Review of:

 Minna Pallander-Collin and Minna Nevala (eds.) (2005), Letters and Letter Writing.

Special issue of European Journal of English Studies 9/1.

(February 2006, HSL/SHL 6)

In recent years the genre letters has received increasing attention in the field of historical (socio)linguistics as it allows the study of a more oral, informal style (on a written to oral language continuum) or, put differently, it allows the study of vernacular language (cf. Nevailainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2002; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005; Elspass et al. forthc.). The special issue of European Journal of English Studies (EJES) is based on conference papers presented at the workshop ‘Letters and Letter Writing’ at the Sixth European Society for the Study of English (ESSE 6) conference, which was held in  Strasbourg in August 2002. The collection of papers in this issue does not only focus on the use of letters in historical (socio)linguistics but also on other disciplines that use letters as research material. It is the aim of the issue to consider “the genre of letters from diverse perspectives, to bring scholars of English language, literature and culture together to share ideas with researchers outside their typical academic communities” (Pallander-Collin & Nevala 2005:1). The six papers selected to be discussed here are based on different theoretical frameworks and focus on different time periods. The papers are presented in chronological order, covering a time span from the late sixteenth to the twentieth  centuries.  

In the introductory section the editors Pallander-Collin and Nevala provide an overview of the volume’s structure, discussing themes that the selected papers touch upon. These themes are listed as (a) The letter genre; (b) At the crossroads of public and private; (c) Letters as communication: style shifting and writer networks; (d) Letters as evidence of language change; and (e) Reality and fiction in letters.

The first paper of this special issue on letters and letter writing is “A Study of Request Markers in English Family Letters from 1623 to 1660” by Margaret J-M. Sönmez. The author analyses the correlation between selected request markers and family relations (in ten families of the gentry) based on a letter corpus which consists of the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler, transcriptions of unpublished letters as well as published letter editions. Seniority in families is reflected with respect to degrees of deference in Sönmez’s study. The paper shows that there is a correlation between the choice of request markers and generational difference between the letter writer and the recipient. The outcome of the study further reflects the patriarchal system as found in the correspondence between husbands and wives as well as brothers/heirs and their younger sisters.

In her paper “’Sam of Streatham Park’: A Linguistic Study of Dr. Johnson’s Membership in the Thrale Family“ Anni Sairio is concerned with the degree of linguistic involvement as disclosed in letters between Samuel Johnson and the Thrale Family as well as his stepdaughter Lucy Porter and his friend Elizabeth Aston. Sairio’s study, which applies the model of social network analysis, investigates the use of evidential verbs, degree verbs and first- and second-person singular pronouns in order to measure the degree of involvement on the part of the letter writer. She hypothesises that frequent use of these features reveals a higher degree of involvement, which in turn suggests that the people under investigation were emotionally close. Against common beliefs that Johnson was closest to Hester Thrale, Sairio is able to show that Johnson’s relationship to Hester Thrale’s husband Henry is very similar. Samuel Johnson appears to be even closer to his stepdaughter and Elizabeth Aston who were not part of the Thrale family. A strong point of the paper is Sairio’s comparison of her own study’s method and outcome to Bax’s 2000 study, which investigates partially the same network by way of a different method, namely by measuring network strength as was first introduced by Lesley Milroy (cf. Bax 2000).

Helena Raumolin-Brunberg’s paper called “Language Change in Adulthood: Historical Letters as Evidence” focuses on the shift from –th to –s of the third person singular suffix during the period c.1410 to 1681. The study is based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and some additional letters which were collected after the completion of the corpus. Raumolin-Brunberg emphasises the fact that studies in sociohistorical linguistics, unlike sociolinguistics, can investigate language change in real time. Her analysis is then subdivided into macro-level findings, which deal with the shift to –s usage by groups of people in real and apparent time, and micro-level findings, i.e. the idiolects of eleven literate people from the upper ranks. The studies on both levels show that the spread of –s was a combination of a generational and communal pattern of change, which might also explain the velocity of the change. Apart from providing convincing results and interpretations, Raumolin-Brunberg also successfully applies a sociolinguistic method that proves to be particularly valuable for the field of sociohistorical linguistics.

“’A Jolly Kind of Letter’ – The Documents in the Case and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Correspondence on Trial” is the title of Arja Nurmi’s paper. The title already implies that Nurmi aims at comparing the fictional letters from Sayers’s novel The Documents in the Case (1930) to Sayers’s private correspondence, which was written between 1928 and 1935. In order to detect similarities and differences, Nurmi studied a range of linguistic features, e.g. forms of address, use of dialogue, use of personal pronouns, tense, etc., most of which were used in Biber’s (1988/1995) investigations of differences between fiction and letters. The results show that dialogues and reported speech are more frequently found in Sayers’s fictional as opposed to her private letters. In comparison to Biber’s study, Sayers’s fictional letters are most similar to mystery fiction whereas her private correspondence most resembles the category of professional letters.

Jeffrey B. Berlin’s contribution is called “On the Nature of Letters: Thomas Mann’s unpublished correspondence with his American publisher and translator, and unpublished letters about the writing of Doctor Faustus”. Berlin’s paper substantially differs from the preceding papers in that it focuses on literary and cultural rather than linguistic aspects of the letter genre. As the title implies, the paper is based on an unpublished corpus of correspondence. The first part of the paper discusses the value of the corpus for learning about the complex personality of Thomas Mann (1875-1955). While discovering information on Mann’s adaptability to America and his interactions with people there, the source also “enriches our understanding of Mann’s impact on his cultural legacy and the making of his creative works” (Berlin 2005:63). Samples of the correspondence between Thomas Mann and his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which constitute the second part of the paper, provide an insight into Mann’s life, his happiness as well as worries about the publication of the translated (English) version of Dr. Faustus in America. The relationship between Mann and his American translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter is only implied by way of mentioning Lowe-Porter’s work in the correspondence between Mann and Knopf.

The final paper, which is written by Monique Mémet (“Letters to the editor: a multi-faceted genre”), takes us back to the realm of linguistics and in particular the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Mémet deals with letters addressed to editors of journals, news magazines and scientific magazines with a particular emphasis on the notion “genre”. The description of the corpus, which consists of 242 letters (ca. 35,000 words), is followed by an analysis of its structural patterns. Topics Mémet focuses on in the latter section are (a) the writer; (b) self-mention and first-person pronouns; (c) opening salutational formulae; and (d) the addressee. Even though the selected letters to editors would all belong to the same genre, the author notices great variation in terms of content as well as length, syntax and layout (Mémet 2005: 87). Considering the fact that these types of letters are frequently subject to severe editing, as has also been stated in the guidelines of selected journals, the corpus would not be of great value for research in several fields of linguistics. Mémet seems to be aware of this in that she suggests that the corpus be used for teaching genre differences to students in ESP training programmes. One suggestion of how to employ the collected letters to editors in ESP programmes is provided but then the author points out that this is still work in progress.

On a more general note, thanks are due to the editors for a well-edited special issue of EJES, which contains a range of high-quality papers. A point of criticism is the imbalanced selection of articles in this special issue. Four out of the six articles represent the field of historical sociolinguistics, one article focuses on English for Specific Purposes, which may be regarded as being part of the linguistic domain, and merely one paper is dedicated to the field of literature/culture. The choice of selection might have been less obvious if the editors had provided an epilogue in which the themes that the selected papers had in common were summarised (as or in place of discussing the coinciding themes in the introductory section). Then again, the selection of the papers demonstrates the important role the genre “letter” currently plays in the field of (socio)historical linguistics. The fact that a genre representing vernacular language is available as a source in this research field has given researchers the possibility to apply sociolinguistic methods to historical data (cf. Bax 2000; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003; papers by Sairio and Raumolin-Brunberg in this issue).  

The unifying aim of the papers presented in this issue was to show that letters are an important source for research, be it in the field of linguistics, literature, culture, or history; and the authors were certainly successful in conveying this message to the reader.

Anita Auer, English Department/LUCL, University of Leiden (The Netherlands). (Contact the reviewer.) 

References:

Bax, Randy C. 2000. “A Network Strength Scale for the Study of Eighteenth-century English.” EJES 4/3, 277-89.

Elspass, Stephan and Nils Langer and Joachim Scharloth and Wim Vandenbussche (eds.) (forthc.). Language History from Below. Studies from the Germanic Languages. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nevailainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London/New York: Longman.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2005. “Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular”, Linguistica e Filologia 21, 113-146.