Minna Palander-Collin

Male and female styles in 17th century correspondence: I THINK

When 17th century personal correspondence was studied, it was observed that women used the evidential expression I THINK more often than men. A closer analysis showed that women also used other 1st person evidential verbs as well as the 1st and 2nd person pronouns more frequently than men. This male/female difference was maintained even in different registers, although both sexes have higher frequencies of I THINK in more intimate circumstances, such as when the informants are writing to their friends or close family members. The male/female differences in frequencies are explained as a difference in the style of communication. Womens style is more “involved” and interactive: personal point of view is frequently expressed, and both the writer and the addressee are overtly included in the communication situation. Interestingly, similar differences have also been found in Present-Day English.

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).

Self-reference and mental processes in early English personal correspondence: A corpus approach to changing patterns of interaction

This paper explores linguistic variation and change in the way letter writers position themselves in their letters, the focus being on gentlemen’s self-reference (I) in sixteenth- and eighteenth-century personal correspondence. Self-reference is understood as a linguistic feature relevant to the identity and interpersonal functions of language. The aim is to identify broad changes in patterns of self-reference, using corpus tools, in the data extracted from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension. The results indicate that self-reference and self-referential mental processes increased from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is suggested that this development may relate to increasing stance marking and involvement observed in the history of English from 1650 onwards, particularly as self-referential mental expressions often serve interpersonal functions.