Spatio-temporal Systems in Paston Letters

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the spatio-temporal systems in the genre of letters along the lines of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. The corpus consists of letters selected from the Paston Letters edited by Davis. The present paper first carries out a statistical analysis of how frequently the elements of space and time are employed. An examination of the discourse then shows how these elements are related with each other in the integrated spatio-temporal domain, and how these relationships change in discourse. This research shows how the Pastons interacted with the systems of space and time, making a notable contribution to the pragmatic study of letters in Middle English.

KEYWORDS:

• spatio-temporal system
• Paston letters
• Middle English
• proximal and distal perspectives
• historical pragmatics and discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the audience of the session at IAUPE 2016 and two anonymous reviewers who offered me insightful and helpful comments. This research is supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI No. 24520538 and No. 15K02595), which I gratefully acknowledge.

Notes

¹ All the texts are drawn from Davis (2004 [1971]). In each source, the first digit refers to the number of the letter and the second one to the lines of the text.

² The selection of letters is based on Davis (2008 [1963]), paying due attention to the years when the letters were written. It is considered that female members did not write letters themselves and dictated their letters to other hands, i.e. scribes. The present research disregards possible influences of such scribes following Bergs (2015).

³ Interjections are neither spatial nor temporal, but belong to the integrated spatio-temporal domain. They can only be proximal because they are directly connected to the speakers’/writers’ domain. However, there are no occurrences recorded in the corpus.

⁴ For the reason why modals should be included in the spatio-temporal systems, see Nakayasu (forthcoming).

⁵ See Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) and Nakayasu (2009) for these extended meanings.

⁶ Biber & Conrad (2009: 36) observe that ‘effective register analyses are always comparative’, and that ‘[i]t is virtually impossible to know what is distinctive about a particular register without comparing it to other registers’.

⁷ This result supports the finding by Nakayasu (2017) that Margaret employs should quite frequently (82.1).

⁸ The relative status of the writers is manifested in the letters’ salutations (Gies & Gies 1998: 9). For example, Margaret employs elaborate salutations to show deference to her husband, John I, while his letters begin with a businesslike salutation. It is also interesting to note that, contrary to what is commonly assumed about medieval womanhood, Margaret was not a typical example; ‘like Agnes, (she) was a businesswoman, strong and rather self-determined’ (Bergs 2005: 64).

⁹ Elements which are not distinctively proximal or distal are excluded from these figures: e.g., elements in the ‘other’ categories and the perfect forms.

¹⁰ This follows the idea of Halliday & Hasan (1976) that the roles of speaker and addressee should be distinguished from other roles.

¹¹ The Canterbury tales narrates a past story, which is likely to promote the use of distal elements, although the speakers also exploit proximal elements to draw the hearers’ attention. In A treatise on the astrolabe, by contrast, the speaker explains scientific facts and addresses his son, which encourages the use of proximal elements.

¹² Statistical analyses in Section 3 do not make a distinction between the prototypical deictic use of a demonstrative this and the anaphoric use in discourse, but focus on the proximal-distal distinction.

¹³ See Taavitsainen & Hiltunen (2012) for the use of now to give meta-comments as a discourse-structuring device. Now is often used as a discourse marker in The Canterbury tales, probably because the speakers aim at dramatic effects when narrating a tale (see 3.1 above).

¹⁴ Although these perfect infinitives were not taken into consideration in the statistical analysis in Section 3, they play an important role in creating a distal perspective here.