Style-shifting and accommodative competence in Late Middle English written correspondence: Putting Audience Design to the test of time

Abstract

Style constitutes an essential component for the non-referential indexicality of speakers’ sociolinguistic behaviour in interpersonal communication. Historical Sociolinguistics applies tenets and findings of present-day research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past, but without giving intra-speaker variation the same relevance as to inter-speaker variation. The aim of this paper is to show results obtained from the investigation of style-shifting processes in late medieval England by applying contemporary models of Audience Design to diaphasic variation from historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out through the analysis of the use of the orthographic variable (TH) by male members of the Paston family from the Paston Letters corpus when addressing recipients from different social ranks. The data show both addressee and referee-based accommodation patterns in the communicative practice of medieval individuals. In addition to tracing language variation and change in speech communities, private letters may also shed light onto the motivations and mechanisms for intra-speaker variation in individuals and their stylistic choices in past societies.

Historical sociolinguistics and authorship elucidation in medieval private written correspondence:

“…The development and diversification of archival data sources is allowing scholars to explore the role of new genres and text-types as adequate materials for sociolinguistic analysis: ego-documents, such as diaries, travel accounts, court records, recipes, and especially letters, are now seen as essential documents for research in this field at diastratic, diatopic and diaphasic levels (see Elspaβ 2002Elspaβ , 2012Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005, 2006Nevala & Palander-Collin 2005;Palander-Collin, Nevala & Nurmi 2009;Palander-Collin 2010;Auer 2015;Schiegg 2016;Krogull, Rutten & van der Wal 2017;Voeste 2018;or Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal 2018a, 2018b. Some monographs have also confirmed the relevance of these documents to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in the past (see Dossena & Fitzmaurice 2006;Nevalainen & Tanskanen 2007;Dossena & Tieken-Boon van ostade 2008;Sairio 2009Sairio , 2017Dossena & Del lungo Camiciotti 2012;van der Wal & Rutten 2013;Rutten & van der Wal 2014;Auer, Schreier & Watts 2015).…”

“…The use of <th> was gradually supralocalised into the literate ranks of the whole of England: its sociolinguistic diffusion initially took place in the careful and conscious styles, acquiring overt prestige and becoming part of the accepted linguistic norm, as a typical labovian 'change from above'. Therefore, the use of (TH) was a sociolinguistic variable with status of marker and indexical meaning in late medieval England (Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal 2018a, 2018b. Similarly, although use of the 'yogh' ȝ had some more complex phonotactic constraints, it was substituted with the graphemes <y>, <j> or <g> (see Scragg 1974: 10;Benskin 1977: 506-507;1982: 18-19;Stenroos 2006;Bergs 2007a;or Conde-Silvestre & Hernández-Campoy 2013, among others).…”

“…Microscopically, and considering Margery's epistolary interaction and letter recipients (audienceship), her six letters were written when she was between 22 and 34 years old and they were all addressed to the same person (her husband: John Paston III). This means that there was no possibility for distinctions in language production or choice due to addressees' differences in terms of Bell's (1984) audience design or other stylistic resources (see Biber & Finegan 1989;Hernández-Campoy 2016a), as, however, found in other members of the family (see Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal 2018a, 2018b. Similarly, the short 12 year-span between her first (1477, when she was 22) and last letter preserved (1489, when she was 34, reaching middle age) cannot extend any kind of analysis to chronolectal variation and hence does not allow us to trace any tendencies and propensities in terms of agegrading, for example, as seen above, at the level of individual variables due to its unequal patterning.…”

Tracing Patterns of Intra-Speaker Variation in Early English Correspondence: A Change from Above in thePaston Letters

“…This implies that languages probably varied in the same patterned ways in the past as they have been observed to do today, and that the development of linguistic systems always occurs in relation to the sociohistorical situation of speakers (Labov 1972(Labov : 275, 1994. Accordingly, the sociolinguistic behaviour of, for example, late fifteenth-century speakers may have been determined, to some 4 This piece of research is related to two long-term projects carried out at the University of Murcia (Spain), "Sociolinguistic models of stylistic variation in English historical correspondence" (HiStylVar) and "Communities of practice and stylistic variation in English historical correspondence", whose results and conclusions are chiefly published in Conde-Silvestre (2016b and Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal (2018a, 2018b. The aim of the projects is to explore the motivations and mechanisms for stylistic variation in English historical correspondence corpora and in connection with some of the present-day theoretical models developed for its study.…”

“…See studies by Elspaβ (2002), Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2005, Sairio (2009), Alexandropoulos (2015), Auer (2015), Schiegg (2016), Hernández-Campoy & García-Vidal (2018a, 2018b, or Voeste (2018), for example. , and which largely correspond to the printed one published by Norman Davis (1971Davis ( -1976.…”