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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Pragmatics
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The Discourse of Desperation - Late 18th and Early 19th Century Letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,212
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The Discourse of Desperation - Late 18th and Early 19th Century Letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Studies in Linguistics
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their
linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing
on three corpora of letters written by the poor. The main question
addressed by the book is, 'How were the poor, often armed only with
low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the challenge of
writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?'
Timmis argues that the answer lies in the highly strategic approach
adopted by the writers, particularly evident in the way formulaic
language is used in the pauper and prisoner letters. Formulaic
language supports the writers in producing intelligible letters in
what they consider an appropriate tone but also allows them to
exploit popular cultural motifs of the time. Data is drawn from
three sources: pauper letters by the poor applying for parish
relief, from around 1795 to 1834; prisoner letters by women
awaiting deportation to Australia for defrauding the Bank of
England in the early nineteenth century; and anonymous letters by
the poor demanding money with menaces. Comparison with the Mayhew
Corpus of interviews with the London poor in the 1850s reinforces
the idea that part of the writers' approach was to orient away from
the vernacular towards a style they perceived to be more elevated.
Showing how resourceful people can be in communicating their needs
in crises and in turn surfacing new insights into literacy and
demotic language awareness, this book will be of interest to
students and scholars in corpus linguistics and social history.
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