This paper examines intra-speaker variation in historical writing. Its purpose is to show that lower-class people were able to consciously switch between language forms of conceptual orality and distance in their texts. To test this hypothesis, the article focuses on code-switching phenomena in autobiographic writing by patients from the Southern German psychiatric hospitals in Irsee and Kaufbeuren (1852–1931). The corpus of this paper consists of c. 98,300 tokens by 22 writers, of whom 11 use code-switching. First, I develop a method to distinguish code-switching from code-mixing phenomena in written texts by combining structural with functional approaches. In the article’s empirical part, I analyse the writers’ different communicative repertoires and the structures and functions of code-switching. Writers use linguistic variants of both conceptual orality and distance for code-switching. Thereby, they often use dialect, regional, or Southern German language forms that are outside of their regular linguistic repertoires. This leads to a re-evaluation of diatopically marked variants as not necessarily reflecting a writer’s lack of standard competence, but on the contrary being his or her deliberate linguistic choices.
Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources.
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