DigitalUM :: Browsing by Subject "Late Middle English correspondence"

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Communities of practice, proto-standardisation and spelling focusing in the Stonor letters
(Walter de Gruyter, 2020-09-07) Conde Silvestre, Juan Camilo; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
The analytical construct known as community of practice—a group of people linked by the pursuit of a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire of resources with this purpose—is extensively used in present-day sociolinguistic research on the diffusion of variation in connection with identity and social meaning construction and as part of a common, locally-constructed style. Communities of practice are also crucial in the diffusion of standard or non-standard practices and I believe that this tenet—which certainly holds for the present—could also be extended to the past, adding a new dimension to the historical study of standardisation. In this paper, I intend to reconstruct one fifteenth-century community of practice on the evidence afforded by the late Middle English collection of correspondence known as the Stonor letters. I will analyse the linguistic resources that members of this community of practice shared and I will particularly study spelling focusing as shown in reduced frequencies of spelling variants in their letters when compared to orthography in the letters issued by non-members. I believe that this perspective can help understand historical proto-standardisation in a new light, associating it to processes of identity construction.