Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics

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Of Manners and Letters: Politeness in the Letters between Jonathan Swift and his Female Correspondents

Annemieke Bijkerk, June 2001

The aim of this thesis was to find out more about Jonathan Swift’s (1667-1745) relationship with women. In order to do so, I used a modern sociolinguistic model of politeness, and applied it to the opening and closing formulas in the letters written by Swift to his female correspondents and vice versa.

This model of politeness was developed by Brown and Levinson (1987) in their study: Politeness: Some universals in Language Usage. The key aspect of their model is face, which is divided into negative face, the desire not to impose upon the other, and positive face, the desire to be liked and admired. The model supplies two types of politeness strategies that satisfy either negative face or positive face, i.e. negative politeness strategies and positive politeness strategies. The type of strategy used by a speaker depends on three social variables: social distance, relative power and formality of context.

I studied all letters to and from women in Jonathan Swift’s correspondence, but I only discussed the letters of four of these women in detail (Lady Elizabeth Germain, Mrs Pendarves, Mrs Whiteway and the Duchess of Ormonde) because their correspondences were the most elaborate. The general tendency in the letters written by the women is that the formulas become increasingly informal in the course of the correspondence. Socially lowly placed women show great concern for negative face and use negative politeness strategies, socially highly placed women use more positive politeness strategies and can become very informal in their formulas.

Jonathan Swift, however, almost invariably used negative politeness strategies to all of his female correspondents. Socially highly placed women received more negative politeness than socially lowly placed women, but he seldom became informal in his use of the formulas to any of them. Swift’s formality may have been caused by social and cultural restraints, or by his own psychological state of mind which may have prohibited him from gettting close to women. In order to get a fuller perspective on Swift’s use of politeness towards women and to all his correspondents in general, it is necessary to study the letters written to and from Swift’s male correspondents as well. This would be something for a different project.