"As this leaves me at present" - Formulaic usage, politeness, and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants' letters

White Field, black seeds: Nordic literacy practices in the long nineteenth century

“…Preaching style was present in both letters and factual texts, and emigrant letters were for example o en interspersed with quotes from the Bible, excerpts from hymnbooks and proverbs. Similar observations have been made of letters written by Scottish and German emigrants (Dossena 2007, Elspaβ 1999. Hybridity has been approached from the point of view of genre awareness.…”

Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

“…It is all too telling that many letter collections in historical sociolinguistics only exist because the writers were forced to write letters in the absence of their loved ones, because of emigration or war (cf. Elspaß 2005;Dossena 2007;Nordlund 2007;Sandersen 2007, as well as our corpus, see Section 4.1), or because they wrote petitions to overseers or authorities, asking for relief (cf. Klenk 1997;Fairman 2007).…”

“…e two most popular books by far were the catechism and elementary ABC-books (De Booy 1977: 271). van Ostade 1999;Nevala 2004;Elspaß 2005Elspaß , 2012Dossena 2007;Laitinen & Nordlund 2012). All these letters bear witness to a pervasive pan-European tradition of letter writing dating back to the late-medieval ars dictaminis and the Renaissance rhetorical art of letter writing, and to Latin and French models for business and legal writings, the ars notaria (see Nevalainen 2001;Poster & Mitchell 2007 and the references there).…”

“I hope you will write”

“…Letters have been used by social historians to investigate push/pull factors and the role of institutions and communities in the process of emigration; they have also been used to explore and understand the conditions and daily lives of emigrants and how individuals and groups adapted to the New World (see Thomas and Znaniecki (1958), Erickson (1972), Miller (1985), Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (1988) and Fitzpatrick (1994)). More recently, correspondence collections have been used by linguists to shed light on language change and variation as well as to map out the linguistic and structural features of letters (see, for instance, Elspaβ (2002), McLelland (2007), Dossena (2007), Nurmi andPalander-Collin (2008), andPalander-Collin (1999) and (2009)). The present study, also taking a linguistic approach, will examine the interactive nature of letters and how, through language, relationships are enacted and familial bonds maintained.…”