Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English: (195 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

This volume presents a ground-breaking overview of the interconnections between socio-cultural reality and language practices, by looking at the different ways in which social roles are performed, maintained, adopted and assigned through linguistic means. The introductory chapter discusses and evaluates different theoretical approaches to the question, and the eight articles by leading scholars in the field offer a multiplicity of methodological and theoretical approaches to the description and interpretation of social roles as expressed in a variety of texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the specific period covered is Late Modern English, the theoretical insights offered will be of interest to any linguist interested in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and the history of English, as well as scholars in the social sciences and social history interested in the concept and realisation of roles.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. Language practices in the construction of social roles in Late Modern English (by Pahta, Paivi); 3. Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of practice and the periodical discourse community (by Fitzmaurice, Susan); 4. How eighteenth-century book reviewers became language guardians (by Percy, Carol); 5. "if You think me obstinate I can't help it": Exploring the epistolary styles and social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott (by Sairio, Anni); 6. Reporting and social role construction in eighteenth-century personal correspondence (by Palander-Collin, Minna); 7. Preacher, scholar, brother, friend: Social roles and code-switching in the writings of Thomas Twining (by Nurmi, Arja); 8. The social space of an eighteenth-century governess: Modality and reference in the private letters and journals of Agnes Porter (by Nurmi, Arja); 9. Building trust through (self-)appraisal in nineteenth-century business correspondence (by Dossena, Marina); 10. Good-natured fellows and poor mothers: Defining social roles in British nineteenth-century children's literature (by Andersdotter Sveen, Hanna); 11. Name index; 12. Subject index

Review :
This collection of uniformly strong studies brings a contemporary, sophisticated understanding of social roles, positions and identities to historical written texts, and so raises new and exciting questions on the ways in which writing, early on, became a vehicle for articulating more than ideas and stories - how writing became an instrument for endorsing, questioning and challenging the social order. This is a trailblazing volume. Too often do studies in historical linguistics adopt social (or other) theories of yesterday. But here we have cutting-edge research on social roles, identities and practices applied innovatively to historical data, leading to new insights – not just about Late Modern English but also about the dynamics of language, social phenomena and change – and lighting the way for future research. Adopting a research model from the social sciences, this volume offers a challenging new framework for the study of Late Modern English writings both from the public and the private domain. Uniquely in the context of historical sociolinguistics, the papers included offer important insights into the interrelationship of different social roles adopted by Late Modern English writers and their language use. Each paper provides the reader with an intriguing case study, showing convincingly that data from older stages of the language, despite obvious limitations as deriving from the written medium, are in fact very good data when approached with a research model that takes these limitations into account through consistent and systematic embedding in the context in which the texts were originally conceived.