Publication: Persona Management and Identity Projection in English Medieval Society: Evidence from John Paston II
Authors
Hernández-Campoy, Juan M. ; García-Vidal, Tamara
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Publisher
De Gruyter
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2016-0027
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
©2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
This document is the accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2016-0027
Abstract
Historical Sociolinguistics has favoured the interest in tracing heterogeneity and
vernacularity in the history of language, reconstructing the sociolinguistic contexts and
directions of language change as well as socially-based variation patterns in remote
speech communities. But this treatment of language variation and change
macroscopically, longitudinally, unidimensionally and focused on the speech community
as a macro-cosmos can be revealingly complemented with other views microscopically,
cross-sectionally, multidimensionally and privileging individual and their community of
practice as a micro-cosmos. This conveys a shift from the study of collectivity and inter speaker variation to that of individuality, intra-speaker variation and authenticity.
The aim of this paper is to show results on the microscopic investigation of the
mechanisms and motivations for style-shifting within the micro-cosmos of late Medieval
England applying current multidimensional models of intra-speaker variation as persona
management to historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out
through the analysis of the behaviour of the orthographic variable (TH) in members of
the Paston family from the Paston Letters. The data obtained show that letters may shed
light onto the motivation(s) for variability in individuals and their stylistic choices for the
construction of identity, in addition to tracing language change. This would therefore
provide us with the possibility of reconstructing the sociolinguistic values in medieval
times, and of accounting for the social meaning of inter- and intra- speaker variation in
the sociolinguistic behaviour of speakers at the individual level as a resource for identity
construction, representation, and even social positioning in interpersonal communication
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Citation
Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 4(1), 33-63
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