Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Between deference and destitution: Requesting relief in Scottish pauper letters, 1750-1910
- Date
- Friday 13 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
Research into historical sociolinguistics has in recent years been shifting to focus on language outside of the social elite and upper classes; this language ‘from below’ (Elspaβ, 2005) can yield a more complete, varied and nuanced view of historical language and discursive practices. One source of such data, the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions (ScotPP), compiles pauper letters written by the Scottish poor between 1750-1910. These pauper letters were written in a societal context where social roles were strictly upheld through hierarchy and deferential practices (Laitinen 2015). Letter writers seeking the favour of officials needed to observe these hierarchies, and formulate their requests in ways that befitted the expectations of the addressee. A request could be modulated to be more supplicatory or indirect, thereby saving the face of the addressee and upholding social hierarchies; however, these aims contrasted with the urgency of the letters, requiring writers to navigate a balance between politeness work and the immediacy of their plight.
In this talk, I will investigate how applicants in the ScotPP use modulation (both mitigation and reinforcement) to position themselves in relation to their addressee, choosing between expressions associated with varying levels of deference, directness, and conventionality. Drawing on classifications by Kohnen (2007) and Jucker (forthcoming), I discuss the different types of request strategies (varying in directness, formulaicity, and genre-conventionality) used in the ScotPP, and how their use changes over time. This variation allows us both to trace developments in the sociohierarchical relationships between participants in the poor relief system, and to contrast those with changes in epistolary practices in Scotland more broadly. Through this historical-pragmatic framework, the findings show us how pauper letter writers were able to use linguistic strategies and genre expectations in order to exert agency over their self-representation.
References
- Elspaβ, Stephan. 2005. Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Jucker, Andreas. Forthcoming (2026). “Pray, Sir, proceed” The politeness of requests in epistolary novels of the long eighteenth century. Journal of Historical Pragmatics.
- Kohnen, Thomas. 2007. Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In Susan Fitzmaurice & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 139–166. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Laitinen, Mikko. 2015. Early nineteenth-century pauper letters. In Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier & Richard J. Watts (eds.), Letter Writing and Language Change, 185–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.