English Correspondence Research Articles

The transportation of embedded inversion in world Englishes

AbstractThe present study uses private correspondence to investigate the use of embedded inversion on both sides of the Atlantic as an illustration of the spread of spoken/conversational features through writing. The paper discusses the use of embedded inversion in Irish English (IrE) and briefly compares its occurrence in other varieties of English during the 19th century. The data come from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, which contains emigrant letters written to and by Irish emigrants from 1760 to 1940. The letters were sent mainly between Ireland and other countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Argentina, and therefore provide an empirical base for studies of historical change. By using corpus linguistics techniques, we analyze possible connections between American English and IrE. The occurrence of embedded inversion in CORIECOR is compared with other historical corpora such as the Corpus of Historical American English, which provides data from one of the main destinations of Irish emigrants.

Usage and precept in eighteenth-century English object-clause complementisers

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the use of zero and that as connectors for object clauses in eighteenth-century English. Previous approaches have shown that the use of zero increased in late Middle English and became well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in speech-based text-types. Our own research, based on the evidence of The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, has shown that in the mid-seventeenth century zero was well beyond the mid-range stage of lexical diffusion (73%) with the five high frequency verbs to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope. Chronologically, it has been shown that progress of the zero innovation was thwarted in the eighteenth century, which has been attributed to the effect of prescriptivism. In this paper, we intend to throw light on this issue by tracking the courses of zero and that during the eighteenth century in both usage and precept. With this purpose we rely on two sources of information. On the one hand, a precept corpus containing a selection of grammars published in Britain in 1681–1800. Usage, on the other, has been surveyed in light of the evidence of The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler. Our aim is to assess the existence of a correlation between usage and precept in the expression of object clauses in this period with the following objectives: i) to analyse the use and distribution of zero and that clauses among grammarians; ii) to evaluate the incidence of the phenomenon in correspondence, as an input mirroring the vernacular; and iii) to assess the role of the grammarians’ statements in the propagation of the marked conjunction over the period.

Prescriptivist attempts at a spelling reform in Early Modern English: sociolinguistic and stylistic routes and rates of adoption

ABSTRACT Some late Renaissance scholars, like Smith (1568); Hart (1569; 1570); Bullokar (1580); Mulcaster (1582), attempted to reform English spelling to reflect the pronunciation changes resulting from the Great Vowel Shift. Their goal was to align letters and phonology by devising a more stable and predictable new system. This study explores the impact and diffusion of these spelling proposals. It examines texts from 1300 to 1700, written by authors from different socio-demographic and biological backgrounds, and across various genres, registers and text-types. The sources used as linguistic materials are the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, an archival data source of prose pieces representing different genres from 1150 to 1500 and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a collection of 4,970 authored documents written from 1410 to 1681 by informants from different social ranks. This study may allow us to trace the sociolinguistic and stylistic route and rate of adoption (if any) followed by these attempts at reforming the English spelling system within processes of diffusion of linguistic innovations at the level of orthography, as well as to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in past communities.

Russian discourse word <i>net</i> ‘no’ in a contrastive perspective

The article examines the functioning of the Russian words net ‘no’ and partly da ‘yes’ in comparison to other languages. The study identifies important features of the semantics and pragmatics of these words. Special attention is paid to the discursive uses of Russian net and their correspondences in English and German. A classification of discursive uses of net is proposed, some of which have counterparts in English and German, while others are simply omitted in translation. The specific features of discursive uses are largely determined by the subtle semantics of the central readings of Russian da and net. The same holds for English yes and no, as well as for German ja and nein. Even in the most direct uses of da and net, a distinctive characteristic of Russian dialogue is revealed: it is more important for the speaker to align their position with the interlocutor’s position than with the actual state of affairs. This characteristic underlies the richness of discursive uses, primarily represented by the word net.

“But Never Do be Long Without Writing Us, for Altho' Many Miles Divide Us We Have Your Welfare at Heart”: An Analysis of Requests in Intimate Discourse in Irish Emigrants’ Letters (1700–1940)

This article concentrates on the analysis of requestive speech acts from the point of view of (im)politeness studies within the context of historical letter-writing. It draws its data from a sub-corpus of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) containing letters written by Irish emigrants that settled in the United States and their intimates. The scope of this research is limited to intimate discourse to perform a cohesive study of the encoding of this speech act within a particular framework of usage in a particular genre. This study classifies a total of 254 requests extracted from this sub-corpus and observes the major tendencies that appear in this specific context. Results show a clear preference for the usage of impositive head act strategies (95.68% of the results). Imperatives (50.9%), want statements (27.8%), and performatives (9.8%) are the most recurrent head act strategies in this set of data. Conversely, indirect requests show a much lower number of hits (4.32%). Moreover, the data showed a preference for external modification or no modification at all. These results point towards the idea that directness might have been conventionalized as a sign of positive politeness between family members in the context of historical letter writing. Some reservations about generalizations with regards to the data are expressed and further research lines are proposed in order to establish a more solid understanding of the encoding of requestive speech acts in the context of historical letter writing.

The Role of English Correspondence Courses in the Logistics Management Program at the Banyuwangi Marine Academy

The aim of this research is to determine the role of the English Correspondence course in the Logistics Management Study Program at the Banyuwangi Maritime Academy. This research uses qualitative methods to explore the role of the English Correspondence course in the Logistics Management Study Program at the Banyuwangi Maritime Academy. Document analysis was used to review the curriculum, while interviews with lecturers provided teaching perspectives. Student surveys were used to evaluate course effectiveness. The results show that this course was successful in improving students' English language skills, integrating logistics management, and developing soft skills and leadership skills. The results of this research state that the English Correspondence course in the Logistics Management Study Program at the Banyuwangi Maritime Academy has proven its success in forming competent students in the logistics industry. Increasing English language skills and integrating logistics management concepts creates an important balance, accompanied by the development of soft skills for future challenges.

Enhancing ESP Learning: Investigating Students' Perspectives on Real-Time Written Corrective Feedback Delivery via Google Docs

The present research aims to investigate the practice of real-time or synchronous written corrective feedback (SWCF) delivery via Google Docs as a platform to deliver feedback, known as a linguistic feedback tool (LiFT) in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classes, students’ preferences and viewpoints of SWCF. The research employed a qualitative case study involving 15 students from an advanced English correspondence course in a non-English department of a private university in Depok, West Java, Indonesia. Open-ended questionnaires, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews were used to gather the data. The findings revealed that auto-generated and human feedback are used to deliver SWCF via Google Docs, inferring that those features can build students' awareness of language aspects, content, and context in composing professional documents. Direct feedback was delivered more frequently, regarding the learning time efficiency and the students’ ability to identify errors. Further, the students preferred frequent SWCF, direct and indirect feedback, and correcting delivery methods. Finally, they considered that SWCF delivered via Google Docs assists them in improving letter accuracy. Their preferences and viewpoints might allow the lecturer to choose appropriate feedback delivery strategies and material reinforcement. The present research implies a balanced use of auto-generated and human feedback from LiFT in SWCF delivery. Evaluating the effectiveness of SWCF delivery via Google Docs for different levels of achievers in ESP classes might be a potential area of future research. Other LiFTs’ infusion into ESP classes is also worth researching to provide language instructors with alternative applications for SWCF delivery.

The Spanish subjunctive mood and its English correspondences

Abstract Corpus-based contrastive studies have successfully addressed the empirical study of crosslinguistic similarities and differences and may also contribute to understanding complexity across languages. This paper aims at (dis)proving whether the Spanish subjunctive mood shows greater complexity than its English correspondences as translations or sources of the Spanish subjunctive forms. It also explores a trade-off between language levels, i.e., whether higher morphological complexity is linked to syntactic and lexical complexity. The data come from a bidirectional English-Spanish corpus, and the word-alignment-based metric system has been used to quantify morphological complexity. Syntactic and lexical complexity were also investigated and computed using tests of statistical significance. Results corroborate that Spanish presents higher complexity in this verbal area in all three levels, morphological, syntactic, and lexical: the hypothesized trade-off between higher morphological complexity on the one hand, and lower syntactic and lexical complexity on the other is not validated by our data.

The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces)

Abstract This data paper describes the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces), a linguistic corpus of personal letters covering the long eighteenth century. The letters have been sampled and transcribed from various printed editions and are now openly distributed through Zenodo. The ceeces contains 2,624 letters by 200 writers, some 1.14 million words. It comes in several versions – plain text, xml, standardised-spelling, and part-of-speech tagged – with ample metadata on the correspondents and the letters, enabling the sociolinguistic study of historical English using a range of social variables including gender, age, social rank, and geographical region.

Linguistic Perceptions of Irish English in Nineteenth-century Emigrant Letters

In this paper we look at the real voices of Irish English speakers in the nineteenth century. By turning to the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno, 2012), we analyse the perceptions that letter writers had of their own language use. We apply a micro-perspective analysis to the language of John Kerr, an Irish emigrant to America, in his letters to his uncle James Graham of Newpark (Co. Antrim, N. Ireland). We examine Kerr’s incisive comment on language use alongside metacommentary found in different Late Modern works, including dictionaries, essays on Irish English, as well as contemporary fictional representations of the variety of English spoken in Ireland during this period. Through this small batch of letters, we explore how the real voices of Irish English speakers echoed an enregistered Irish repertoire that may have raised awareness shaping their perceptions of their own dialect.

By Miranda, Mary Hamilton, Mrs Dickenson … Self-reference in Late Modern English private correspondence

This paper is set in the late Georgian period, when letter writing became a widespread social practice and letter-writing manuals established norms of propriety and elegance of style for addressing persons of all ranks. More specifically, it turns its attention to author-oriented address with a focus on the use of personal names in self-reference expressions, as these address the recipient of the letter at the same time as they describe the status of the writer. The aim is to explore their role as a means of socially-governed linguistic practice and as an index of politeness on the positive-negative continuum, as proposed for Early Modern English correspondence.
 The study is based on a set of private letters written by Mary Hamilton (1776–1814), a well-connected figure in royal, aristocratic and literary circles. The analysis traces intra-speaker variation in the use of self-reference in the main text and in the signature, and explores sociolinguistic factors (gender) as well as notions traditionally connected with pragmatic language use (distance, relative power). The research presented here will thus contribute to the growing body of literature that considers ego-documents as representations of the self, of particular interest in the fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics.

LEXICAL TONALITY IN THE MODERN BUSINESS INTERNET CORRESPONDENCE IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

This research is devoted to the comparative analysis of lexical tonality in business Internet correspondence in Russian and English. The review and analysis of scientific literature, articles devoted to the study of the concept of lexical tonality is carried out. Lexical tonality is a subjective attitude through emotion, evaluation, opinion, judgment to another subject or object, which is determined at the level of vocabulary, which allows you to explore the tonality in a sentence, breaking it into separate lexemes and considering the meaning of each of them. The current trends that affect the lexical tonality when writing business letters in Russian and English have been studied. The study presents variants of words that have positive or negative semantics, words with semantics that contain an emotional assessment and words with the meaning of benevolence, interest, tact, consistency, etc. It is shown how positive, negative, neutral tonality is determined in a sentence with the help of words, which is expressed in a positive, negative or neutral attitude of the subject to the object. One of the objectives of the study is to supplement the classification of means in two languages (considering their specifics) to determine the lexical tonality of the text in business Internet correspondence.

“I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters

This paper sets out to explore the interface between migration experiences and epistolary discourse in CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty and Amador-Moreno in preparation). Using corpus and computational methods, this investigation aims to empirically explore language usage in the letters exchanged between the Irish in the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand and their loved ones back in Ireland. Specifically, the study proposes a corpus-pragmatic examination of the mental verb think in an attempt to explain the function of such verb in the negotiation of epistolary relationships, that is, how it helps to reinforce and maintain crucial emotional and physical links between emigrants and their families in Ireland. The material will be searched using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). In the quantitative stage, corpus tools such as the Corpus Query Language (CQL) function will be utilised to identify and collect the linguistic patterns that characterise the epistolary discourse under analysis. Qualitatively, a detailed inspection of such patterns will be conducted in order to provide access to historical forms of communication in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish emigration as well as the use of involvement-marking strategies in private letters.

Cross-Linguistic Correspondences and Current Problems in Terminography

The paper investigates the current development of digital technologies, its terminology, the problems in cross-linguistic terminography and shows that at present terminography becomes an autonomous and leading multidimensional linguistic digital discipline. Its most urgent task is to create effective digital termilonological resources of cross-linguistic correspondences to authentic extended language-specific and idiomatic digital terminology in English, including its equivalents in Russian. A wide collection of corpus data, compiled for the last five years (over 1 mil. words) out of leading authentic journals and books in English on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and corresponding authentic texts in Russian, provided with translation of titles, abstracts and key words from Russian into English, as well as the analysis of computer translation systems, shows that contemporary English-Russian dictionaries and digital lexicographic resources need serious improvement. It can be based on contemporary linguistic knowledge in cross-linguistic English–Russian and Russian–English correspondences, particularly concerning “translation universals”, such as explication, implication and normalization.

‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters

Abstract This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner’s speech? If so, how does an individual’s social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics.

The Significance for Indonesian Democratic Value Integrated to Learning English Correspondence of International Private Law Course Subject at University

International Private Law Course Subject contains about how students of Law understand and comprehend the application for realizing International Law Standards about preceding demanding and arguing Law Argumentation in written context. The English materials for private law needs an urgency to read a case text for court English Letter as an International Correspondent to Explain the meaning By collecting steps of Teaching with Literal Data, Researcher develops arguments with Descriptive Qualitative Research. The Subject can infer Contextual Application as International Private Law Material Instead of Correspondence Application with Inquiry Strategy

A Study on the Principle of Courtesy in Business English Correspondence from the Perception of Pragmatics

A Study on the Principle of Courtesy in Business English Correspondence from the Perception of Pragmatics

Modal may in requests

Abstract This study applies House’s (1996, 2005) dimensions of cross-cultural differences as a diagnostic tool to investigate regional variation regarding two pragmalinguistic requestive patterns with may in Scottish and English non-private letters (1500 to 1700). The dimensional scheme proves a useful tool for explaining similarities and differences in the requestive behaviour in the two varieties. It is shown that, in the sixteenth century, grounders with may are part of a set of downgrading devices employed by letter-writers to counteract the directness and self-orientation particularly of performative requests in both the Scottish and the English correspondence. Moreover, the dimensional analysis explicates the cross-varietal differences regarding may in the seventeenth century correspondence by linking the rise of mitigating may in performative requests in the Scottish letters to the increased self-orientation towards the letter-writer, which is not counter-balanced by other downgraders.

Students’ attitudes towards the use of imagination and humour in teaching and learning business correspondence and their implications for teaching

The purpose of the study has been an investigation of students’ attitudes towards the teaching of business correspondence in English with the use of imagination and humour, as expressed in the questionnaire and reflected in the students’ writing. It was assumed that the use of imagination, creativity and humour would motivate the students to practise business writing and develop their skills. The study is based on both an analysis of students’ actual writing as well as a questionnaire regarding their attitudes towards simulation and humour in practising business correspondence. As the results show, the students’ writing varies considerably, ranging from standard letters modelled on textbook examples, up to humorous letters from and to imaginary companies. Similarly, the questionnaire reveals a variety of attitudes: some students regard simulations of this kind as interesting and motivating, while others find them artificial. They also tend to prefer learning serious correspondence, which is closer to their future professional work. It can thus be concluded that, while using imagination and even humour has some benefits, such as motivating students and developing their creativity, the focus of teaching should be on more authentic business correspondence, closer to that which they will use in the future.

Using Simulation in International Business Correspondence Courses for China’s English-Major Undergraduates

This study reports an investigative study with 55 English-major participants in a Chinese university about using simulation in business English correspondence teaching. The study found that participants had strong needs in practical skills development and learning business English correspondence writing. The simulation approach was perceived to be effective and had positive learning outcomes in business communication skills development, motivation, confidence and vocabulary growth, business and language knowledge improvement, and more understanding about the business practice. The constraint factors in simulation included lack of business knowledge and vocabulary, ineffective group cooperation, and lack of understanding about the real-world business background.