 1970. The Study of Nonstandard English. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Lane-Poole, Stanley. 2004. “Twining, Thomas (bap. 1734; d. 1804).” Rev. Anna Chahoud. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/27910, accessed 24 April 2006. Li Wei. 2005. “‘How can you tell?’ Towards a common sense explanation of conversational codeswitching.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 375–389. Milroy, Lesley, Li Wei & Ching, Pong Sin. 1992. “A two-step sociolinguistic analysis of codeswitching and language choice: The example of a bilingual Chinese community in Britain.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2: 63–86. Lobban, J.H. (Ed.). 1910. Dr. Johnson’s Mrs. Thrale. Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi, Edited by A. Hayward, Q.C., Newly Selected and Edited with Introduction and Notes. Edinburgh/London: T.N. Foulis. Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual Speech. A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Nevala, Minna. 2004. Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-pragmatic Functions. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevala, Minna & Palander-Collin, Minna. Forthcoming. “O England! England! She says my Father my Sisters my friends! shall I ever see you more? Reporting in 18th-century correspondence.” In Interactional Discourse, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson, Johanna Karhukorpi & Mia Raitaniemi (Eds), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Longman. Nurmi, Arja & Pahta, Päivi. 2004. “Social stratification and patterns of code-switching in early English letters.” Multilingua 23: 417–456. Nurmi, Arja & Pahta, Päivi. Forthcoming. “Preacher, scholar, brother, friend:  Social roles and code-switching in the writings of Thomas Twining.” In Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English, Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin (Eds). OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2008. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http:// www.oed.com. Pahta, Päivi. 2004. “Code-switching in medieval medical writing.” In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (Eds), 73–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Päivi Pahta & Arja Nurmi Pahta, Päivi & Nurmi, Arja. 2006. “Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: A thousand years of multilingual practices.” In Medieval English and its Heritage: Structure, Meaning and Mechanisms of Change, Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer & Dieter Kastovsky (Eds), 203–220. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Pahta, Päivi & Nurmi, Arja. 2007. “What we do cón amore:  Structures of code-switching in eighteenth-century letters.” In ‘Of varying language and opposing creed’: New Insights into Late Modern English, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso & Esperanza Rama-Martinez (Eds), 401–420. Bern: Peter Lang. Palander-Collin, Minna. 2002. “Tracing patterns of interaction in historical data.” In Variation Past and Present. VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi & Matti Rissanen (Eds), 117–134. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Palander-Collin, Minna. 2006. “(Re)constructing style and language as social interaction through first- and second-person pronouns in Early Modern English letters.” In Dialogic Langugage Use, Irma Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä & Jarmo Korhonen (Eds), 339–362. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodger, N.A.M. 2004/2006. “Montagu, John, fourth earl of Sandwich (1718–1792).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/19026, accessed 24 April 2006. Rogers, Pat. 2004. “Burney, Frances (1752–1840).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/603, accessed 24 April 2006. Sambrook, James. 2004. “Crisp, Samuel (1707–1783).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6706, accessed 24 April 2006. Schendl, Herbert. 2002. “Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics.” In Studies in the History of the English Language:  A Millennial Perspective, Donka Minkova & Robert P.  Stockwell (Eds), 51–78. Berlin/New York:  Mouton de Gruyter. Troide, Lars. 2004. “Burney, Charles (1757–1817).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4079, accessed 24 April 2006. Wagstaff, John. 2004. “Burney, Charles (1726–1814).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4078, accessed 24 April 2006. Wenzel, Siegfrid. 1994. Macaronic Sermons:  Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Wright, Laura. 1998. “Mixed-language business writing: Five hundred years of code-switching.” In Language Change:  Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, E.H. Jahr (Ed.), 99–118. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Patterns of interaction Self-mention and addressee inclusion in the letters of Nathaniel Bacon and his correspondents Minna Palander-Collin This paper explores patterns of interaction in late sixteenth-century personal letters. Self-mention (I) and addressee inclusion (you vs nominal title) are studied quantitatively and qualitatively in the letters of Norfolk gentleman Nathaniel Bacon and his correspondents to see how social relationships are mutually constructed. The results suggest that Bacon used more first- and second-person pronouns with his inferiors and equal family members than with his superiors, style-shifting to “humiliative” discourse when writing to social superiors, and to “friendly” discourse when writing to inferiors. Noblemen writing to Bacon employed somewhat similar patterns, but Bacon’s inferiors seemed to be more mixed in their usage. It is argued that differences in educational background and consequent repertoires of stylistic literacy may explain such differences.

1.  Introduction Letters are genuine interaction between correspondents.1 Although it is seldom possible to follow a full sequence of letters between the same writers, letters nevertheless show glimpses of past interactions and provide valuable material for the study of earlier patterns of interaction. It has been more usual to study interaction in spoken language or in texts imitating speech, like plays, than in written texts, but there is now a growing body of research on Present-day English showing that “written texts embody interactions between the writers and readers” (Hyland 2005a:  173) and that identities are linguistically produced in interaction (Bucholtz & Hall 2005). Even present-day academic texts that are perhaps regarded as an informational genre par excellence contain interactive elements

1.  This research was funded by the Department of English, University of Helsinki, and more recently by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, where it was carried out as part of my project on Language Variation and Change in Social Context: Constructing Identities in Written English 1450–1900.

 Minna Palander-Collin

that construct an appropriate authorial self and negotiate accepted participant relationships (Hyland 2005a, 2005b). The letter genre allows us to observe how authorial selves and participant relationships change from one letter to another and how such changes affect the linguistic style adopted by the writer. In sociolinguistic studies, style is generally viewed as intra-speaker variation, but the explanations of style-shifting vary (for a discussion, see e.g., Rickford & Eckert 2001).2 Labov’s (1972) influential work on style attributed a central role to attention paid to speech as a cause of shifting between casual and formal styles, whereas accommodation theory associates style particularly with the speaker’s orientation and attitude to the addressee (e.g., Giles & Coupland 1991; see also Rickford & Eckert 2001 for approaches to style). A similar approach is presented in the audience design framework, which suggests that speakers design their style primarily in response to their audience (Bell 2001). According to Bell (2001: 139) the sociolinguist’s core question about style is “Why did this speaker say it this way on this occasion?” Style can also be seen as a distinctiveness that is used to build group identities (Irvine 2001), or “as a clustering of linguistic resources, and an association of that clustering with social meaning” (Eckert 2001: 123). According to Fairclough (1992:  64–66), language has at least three central functions and conveys three types of meaning: it contributes to the construction of social identities or types of self (identity function), to the construction of social relationships between people (relational function), and to the construction of knowledge and beliefs about the world (ideational function). In this view, language is a social practice rather than a purely individual activity; there is a dialectical relationship between discourse and social structure so that discourse is shaped and constrained by social structure such as class, social relations, and relations to particular institutions, but discourse also constitutes them (Fairclough 1992:  64–73; see also Halliday 1994). My purpose in this chapter is to see how letter writers’ linguistic choices construct and reflect their social roles in relation to the recipient in the interaction found in a sample of late sixteenth-century letters. The individual’s social rank and hierarchical relationships are an important feature of early modern English society, and these are constituted by various discursive practices. After a brief discussion of conventional and recommended linguistic practices of the early modern period in Section 2, I shall focus on patterns of self-mention (I) and addressee inclusion (you vs Your Lordship/Worship) in the letters, because these overtly

2.  I have used style here much in the same sense as register is used elsewhere, to refer to situational variation in language use. With the term style, however, I wish to emphasise language variation as an individual’s linguistic resource.



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signal the degree of author presence in the texts and the author’s wish to involve the addressee in the communicative situation. The degree and nature of author presence and audience engagement is expected to vary according to the mutual relationship of the correspondents. For instance, many sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury conduct books describing the ideal of civil behaviour and civility of speech and writing advise that the inferior must not ask directly or contradict the superior, and that no direct pronouns should be used to the superior, but instead the superior’s title should be repeated (Bryson 1998: 167–169).

2.  Civility of speech and writing Early modern England was a highly stratified society where people’s rank, in other words, a combination of lineage, wealth and education, prescribed their position in society and the behaviour and roles appropriate to them vis-à-vis other people (e.g., Keen 2002; Wrightson 2002, 2003). Analysing the civil language of early modern Europe, Burke (2000: 33) proposes a working hypothesis that “the more hierarchical (highly stratified or more sharply stratified) the society, the more formal or elaborate its civility will be”. This hypothesis would predict a fair amount of linguistic coding of hierarchical relationships, which is, in fact, evident in the recommendations of early modern conduct literature and letter writing manuals (see Nevala 2004: 33–53; Bryson 1998). For instance, William Fullwood’s The Enimie of Idleness. Teaching the maner and stile how to endite, compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters (1568) advised the readers that superlative terms of address should be used to superiors, “familiar reverence” should be employed with equals, and plainness would be most suitable with inferiors (see Bryson 1998: 157). The norms of speech and writing were, thus, central to the ideal of the civil gentleman and apparently a form of cultural capital: Polite conversation was the most sophisticated means whereby ‘civil’ gentlemen could express and elaborate their common culture in an exclusive social milieu; and polite verbal and epistolary forms and formulae proliferated to provide the ‘civil’ gentleman with a much expanded repertoire of signs by which to orientate himself in an increasingly crowded and complex ‘civil society’. From the later sixteenth century onward, conduct literature for the adult depicts social life as a life full of prudent, graceful, and civil discourse. (Bryson 1998: 159)

The most overt and conventional indicators of social roles are presumably those that are explicated in conduct books, but we cannot be sure to what extent even these rules were really followed. Undoubtedly, various linguistic means were

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used to code identities, social roles, relationships and hierarchies in the sixteenth century. Some of these means were more overt and resulted from a conventional choice, like the formulae used to address the recipient at the beginning and the end of a letter (Nevala 2004), or the repetition of the superior’s title at intervals during the exchange (Bryson 1998: 165), whereas others are perhaps more intuitive and less formulaic (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1995: 505). Moreover, it can be hypothesised that the type of civility described in conduct books reflects the ideal conduct of the upper echelons of early modern society, whereas the vast majority of the population did not have access to such a style through education or everyday experience. Although the provision of educational facilities in general increased in the early modern period, the opportunities for education at the lower end of the social scale were still poor (Wrightson 2003: 191–207). Repertoires of literacy typically develop during an individual’s lifetime from childhood to early adulthood, and, for instance, in the present-day context register-specific linguistic skills of academic writing like dense information packaging develop during university education (Ravid & Tolchinsky 2002; Biber, Reppen & Conrad 2002: 461). Nathaniel Bacon (1546?–1622), a Norfolk “county magnate” and local politician educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn, is the central informant in this study and the kind of person who would have been aware of the appropriate ways of speaking and writing due to his university education and experience of a variety of genres and styles (Hassell Smith 2004/2005). Examples (1) and (2) below are from letters written by Bacon to two addressees of different social positions in sixteenth-century England. Example (1) concerns local administrative matters and was written to a baron, who was socially superior to Bacon. Example (2) concerns the business of farming and was written to a local yeoman, Goodman Aldred, who was possibly a tenant farmer, but clearly Bacon’s social inferior (for the use of titles, see e.g., U.  Busse 2002:  104–105; Postles 2005).

(1) […] I ame well assured that your Lordship will not finde fault with any thinge done touchinge this cause when you shalbe let to understand the truthe of the procedinge therein. Thus beseching God to blesse your Lordship with an increase of his holie spirit to his glory and your great comfort, I humblie take my leave. (Nathaniel Bacon to Lord North, Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge, 1582; Bacon II, 227)



(2) Aldred, yf the rentes of West Somerton be ready & gathered, I wold have them delivered to Momforth, the bearer hearof. Toutching your rent corne I am content he shall bargaine with yow either for the whole or for your part … Thus far yow hartely well … Your very friend Nathaniel Bacon (Nathaniel Bacon to Goodman Aldred, 1570s; Bacon I, 93)



Self-mention and addressee inclusion 

Examples (1) and (2) are written in very different styles, showing the writer– addressee relationship in various ways. Writing to the nobleman, Bacon repeats the recipient’s title (your Lordship), employs circumlocution (I ame well assured that …) and emphasises the writer’s humbleness (I humbly take my leave). Bacon’s letter to the local yeoman, on the other hand, states the business of rents directly without conventional phrases of politeness, but the end of the letter emphasises his friendship and goodwill towards Aldred (Thus far yow hartely well… Your very friend Nathaniel Bacon). Moreover, the recipient is addressed merely with his name, although the title Goodman as a polite form to a lower class person would be possible (U. Busse 2002: 108; cf. example 6 to Goodman Cressey). The styles of these letters are a result of contemporary discursive conventions and letter writing practices, where some linguistic choices, like the use of the phrase your Lordship in example (1), is highly conventional (Bryson 1998:  151–192). The phrases like far yow hartely well and your very friend are also fixed as they are repeated in other contexts where Bacon addresses a social inferior or a lower-gentry equal and by other contemporary letter writers. These conventional patterns of interaction convey hierarchical relationships, and Lord North as Bacon’s superior also ends his letter to Bacon with “hearty” and “friendly” phrases of politeness as shown in example (3).

(3) I bidd you hartely fare well, praieng the Almighte to bles and kepe you… Your very loving frend R. North (Roger Lord North to Nathaniel Bacon, 1591; Bacon III, 117)

Thus, Nathaniel Bacon portrays himself as Lord North’s “obedient and humble servant”, while Lord North is a “hearty and loving friend” to Bacon. Phrases of submission and the language of servitude to address superiors were common not only in England but also in other parts of early modern Europe, and they were used to signal even fairly small social distinctions. For example, a knight addressing a baron would adopt a humiliative mode, although he was only one step lower in the social hierarchy (Burke 2000: 44–45). Later, the humiliative style was criticised and it declined in the eighteenth century together with phrases of submission and devotion and hyperbolic compliments (Burke 2000: 45–46). Politeness was also recommended when addressing inferiors (Burke 2000: 38). According to La Serre’s Secretary in Fashion (1654), this should be shown in the subscription formula of the letter as affection, whereas in the case of a superior service should be stressed (Bryson 1998: 169). The term friend could construct various interpersonal relationships at the time, as it was used between people who were intimately associated, but also to address a stranger or an otherwise distant person, or subservient people (U. Busse 2002:  152; also B.  Busse 2006:  316–318). In examples (2) and (3), friend may of course characterise

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the relationships as amicable, but even more clearly friend indicates a status difference and the superior’s appropriately affectionate stance towards the recipient (for the use of the word friend as an in-group marker in the eighteenth century, see Nevala in this volume; and for the concept of friendship in the eighteenth century, see Sairio in this volume). Thus, the discourses of friendship and obedience were established patterns of interaction and recognised ways of constructing social hierarchies in early modern England, and they can be observed in examples (1)–(3) above. The conventional discourse of obedience and servitude is to some extent reproduced when social inferiors write to Nathaniel Bacon addressing him as Your Worship and ending their letters with phrases like Yours to comawnd or I with my hubbull dutye rest at command, but their styles appear to have been more mixed and somewhat less humiliative than Bacon’s style to his superiors, as will be discussed below.

3.  Self-mention and addressee inclusion In this study, conventional patterns of interaction depicted above are further explored through instances of self-mention and addressee inclusion. Both writer presence and addressee inclusion are evident in examples (1)–(3) in the form of first- and second-person pronouns as well as the nominal third-person title your Lordship. These are not the only linguistic means that can be used to refer to the writer and the recipient, but they are most commonly used for this purpose in the body of the letter. Additionally, the writers refer to themselves by name in the subscription of the letter as well as by various nominal epithets (e.g., your friend, your humble servant). Third-person pronouns may occasionally refer to the writer, but not particularly in these letters (see, however, Nevala in this volume). Apart from the second-person pronouns and third-person titles, the recipient is conventionally addressed at the beginning of the letter and may be addressed with vocatives in the body of the letter (e.g., Sir, if there be any thinge … which you shall stande need of, yf you please to sende me worde I shall make request…).3 The analysis in Section 5 includes first-person singular and second-person pronouns and titles as alternative ways of addressee inclusion in place of the direct second-person pronoun you. In other words, the writer may chose between I ame well assured

3.  For a detailed study of Early Modern English address terms in correspondence, see Nevala (2004); for vocatives in Shakespeare’s plays, see B. Busse (2006).



Self-mention and addressee inclusion 

that your Lordship will not finde fault with any thinge (cf. example 1) and I ame well assured that you will not finde fault with any thinge. Acts where the interactants refer to one another are typical of even brief interactions. As the person speaking or writing is the “default origo” of such an act and the addressee its “focus”, these acts always index “some social relation between speaker and addressee” (Agha 2007:  280). Similarly, Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990: 5) suggest that “the use of person-indexing expressions in most languages include reference to specific social relations”. For I, they propose a thesis of double indexicality by which “I and other first-person expressions are used not to denote anything, but as indices of location” (Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990: 92). These locations are of two kinds as I not only indexes the speaker’s utterance in place and time but also with the person to be held morally responsible for the utterance. For instance, in (2) above, I am content he shall bargaine with yow locates the act of being content at the writer and specifies the time as simultaneous with the writing. The responsibility indexing specifies the impact of the utterance in relation to the writer’s position in the situation, and the responsibility for the outcome is taken by the writer (i.e., what kind of consequences the writer’s state of satisfaction may have, or what would happen if he were not content). Many languages grammaticalise social relationships in the second-person (T/V systems), or alternatively, third-person systems signal respect for the addressee (Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990: 135–148). In earlier periods and in some dialects in this period, the opposition of you and thou served to indicate distance, intimacy and power as a kind of T/V system.4 The informants in this material, however, chose between the direct pronoun you and the deferential phrase Your Lordship, Your Ladyship, Your Honour, or Your Worship. The choice depended on the addressee’s gender and social status. Bacon addressed the noblemen in the data as Your Lordship or Your Honour, which was also used for other social superiors, and the titled ladies as Your Ladyship. Nathaniel Bacon, on the other hand, was addressed as Your Worship if a title was used rather than the pronoun you. In general, the title Your Lordship was reserved for the nobility, whereas Your Honour could be used to address “any person of rank or quality” and Your Worship to address “a person of note” (Oxford English Dictionary; see also B. Busse 2006: 61–65). 4.  The findings of many studies on you/thou variation (e.g., U. Busse 2002; Walker 2007) indicate that in broad terms the choice between these pronouns corresponds to relative power relations between the interactants, as inferiors tended to be addressed as thou and superiors as you, although there is considerable room for manoeuvre to show shifts in feelings, attitudes, level of intimacy, etc., to the point that every individual shift between you and thou cannot be accounted for (Nevala 2004: 177–178).

 Minna Palander-Collin

In an earlier study, I analysed Nathaniel Bacon’s letters to various recipients showing that the first and second persons were important loci for the coding of social hierarchies as the frequencies of self-mention (I) and direct addressee inclusion (you) were higher in letters to social inferiors than superiors, while indirect addressee inclusion (Your Lordship) was used in letters to superiors, including Bacon’s father (Palander-Collin 2006). Such patterns of interaction may change in time, but very similar tendencies were observed also in eighteenth-century letters where first- and second-person pronouns related to deference and solidarity, since equal family recipients like siblings received the highest frequencies of both first-  and second-person pronouns, whereas in more distant relationships these pronouns were less frequent. They were also less frequent when writing to superior family members, i.e., parents (Nurmi & Palander-Collin 2008). In register studies the frequent use of first- and second-person pronouns —  together with other “involvement” features like private verbs, present tense verbs, be as the main verb, contractions, general emphatics, hedges and amplifiers — has been shown to be characteristic of spoken and speech-related registers including personal letters, whereas written registers and formal speech are clearly less involved (e.g., Biber 1988, 2006: 50; Biber & Finegan 1989). The present study builds on my earlier study of Nathaniel Bacon’s language (Palander-Collin 2006), including now also letters written to Nathaniel Bacon. The purpose is to see how roles and hierarchies are mutually constructed and whether other social groups employ patterns similar to Bacon’s usage. Methodologically, the frequencies of self-mention and addressee inclusion provide the quantitative baseline evidence (Section 5) against which individual and contextualised usages are viewed more closely (Section 6). The results show that although conventional elements of the “humble servant” pattern are reproduced to some extent in letters by social inferiors to Nathaniel Bacon, the self-mention and addressee inclusion patterns differ from those employed by Nathaniel Bacon to his social superiors. It is consequently suggested that this may be a result of the level of stylistic literacy that different social groups had at that time. My claim is that the use of the first and second persons is meaningful for the discourse of social hierarchies of the period and that discourse styles vary according to the writer–addressee relationship. Different social ranks, however, seem to have used different discourse styles, making patterns of interaction socially embedded.

4.  Data and method This study is based on a sample of sixteenth-century letters from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). Since I am analysing the linguistic construction



Self-mention and addressee inclusion 

of social relationships and hierarchies, it was important to find one central letter writer with letters to several different type of addressees. It was equally important to have different types of people writing back to the central character. Following these principles, I chose Nathaniel Bacon (1546?–1622), a younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, as my central informant.5 Table 1 shows the social background of the letter writers, the number of writers and word counts for each group. Concentrating on one network of writers diminishes the impact of regional dialect variation. Gender variation is another aspect, which was not particularly accounted for here, as most of the informants are male:  19% of the total word count in Bacon’s letters is addressed to women, and 15% of the total word count in letters to Bacon is written by women. Both the women addressed by Bacon and those writing to him belong to the family circle and are titled ladies by marriage. The social rank of the informants provides an important framework of reference concerning their mutual relationships. There is ample evidence of the importance of social rank in early modern England (see e.g., Wrightson 2002, 2003), although it was by no means a simple matter for contemporaries to decide which ranks were relevant and how many of them there were. William Harrison in 1577, for example, defined the population of England as consisting of four degrees of people: gentlemen (nobility, knights, esquires, mere gentlemen), citizens and burgesses, yeomen of the countryside, and poor people such as day labourers, poor husbandmen, artificers, and servants, who had “neither voice nor authoritie in the common wealthe, but are to be ruled and not to rule other” (cited in Wrightson 2003: 27). Ranks were not closed as upward as well as downward social mobility was possible (Stone & Stone 1984), nor can the relations between ranks be described in simple terms. For instance, servants were inferior to their masters and deference was the expected mode of conduct, but, on the other hand, servants were also regarded as members of their master’s family (Wrightson 2002:  33). The probable practical implications of this asymmetrical relationship between masters and servants are captured in the anecdote told in Wrightson (2003:  71): “The apprentice Roger Lowe bought drinks for his equals, but never for his superiors. They bought drinks for him and he in turn, as a promising lad, listened deferentially to their opinions and advice”. A rank-based starting point, nevertheless, provides a practicable abstraction and a model for operationalising social relations as the more precise and local nature of the relationships between individual letter writers is not necessarily

5.  More details on the letter collection Bacon in the Appendix to this volume.

 Minna Palander-Collin

known to us. Table 1 relies on a fairly detailed rank division separating the nobility from knights (GU), and knights from esquires and mere gentlemen (GL) (for details of the rank model, see Raumolin-Brunberg 1996 or Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). Family members have been treated as a separate group, as there was also a recognised separation between civil and domestic life (Bryson 1998: 167). Table 1.  Personal letters (1571–1594) from and to Nathaniel Bacon (1546?–1622) (number of different letter writers in parentheses). From Nathaniel Bacon* (Gentleman)

Rank of the addressee/letter writer

To Nathaniel Bacon

7,743 words 2,701 words 1,227 words 840 words 7,746 words 11,275 words

Nobility (N) Gentry Upper (GU) Gentry Lower (GL) Professionals (P) Merchants (M) Other (O) Family Father

1,652 words (2 writers) 5,119 words (6 writers) 10,437 words (15 writers) 9,823 words (7 writers) 1,865 words (5 writers) 9,509 words (9 writers) 15,786 words (16 writers) 614 words 

*Palander-Collin (2006:  Table 2) shows more detailed information about the recipients of Nathaniel Bacon’s letters.

Living in a country estate in Norfolk, Bacon was concerned with the business of farming and estate management, which his letters to servants and local yeomen, i.e., the group “other” in Table 1, mostly deal with. His judicial and administrative duties as a Justice of the Peace also placed him within a wider community locally, but not nationwide (Hassell Smith & Baker 1988:  III, xvi). Many letters to and from noblemen and members of the gentry deal with administrative business. Bacon represents the social rank of lower gentry writing both to his social superiors, equals, inferiors and family members. He also had a number of correspondents from different social backgrounds who wrote to him. The letters date from the years 1571–1594 when Bacon was first a young husband in his twenties and later a father arranging his daughters’ marriages in his late forties. He can be found as Sir Nathaniel Bacon in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but since he was knighted only in 1604, I shall refer to him as Nathaniel Bacon or Bacon (Hassell Smith 2004/2005). The distribution of material shown in Table 1 presents the typical problem a historical linguist often faces: the material is not equally representative of different groups of writers and addressees. For instance, Bacon’s letters to the group “other”, which is the lowest group in social standing including servants and local



Self-mention and addressee inclusion 

yeomen, are infrequent. Similarly, the letters to and from members of the gentry are far better represented than those to and from nobility, merchants or professionals. Bacon himself has no letters to merchants or professional people in the material. The correspondence is fragmentary in the sense that letters do not usually form chronological series so that there would be entire correspondences from and to Bacon. Nor are Bacon’s letters to different ranks always addressed to the same individuals that have written letters to him as representatives of that rank. Self-mention and addressee inclusion in the letters are measured as frequencies per 1,000 words. Self-mention is understood as the first-person singular pronouns (I, me, myself, my, mine) and addressee inclusion as the secondperson pronouns (you, your, yours, yourself) or alternatively as nominal forms (Your Lordship, Your Ladyship, Your Honour, Your Worship) that refer to the addressee indirectly in the third person. I shall first present the frequencies of self-mention and addressee inclusion in Section 5, and then discuss their use in context in Section 6.

5.  Distribution of self-mention and addressee inclusion The frequency of first-person singular pronouns reveals how often the writer overtly mentions himself in his writing. In the letters of Nathaniel Bacon, selfmention is most prominent in letters to the group “other”, including Bacon’s social inferiors, and to family members with the exception of his father Sir Nicholas Bacon (Figure 1; see also Palander-Collin 2006 for a more thorough discussion of Bacon’s use of first- and second-person pronouns). Thus, the first person relates to social hierarchy and familiar intimacy in Bacon’s usage. In situations requiring social reverence, like writing to socially superior noblemen or his father, first-person pronouns occur less frequently (chi-square=106.39, df=5, p