What is it about?
In this essay I examine the pattern Pronoun + Verb + Pronoun (I hope you, I think she, I suppose you), typically found in personal correspondence. The data I use is a collection of nineteenth century Irish emigrant letters. My aim is to explore how these patterns (known as projection structures) contribute to, and reinforce, familial bonds, over time and distance.
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Why is it important?
A key question for scholars working with historical emigrant letters is how, through correspondence, personal relationships are negotiated. I believe that the language of correspondence can provide us with clues as to how family members, separated by time and distance, maintained relationships. Intersubjectivity (including the use of projection structures such as 'I hope you', 'I wish you') is one possible avenue of exploration, revealing something about the interactive nature of emigrant correspondence and the types of relationship the emigrant letter embodies.
Perspectives
My background is in corpus linguistics and I am especially interested in how corpus and computational methods of analysis can be used to explore the language of historical ego-documents (personal letters, diaries and first person narratives), allowing us to better understand the lives and experiences of ordinary men and women, as well as providing new perspectives on social, cultural and economic issues of the time. My research focuses, in particular, on letters of migration and how new technologies can be used to analyse the content of digitised correspondence collections, allowing the user to identify topics and themes in the discourse, or letter writing networks for example.
Dr Emma Moreton
Coventry University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “I hope you will write”, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, December 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jhp.16.2.06mor.
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