Browsing by Subject "Late Modern English"

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    Constructing identities and negotiating relationships in late eighteenth-century England : Mary Hamilton and her correspondents at court.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones., 2023) Oudesluijs, Tino; Yáñez Bouza, Nuria
    During the eighteenth century, language became an increasingly valuable commodity for the construction of identities and the negotiation of relationships with others. Additionally, letter writing had emerged as a crucial means of maintaining relationships and forging deeper intimacy between individuals, and correspondence thus constitutes a rich resource for the study of language variation and change in relation to (social) identity, with forms of address as a key strategy in this respect. The current paper examines expressions of direct address and self-reference in Late Modern English ego-documents, more specifically two sets of letters involving Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), sub-governess at Court and a member of the Bluestocking circle. For each set, we discuss intra-speaker variation in the context of both the individual participants involved and the structure of the letters. The findings reveal different strategies through which Hamilton and her correspondents construct their identities and negotiate their relationships with each other, for example by using nicknames and terms of endearment, omitting signatures, or through changes in lexical choices over time.
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    Dialect in the Making : a third-wave sociolinguistic approach to the enregisterment of late modern Derbyshire spelling.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones., 2023) Schintu Martínez, Paula
    Within the framework of third-wave sociolinguistic research, Asif Agha’s (2003) theory of enregisterment has proved a successful approach to explore the mechanisms that lead to the indexical connection between language and identity. Beal (2009, 2020), Cooper (2013, 2020), and Ruano-García (2012, 2020, 2021), among others, have investigated this phenomenon from a diachronic perspective. They have highlighted the value of dialect writing as a window into the main features associated with particular dialects, as it draws upon authenticating practices such as the use of dialect respellings, which not only signal salient phonological features, but also link them to wider schemes of sociocultural values and identities. This paper seeks to add to this field of research by looking at literary representations of Derbyshire speech (1850–1900) through the lens of enregisterment. My aims are twofold: I attempt to (1) shed light on the main phonological features of the Derbyshire dialect, while (2) determining how this variety was enregistered in the Late Modern English period, and whether meaningful text type-dependent indexical shifts might have affected the way in which this dialect was understood and thus represented by native and non-native speakers.
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    On Early and Late Modern EnglishNon-native Suffix -oon
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Wright, Laura
    This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix -oon. The history of non-native suffix -oonis presented by means of assembling non-native suffix -oonvocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology.It turns out that standard non-native -oonwords (which are few) tended to stabilise early and be of Romance etymology.A periodof enregisterment,c.1750–1850,is identified by means of scrutiny of non-native -oonusagein sixty novels,leading to the conclusion that four or more non-native -oons in a literary work signalled vulgarity.A link is made between the one-quarter non-European -oons brought to English via colonial trade, and the use of such -oons by non-noble merchants, traders and their customers splashing outon luxury foreign commodities.Thus, it is found that a suffix borrowed from Romance languages in the Middle English period received fresh input duringthe Early Modern period via non-European borrowings, resulting in sociolinguistic enregistermentin the Late Modern period.