19CSC:

A Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence

(page under construction)

Compilers: Marina Dossena and Richard Dury (University of Bergamo – Italy)

Aim:

19CSC is expected to include a proportional quantity of both private and business letters, by male and female encoders. The aim is to have a total of at least 500,000 words: 250,000 from private correspondence and 250,000 from business correspondence. The texts included in the corpus are to be diplomatically transcribed from original manuscripts (or typescripts, in the case of later business letters). Previously edited letters by literary figures are excluded. At this stage, transcription is progressing, accompanied by a process of ‘macro-tagging’; lexico-grammatical tagging is envisaged at a later stage.

Main investigation lines that may be followed in 19CSC:

· themes relating to historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics;

· themes relating to the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective;

· themes relating to language contact and language change in formerly Gaelic-speaking and Scots-speaking areas.

Sources:

Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, National Archives of Scotland, Bank of Scotland Archives

Glasgow University Archives – Centre for Business History

The inclusion of privately held documents is envisaged at a later stage.

Published research:

Dossena, Marina

2004, Towards a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish correspondence, Linguistica e Filologia 18, 195-214.

2006a, Stance and Authority in Nineteenth-century Bank Correspondence – A Case Study. In Dossena, Marina / Fitzmaurice, Susan M. (eds), Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations, Bern: Peter Lang, 175-192.

2006b, 19CSC, ICAMET and the Diachronic Study of Specialized Discourse in Correspondence. In Mair, Christian / Heuberger, Reinhard (eds), Corpora and the History of English. Heidelberg: Winter, 65-77.

2006c, Forms of Self-representation in 19^th-century Business Letters. In Dossena, Marina / Taavitsainen, Irma (eds), Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English. Bern: Peter Lang, 173-190.

2006d, Doing Business in Nineteenth-century Scotland: Expressing Authority, Conveying Stance. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Special issue on Insights from Corpus Linguistics for Professional Communication; Guest editor: Thomas Orr, University of Aizu (Japan); 49/3 (September 2006), 246-253.

Forthcoming, “As this leaves me at present” – Formulaic Usage, Politeness and Social Proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish Emigrants’ Letters. In Elspaß, Stephan / Langer, Nils / Scharloth, Joachim / Vandenbussche, Wim (eds), Germanic Language Histories from Below (1700-2000). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Submitted, “Thank God for his great blessing” – Faith and Formulas in 19^th-century Scottish Correspondence. In Maggioni, M.Luisa (ed.), The Language(s) of Religion: a Diachronic Approach – Proceedings of the 12^th SLIN Conference (Milan 2005).

Submitted, Prescriptivism a Century Ago: Business Correspondence Taught to Emigrants – A Case Study. In Beal, Joan / Nocera, Carmela / Sturiale, Massimo (eds), Proceedings of the Conference Perspectives on Prescriptivism (Ragusa 2006). Bern: Peter Lang.

Dury, Richard

2006, A Corpus of Nineteenth-century Business Correspondence: Methodology of Transcription. In Dossena, Marina / Fitzmaurice, Susan (eds). Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations. Bern: Peter Lang, 193-205.

Contact details:

Prof. Marina Dossena <name.surname at unibg.it>

Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere

Piazza Rosate 2 - 24129 Bergamo (Italy)

tel. +39 035 2052 747

fax +39 035 2052-789