The Discourse of Desperation: Late 18th and Early 19th Century Letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues

ISBN-13: 9780367522643 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 208 str.

Ivor Timmis

Opis

This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor.

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Methodology and Sources  3. The Poor Law: origins, attitudes and effects  4. Education and the Eighteenth-Century Poor  5. Literacy in the Community  6. Formulaic sequences: a dual strategy for the uncoached writer  7. Norms, Standards and Prestige  8. Discourse and Rhetoric  9. Conclusion

O autorze

Ivor Timmis is Professor of English Language Teaching at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He has a long-standing interest in corpus research, which was the subject of his first book for Routledge, Corpus Linguistics for ELT in 2015. More recently, he has become interested in aspects of historical linguistics, an interest which culminated in Historical Perspectives on Spoken Language Research for Routledge in 2017. This book arose from two historical spoken corpora he developed himself: the Bolton/Worktown Corpus of 1930s of informal spoken English and the Mayhew Corpus of 1850s London vernacular. It was this line of research that led him to the letters which are the focus of this book: letters by paupers, prisoner and rogues, c.1760-1830.