Stance and Authority in Nineteenth-century Bank Correspondence - A Case Study

This paper focuses on the linguistic means employed in 19th-century letters addressed to and issued by officials of the Bank of Scotland in relation to matters involving legal controversy. The aim is to discuss the subtle link existing between the deployment of politeness strategies and devices encoding stance, the latter being – by definition – seriously face-threatening in the cases in point. Examples will be taken from the complete texts currently being transcribed from original manuscript or typescript sources for inclusion in the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (Dossena / Dury, in preparation).