Minna Nevala

Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness:a study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey.

Abstract This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oateys (e.g. Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000) “rapport management,” covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, and explain and demonstrate how it can be operationalized for quantitative analysis. In general, it offers a good account of our data, though accommodating ambiguous cases proved to be a major challenge. Our quantitative analysis suggests that three of the five categories of Spencer-Oateys framework are key ones, namely, quality face, equity rights, and association rights. Furthermore, differences between our geographically separated datasets emerge. For example, the England-based data has a preponderance of impoliteness events in which quality face is violated, whereas the China-based data has a preponderance where equity rights are violated. We offer some explanations for these differences, relating them where possible to broader cultural issues.

Letters and Letter Writing: Introduction

The history of the letter genre goes back in time a long way: we can still read letters written in the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina (c.1307 – 1070 B.C.) or in the ancient Mesopotamian city and kingdom of Mari (1774 – 1760 B.C.) (Nissinen, 2003; Toivari-Viitala, 2004). Similar to the letters or e-mails of today, these were messages written by individuals to identifiable recipients. These letters afford us a glimpse of various aspects of the daily lives of people who lived well over 3000 years ago, including their societal organisations, business arrangements and personal relationships. The articles in this issue of EJES focus on letters written in English from the late 16th to the 20th century, testifying to the endurance and popularity of the genre. The authors show how letters can be used to answer various linguistic and literary questions, but their findings and discussions also relate to a wider historical, cultural and sociological context. Several of the articles in this issue were originally read as conference papers in the ‘Letters and Letter Writing’ seminar that we convened together with Margaret Sönmez in the Sixth European Society for the Study of English (ESSE 6) conference in Strasbourg in August 2002. This seminar invited scholars using letters as their research material to submit papers on letters and letter writing from earliest English letters to present-day computer-mediated communication. Our purpose in the seminar was to look at the genre of letters from diverse perspectives, to bring scholars of English language, literature and culture together to share ideas with researchers outside their typical academic communities, and eventually to see whether some common points of discussion would emerge. We wanted to maintain the theme of multiple approaches in this issue, and the articles deal with English letters in different theoretical frameworks and time periods. The articles focus mainly on personal letters, and three of them on personal letters by famous writers, including Samuel Johnson (Anni Sairio), Dorothy L. Sayers (Arja Nurmi), and Thomas Mann (Jeffrey B. Berlin). Others concentrate on late sixteenthand seventeenth-century personal correspondence (Helena RaumolinBrunberg), seventeenth-century family correspondence (Margaret Sönmez), and a different letter genre in which identifiable individuals write to a wide audience through journals and newspapers – that is, letters to the editor (Monique Mémet).

A bit of this and a bit of that : on social identification in Early and Late Modern English letters

This article deals with the use of deictic pronouns this/these and that/those as demonstrative determiners in person-referential terms in Early and Late Modern English personal letters. The material for the study comes from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. The data chosen for this study cover personal correspondence between 1600 and 1800. The main purpose of the study is to show the link between the use of such demonstratives and what e.g. Tajfel & Turner (1979; also Hogg & Abrams 1988) call social identification. Since previous research has shown that the use of person reference in Present-Day English is biased towards group distinction, linking positive characteristics to members of ones in-group and distancing people in the out-group with negative reference, it is probable that this was the case in historical language use as well. The study shows that most of the referents in the letter writers’, and in many cases also in the recipients’, in-group are indexed with positive descriptions and reference terms in positive contexts, whereas identifiable out-group referents mostly receive negative descriptions. The negatively, positively and neutrally evaluative functions were found to be central during both centuries. The neutral function is more prevalent than the others in the seventeenth century, but the negative and positive gain more emphasis in the eighteenth century. This shows that when both pronouns increasingly started to appear as connotative demonstrative determiners, their use as mere indexicals decreased. Overall, we can conclude that although the historical use of demonstrative pronouns as determiners in reference did not show a similar bias towards negative foregrounding to their Present-Day English equivalents, there is some indication that a change towards a more specialised use was on the way from the eighteenth century onwards.

Linguistic representations of the social margins in Early and Late Modern English

This special issue focuses on the way in which people and their representations in the social margins were linguistically constructed and evaluated in Early and Late Modern English (c. 1600–1900). By social margins, we refer to people who were regarded as an out-group by the “respectable society” in terms of their social class, behaviour, socioeconomic status, or sexuality (cf. Thompson 1990; Briggs 1999; Porter 2001; Grube 2013). We have chosen to define the social margins fairly broadly to not only include groups of people that were seen as being disruptive, immoral, or dangerous by polite society but also those who were marginalised because of their low social status or deviance from the contemporary social norms. The borders between decent society and the collective outcast have, of course, been historically fluid. While there are certain common denominators between the social margins across the diachrony (e. g. petty crime and prostitution), there are also social groups whose marginalisation is, and has been, timeor culture-specific. Our definition therefore not only includes criminals but also law-abiding citizens and minority groups. The marginalised groups studied in the articles in this issue include prostitutes (Hintikka and Nevala), criminals and victims of crime (But, Vartiainen), slaves (Mäkinen), members of an Irish agrarian secret society (van Hattum), and homosexuals and homosexual prostitutes (McEnery and Baker). Before introducing the authors’ contributions in more detail, we wish to discuss some motivations for studying the language of marginalised groups and the lower classes by providing a brief sociohistorical background to the articles included in this issue, focusing on the relevant social and societal developments in the period under study (especially in Britain). After this overview, we will present some recent research on the topic and point out some methodological considerations that need to be taken into account when studying the language related to the lower social strata. Finally, in Section 3 we introduce the individual articles in more detail.

Representations of prostitutes and prostitution as a metaphor in nineteenth-century English newspapers

Abstract In this article, we study the way in which prostitutes, on the one hand, and prostitution, on the other, were evaluated and represented in nineteenth-century English news articles. The main aims of the study are to chart referential terms used of prostitutes as socially marginal agents and objects, as well as to map concepts related to the metaphorical field of prostitution. Our data come from the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Database (British Library newspapers parts 1 and 2: 1800–1900. http://www.gale.com/c/british-library-newspapers-part-i) and The Times Digital Archive (1785–2011. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-digital-archive), consisting of altogether 300 news articles relating to prostitution. Our results suggest that there is variation between vilification and pity in the language relating to prostitutes in the Victorian press, both from the socio-pragmatic and the cognitive perspectives. While the overall attitudes are mostly negative, there is a tendency to highlight the humanity of the prostitute by referring to her, for example, as a pitiful object of a crime. All the metaphors found in the material also draw from the negativity seen as inherent in prostitution and prostitutes. This is accentuated by the frequent personification of states or political institutions as prostitutes, whose lamentable behaviour or appearance is referred to in the metaphor.

Friends will be “friends”? The sociopragmatics of referential terms in early English letters

This article studies the sociopragmatic use of the term friend in personal correspondence in Early Modern and Late Modern English, more specifically, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The analysis shows that friend may be used, firstly, for an instrumental function, as when the writer has something to gain from it: a favour, a reciprocal act of solidarity, or access to the addressee’s/referent’s in-group. Secondly, writers use friend in emotional contexts, for example when expressing intimacy and affect towards the referent. The material also includes other functions for the term, such as in expressions of goodwill or in news reporting. In general, shifting between in-group/out-group membership appears to be a common function for the use of friend. Over time, the term is increasingly used to indicate intimate friends and acquaintances, whereas reference to members of the family and kin as “friends” declines from the latter half of the seventeenth century onwards.