Doing Business in 19th-century Scotland: Expressing Authority, Conveying Stance

Relying on examples taken from the complete texts currently being transcribed from original manuscript or typescript sources for inclusion in the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (19CSC, in preparation: see Dossena 2004), this paper intends to discuss the linguistic means employed in 19th-century business letters to express authority and convey stance in relation to different recipients (peers or inferiors) and different subject matters (e.g., legal controversy as opposed to ordinary, routine transactions). In particular, the aim is to present a survey of the positive and negative politeness strategies adopted by encoders of varying status (bank officials, publishers, but also working-class contractors), in order to place requests, on account of the facethreatening implications of such acts, and therefore of their delicate role in business communication. The paper starts from a general outline of the corpus currently being compiled, which aims to fill a gap in the range of corpora now available for this kind of investigations. In the second part, different cases are discussed, in which hierarchical discourse between superiors and subordinates is observed: this allows us to identify recurring hedging and boosting patterns, through which the encoders’ stance and authority is expressed with varying degrees of forcefulness. Our concluding remarks focus on the implications this type of study may have for sociohistorical linguists studying Late Modern English and the earliest stages of professional discourse.