Initiating contact in institutional correspondence Historical (socio)pragmatics of Late Modern English literacies Matylda Włodarczyk Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań When addressing family members or friends, letter writers enter a common ground of some sort, where, as research has shown, the rules of everyday interaction apply (Nurmi and Palander-Colin 2008). In diferent historical periods, familiar correspondence is thus very much about maintaining existing bonds and about phatic communion. he situation is likely to be very diferent in the case of institutional recipients, in particular if somebody addresses a given institution for the irst time. he data selected for the study, the 1819 applications to the British Colonial Oice for the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme (TNA 48/41–6), include many letters written by “irst timers” (i.e., the encoders1 who have not addressed the institution before). hese letters may provide some insights into the speciic participation framework of the irst-time writers in their interaction with the institution. In the paper, I propose that contact initiation may be related to the literacy levels of letter-writers, focusing on what I refer to as “technical literacy”. Based on some parameters thereof, I distinguish between two broad groups of informants, relecting what may be described as standard and non-standard literacies, respectively. he two groups, I assume, do not operate within the same participation framework and, therefore, display pragmatic and linguistic diferences in constructing the initial encounters. Moreover, the analysis of these initiations ofers a new perspective on the routinisation of institutional correspondence. 1. Recently, the notion of an “encoder” in place of “writer”/“sender”/“author” has been proposed and used to acknowledge the practices of delegating/dictating or the communal composition of letters in the Late Modern period (see Dossena 2012: 18–20 for details). See also Houston (2014: 77–8 and 82–6) on the complex issue of the authorship of the petitions submitted by the poor. His sample shows that most were unsigned (i.e., delegated), both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2 (2017), 271–294. doi 10.1075/jhp.00006.wlo issn 1566–5852 / e-issn 1569–9854 © John Benjamins Publishing Company 272 Matylda Włodarczyk Keywords: Cape Colony, epistolary initiations, Late Modern literacies, petitions, requests 1. Introduction In diferent historical periods, familiar correspondence is very much about maintaining existing bonds and about phatic communion. he situation is likely to be very diferent in the case of institutional letters, in particular if somebody addresses a given institution for the irst time. Unfortunately, no research to date provides information on how the participation framework in institutional correspondence difers from that in personal letters, although the former type of epistolary practice has been studied (e.g., Dossena and Fitzmaurice [eds] 2006). In an attempt to address this particular gap, the following analysis focuses on a sample of one-of or irst-time letters drawn from the applications for the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme (1819). In particular, I present the ways in which the encoders initiate their exchange with the Colonial Oice and I pay special attention to the possible pragmatic implications of the linguistic properties of these initiations. he rhetorical models of the petition as presented in the contemporary manuals, as well as the implications of the existing linguistic studies into the genre, constitute the background of the historical pragmatic perspective adopted in the paper. he pragmatic perspective adopted in this paper involves an attempt to link the broadly understood situational factors (the general socio-cultural and genrerelated context) to the social setting of individual letter writers. he social background of the informants, I would like to claim, may be viewed through the lens of Late Modern literacies, understood as the competence regarding diferent aspects of written communication. Following some studies into contemporary and historical literacies, these are viewed as complex, multi-layered phenomena (Barton 2007; Taavitsainen 2012). Distinctions in literacy are ine-grained and usually conceptualised as scales (see, for instance, Street 1995; Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton 2007: 38), and in this study also, they are placed on a continuum in relation to speciic features of language use. As I have shown elsewhere, an important dimension of literacy, if a collection of fairly homogeneous texts is analysed, is genre literacy (Włodarczyk 2013a, 2016). his type of literacy, as well as the other types, is related to the pragmatic competence of the users of language, their social and interactional skills, and awareness of diferent types of norms. In this study, I focus on yet another type of literacy, which I refer to as “technical literacy”, which includes features of spelling, such as the relections of phonetic vernacular uni- © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 273 versals2 (e.g., h-dropping and g-dropping), punctuation, and selected features of morphosyntax (see Section 2.2 for details). In relation to the concept of genre literacy, it may be claimed that, when writing a letter of request (i.e., the petition), an encoder employs their knowledge of the etiquette, conventions, linguistic norms, etc., of the time based on their social awareness, each to the best of their skills and abilities. If the total of this knowledge is employed to build a speciic request, a legitimate assumption would be that subjects who have little experience in the practice and do not display standard literacy will probably encounter a host of diiculties. For example, we could imagine that, rather than elaborate upon the choice of a speciic salutation, pronoun or strategy (i.e., make social or stylistic decisions), the less literate encoders would be more likely to focus on inding the words to express themselves, or simply put speech into writing. We could posit, then, that compared to the encoders with extensive experience and standard literacy, a diferent type of processing would have to be involved. hese considerations allow formulating the following hypothesis. In relation to literacy levels of letter-writers, it could be predicted that the informants who lean more towards non-standard literacy (see Street 1995: 134–40 on the distinction into vernacular versus dominant literacy) will not have the same control over their initiations as the standard informants. In this paper, this hypothesis will be veriied against a similar number of irst-time letters from lower order and standard letter writers. he Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme advertised in 1819 attracted a multitude of written applications from Britons of all social backgrounds, the preserved letters being the source of the data sample that is analysed here (Section 2). he relationship between pragmatic features of the initiations and literacy levels of the informants provides a (socio)pragmatic perspective on institutional correspondence in the Late Modern period. In Section 3, I present the initiation strategies found in the analysed material, including a case of a repetitive, or double, initiation in the letters of one informant, William Aldred. Section 4 discusses the results of the analysis. he inal section focuses on the routinisation of historical institutional correspondence and presents some conclusions. 2. Although the “non-standard” features I have noted as indicators of vernacular literacy may be regional, dialectal and social, considering the diiculty of establishing the details of the informants’ background, I have opted for a generalising label of “vernacular universals”. hese are deined as “a small number of phonological and grammatical processes [that] recur in vernaculars wherever they are spoken” (Chambers 2004: 28). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 274 Matylda Włodarczyk 2. Historical background, data and methodology In Britain throughout the nineteenth century, emigration was viewed as a way of reducing the consequences of unemployment. In particular, amidst the crisis related to the transition from war to a peace-time economy ater the Napoleonic Wars, the British government decided to aid the colonisation of the Cape Colony with the amount of £50,000 in July 1819. he public response to this sponsored emigration plan was staggering: between July 1819 and January 1820, the Colonial Oice, a government agency responsible for organising the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme, received a huge number of applications. Letters from citizens from all over Britain, who represented a variety of social backgrounds, are preserved in the National Archives (CO 48/41–56). he collection contains interesting, but at the same time complicated, evidence for early nineteenth-century English. For example, historians have indicated that, in terms of their social background, the information provided by the candidates themselves, in particular in relation to their occupation and social background, cannot be taken at face value. he recruitment scheme favoured agricultural volunteers who were able to withstand the harshness of the natural conditions, so applicants were likely to lie about their occupation to increase their chances of being accepted for emigration (Nash 1987: 1; Peires 1989: 175). For some candidates, it is, nevertheless, possible to verify their occupational status, and to some extent their social background, but relevant historical records have not been preserved in all cases, while consulting all potentially informative local archives and registers to that end is an impossible task. herefore, from a methodological perspective, the analysed collection calls for a speciic text-orientated approach in the search for the external determinants of the pragmatic variation found in the data (see Section 2.2). 2.1 Data sample he TNA collection of the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme covers about 3,000 applications, or formal requests, made individually or on behalf of groups of poverty-stricken Britons who were seeking a new opportunity for employment in the colonies. My previous work has been based on diferent selections of letters from CO 48/41–53. For this paper, I have speciically selected the irst-time letters only, which means that each of the letters comes from a diferent informant. In line with the hypothesis presented above (Section 1), I have, as the irst step of the analysis, chosen ity informants whose letters give an impression of a standard language user, and another ity containing features which do not conform to the © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 275 standard of the time (see also Section 2.2).3 he sample covers 100 letters from 100 informants, the letters being rather short (about 18,000 words in total). he preliminary selection was based on two types of evaluation: that of the external material features of the letters (cf. visual prosody, Meurman-Solin 2013), and that of the literacy levels of individual informants. his somewhat impressionistic analysis, based on visual pragmatics and insights gained in the course of transcription, is subject to further veriication based on some speciic literacy-related criteria (see Section 2.2 and Tables 1 and 2). 2.2 Methodology for Late Modern Literacies: evaluation criteria he features taken into account in the evaluation of literacies relected in the letters analysed here include the lack/presence of spelling inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies and phonetically salient spellings, the nature of punctuation and capitalisation (lack or frequency of the former and the nature of the latter) and morphosyntax (lack of concord, mostly between subject and verb).4 Spelling inconsistencies are deined as diferences in spelling of the same lexeme by one encoder (e.g., family versus familey; wife versus whife; single versus singel; freinds versus Friend). Spelling idiosyncrasies involve spellings not attested in contemporary printed sources (i.e., the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts). Phonetically salient spellings comprise the following (sets separated by a colon come from diferent encoders): – – – – /h/ dropping and insertion; for example, I ham (‘I am’); it his (‘it is’); imself (‘himself ’), as got (‘has got’), as soon has (‘as soon as’) variable rhoticity; for example, Govenments (‘government’s’), pertishner (‘petitioner’), Surporte (‘support’) /g/ dropping; for example, wishin (‘wishing’), working (‘working’), lyin in (‘lying in’), Bean out of employ (‘being’) /e/ raising; for example, iver (‘ever’), Kint (‘Kent’), whin (‘when’), whither (‘whether’) 3. he notion of standard is always problematic, so I used the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, containing printed material (see Diller et al. 2011; available online at: https://perswww. kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet3_0.htm), that is to say, a relection of a codiied spelling variant of the time, as a reference point to conirm the “nonstandard” spellings. 4. he lack of concord, including its diferent types, is the only morphosyntactic feature which occurs systematically in the data, and that is why it was chosen as an indicator of lower-order literacy. he data include isolated instances of some other non-standard morphosyntactic features which I have covered in more detail elsewhere (Włodarczyk 2014, 2016). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 276 Matylda Włodarczyk he threshold points for the above-mentioned features are: no such features (Category: None), one or two instances of a given feature (Category: Isolated), more than two occurrences of a feature (Category: Common). For instance, James Powell’s letter (CO 48/45/f88) lacks punctuation (0.5 point) and uses capitalisation inconsistently (e.g., i for I; 1 point), and it also contains the following other features based on which his scores were assigned (see Table 3): Suicent (‘suicient’) and Carracter (‘character’). hese spellings were marked as idiosyncratic (2 features score 1 point). In total, Powell’s score was 2.5, which placed him in the “weak non-standard” group. he selection of features is obviously arbitrary, but it has been based on extensive work with the data that I conducted previously. he focus on spelling and punctuation stems from the assumption that these features (punctuation and capitalisation, in particular) have not received enough attention in the study of Late Modern English so far. As the analysis conducted here is based on manuscript material, it provides a good opportunity to incorporate these features and to bridge this gap. Moreover, the 1819 applications contain a rather limited pool of nonstandard features of phonology and morphosyntax, chiely for reasons of genre constraints and the modest size of the samples. Hence, using some non-standard features (e.g., relections of phonetic vernacular universals in spelling and the lack of concord) jointly with idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation allows for the creation of a more ine-grained picture of the literacies involved (see also Włodarczyk 2016 for an extended discussion of Late Modern literacies). Table 1. Literacy evaluation: features and scores spelling punctuation morpho-syntax features None Isolated Common inconsistency 0 1 2 idiosyncrasy 0 1 2 salience 0 1 2 punctuation (lack) 0 1 2 capitalisation (random) 0 0.5 1 concord (lack) 0 0.5 1 standard non-standard Table 2. Literacy continuum: scores and informant numbers score 0 0–2 2.5–4.5 5+ literacy type standard weak standard weak non-standard nonstandard letters no. 30 23 37 10 © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 277 Table 3. Individual scores for James Powell spelling punctuation morphosyntax features None Isolated Common inconsistency 0 0 1 2 idiosyncrasy 1 0 1 2 salience 0 0 1 2 punctuation (lack) 0.5 0 1 2 capitalisation (random) 1 0 0.5 1 concord (lack) 0 0 0.5 1 2.5 weak non-standard he preliminary evaluation of 100 letters and the division into two equal sets – each apparently relecting standard and non-standard literacies, proved fairly accurate. All in all, the application of the evaluation system proposed above shows that forty-seven out of the 100 evaluated letters may be placed close to the lower order literacy pole (scores above 2.5), while the remaining ity-three scored between 0–2, which allows placing the involved informants close to the dominant literacy pole (see Table 2). Moreover, the two pools of letters difer in length: for “standard” informants, the average letter length is about 210 words, while for the “non-standard” informants it is about 150 words. In many cases, the non-standard category of letters is characterised by speciic features of visual prosody, such as for instance the applications by high-scoring homas Brown (CO 48/41/f303; score 7.5; a blacksmith and farmer, who wrote from London) or George Dison (CO 48/42/f667; score 6.5; profession unknown, who wrote from Sheield) are marked by a relatively small size of the paper used, lack of page margins (side, or upper and lower), text indentations or spacing. On the other hand, the letter by homas Kelly (CO 48/44/f303; score 2.5; former navy; who describes himself as a carpenter and joiner, and wrote from London), who was placed in the lower range of the “weak non-standard category”, used a large sheet of paper, let an ample let-hand margin, marked the address and superscription with indentations and the subscription with both the indentation and larger spacing. he coincidence of high scores and speciic features of visual prosody mentioned above, may, however, be problematic in the case of extremely short letters – such as, for instance, the application by John Laws (CO 48/44/f272; score 2.5; a bricklayer from London). Laws wrote on a slip of paper of roughly one third of the regular size; the visual prosody involved is similar to the high-scorers, but the sample (thirty-four words) is too limited for the other analysed features to surface. On the whole, however, the genre-related features of visual prosody, such as the size of the paper used, the occurrence of side margins, respectful spacing, marking of the key elements of the © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 278 Matylda Włodarczyk letters by indentation and layout are more common for low-scorers (i.e., the users whose literacy may be described as “standard” or “weak standard”). 3. Initial encounters in institutional correspondence Having evaluated the technical literacies of the informants, the analysis of the initiations will be conducted separately for the two broad groups. Prior to the analysis of the data set, I will discuss previous research into the rhetorical structure of the petition and the models forwarded by the contemporary manuals (Section 3.1). Following that, I will present an individual case of William Aldred, a wheelwright from London, to illustrate some interesting aspects of the initiating contact in institutional communication in the early-nineteenth century (Section 3.2). 3.1 Initiations in the rhetorical structure and contemporary manuals on the petition Studies which explore the rhetorical models of the formal letter of request (e.g., Sokoll 2006; Held 2010; Peikola 2012; Włodarczyk 2013a) recognise the link between the petition and the classical ars dictaminis (see also Nevalainen 2001: 212). In these studies, the petitions written at diferent points in time show a fairly unanimous rhetorical division into: salutation (salutation / address / securing of good will / captatio benevolentiae), identiication of the petitioner, exposition (narratio / statement of grievance, may be preceded by exordium or initiation), petition (petitio / request for redress) and conclusion (Held 2010: 200–20; Peikola 2012: 109– 10; Sokoll 2006: 100; see also Houston 2014: 73–4, who presents the models of petitions ranging from the earliest popular manuals, to the letter-writers popular in the Late Modern period). In this rhetorical organisation, the exordium (or initiation), which, in the classical epistle model, announces the purpose of the discourse and prepares the audience favourably, is not an essential part. Indeed, Perelman (1991: 110) indicates the exordium as the only phatic element of the Ciceronian oration whose “primary function […] is to establish and maintain the communication channel between the addresser and addressee”. However, it is not unlikely that in the strictly formal guidance for petitioning found in the manuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the phatic function of a letter from inferior to superior was not given priority or even much attention at all. One of the popular letter-writers in the early-nineteenth century, Cooke’s (1801: 178) Universal letterwriter, stated: “As the very word Petition implies a want, the language of Petitions should be at once the most humble and respectful imaginable” and emphasised the polite aspects of the layout of “the introductory superscription and address”. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 279 In his manual, Cooke did not directly address the need to “break the ice” in initial epistolary encounters, nor gave any speciic advice on the matter. Moreover, relecting on the model letters presented in a separate part devoted to petitioning, called the “Universal Petitioner”, the author emphasised: “he Petitions are drawn up in such a plain and easy manner, that nothing more is required than to transcribe them” (Cooke 1801: iv). he model proposed by Cooke was fully ixed and allowed little space for creativity (see Włodarczyk 2013a: 57–8 for details of this “traditional” model of petition). Still, the practice of petitioning shows that contemporary correspondents were inclined to go beyond the “transcription” of the ready-made examples. For example, a collection of Essex pauper letters written in response to the Poor Laws in the eighteenth- and nineteenth century edited and analysed by Sokoll problematises the impact of manuals on the epistolary practices of the poor: “[i]t cannot be emphasised enough that in stylistic terms and from their scriptural gesture, most pauper letters do not normally follow the contemporary model of the formal petition” (Sokoll 2006: 103). Earlier on, Sokoll (2006: 101) presents an example of a formal petition drawn from Cooke’s manual, and states that petitions following this model are only occasionally found among pauper letters from the period (cf. the webpage London lives; for example, the petition by Mary Nason GLDBPRH308000015). Similar petitions also occur in the material analysed here, but are clearly marginal (Włodarczyk 2013a: 58–9). he relatively rare instances of emulating the formal petition model may be related to the general tendency towards informality emerging in eighteenth-century letter-writing practices (Sairio and Nevala 2013). All in all, the above shows that although the popularity of manuals and formularies may be indubitable, their actual inluence on the practice of petitioning is not. Finally, little explicit guidance may be found in the Late Modern English manuals on the ways to handle contact initiation in the letters of petition. 3.2 William Aldred’s double initiation his section illustrates the complexity of initiating contact in institutional communication in the early-nineteenth century based on two letters written by the same informant. In 1819, Aldred writes letters of application to the Colonial Oice (Examples 1 and 2) on two separate occasions:5 5. Transcription conventions: \/ insertion from above; /\ instertion from below; s+ long <s>; // line break; | | inserted text (not encoder’s); {} crossed out; [] underlined; * illegible. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 280 Matylda Włodarczyk (1) Tottenham High Cros+s July 28 \th/ // Sir/ // 1819 // I have to acquaint you in Reply of your // agrement to the Cape that I do agre to all // the Conditions you have perposed but I should // wish to know how we are to be proived With // Tooles of Every discripsions to Cultivate the Land // With because the Money Advanced willnot // proived them for thare must be Sumthing to // subsist on till we can Make the {do it} Land do it // and I wish to know further Where the Money is // to be paid and if thare be any nese/\ty of Coming // to Town to have my Name Enterd on the Book // for my Mind is holy plased on a Imbarkshing // for the Cape // Sir I am your Humble // Servent W\m/ Aldred // Derect to W\m/ Aldred Tottenham High Cros+s // Middx // (CO 48/41/f33; Aldred, William) (2) | Rcd 23rd <August> | I take liberty of Righting to you // Respecting the advertisement I saw in the // paper Conserning giving Incorragement // for people to go to the Cape of Good hope // but I should Wish to have the particklers laid // Oute In a more plainer Deale. I am yours // W\m/ Aldred Tottenham Green {*} // Middlese{n}x // Derect to W\m/ Aldred // Tottenham High Cros+s Middlesex // (CO 48/41/f73; Aldred, William) he letters appear to be autographs, clearly written by the same hand.6 In both, the initial lines contain a reference to the government campaign and the information on emigration it released. Although the irst letter is longer and asks more detailed questions, both are designed to obtain some speciic information on the emigration scheme. However, one diference in the communicative function of the two letters is clear: the irst one expresses Aldred’s desire to join the plan (“for my Mind 6. I am quoting the letters as wholes, with the subscription included, to show other features which point to one the same author (e.g., “derect to”). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 281 is holy plased on a Imbarkshing for the Cape”), while the second one does not refer to his intentions explicitly. he two letters, moreover, appear unconnected: the one with the later date fails to refer to, or even hint at, the previous one: they both appear to be initiating contact with the institution, using diferent linguistic means to that end. he irst letter begins as a “Reply of your agrement”, where “agrement” may only be understood as the Colonial Oice circular letter on the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme published in newspapers in July 1819. In connection to the opening phrase “I have to acquaint you”, an epistolary formula in the Late Modern period (Włodarczyk 2013b; cf. Fairman 2007: 178), Aldred’s letter of July may be taken as a response to an earlier letter from the Colonial Oice, but such a letter is extremely unlikely to have existed. It is more feasible to read this as an attempt at personalising (see Landert 2013; Włodarczyk 2013c) the initial encounter with the institution. his would suggest that, not unlike in face-to-face communication, for William Aldred, initiating contact by means of an institutional letter involved some social awkwardness similar to that of initiating conversation (Wolfson 1983; see also Schneider 1988; Svennevig 1999). If so, the personalisation and individualisation of the irst letter may be read as a means to overcome this awkwardness (i.e., to break the ice). he second letter, however, undermines this interpretation: not only does it fail to build on the previous one, but it completely ignores the letter of reply from the Colonial Oice (the clerical note And suggests that a reply was sent to the irst of Aldred’s letters although it has not survived). As this brief discussion has shown, the two letters indicate the complexity involved in initiating institutional correspondence by British citizens in the early nineteenth-century. 3.3 Parameters of initiations Initiation is deined here as the beginning of the body of a letter by means of which a meaningful move/act is made.7 For example, in Aldred’s letters above (Examples 1 and 2), the initiation in both cases ends before but, where the next meaningful statement begins. As we have seen above, Aldred’s initiations involved a reference to the external world (i.e., the public announcements of the emigration plan). his indicates that a possibly useful criterion for analysing initiations is the direction of the reference that they make (see Svennevig 1999). In the classiication of initiations presented below, I use this criterion, or more speciically, the direction of referentiality. To that end, I follow Svennevig’s (1999: 23) distinction into “self-oriented, other-oriented and neutral initiations” based on his study into irst 7. See Peikola’s “introductory move” in the Salem petitions (2012: 109–10), which corresponds to Cooke’s “introductory subscription and address” and not to the initial part of the body of the letter. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 282 Matylda Włodarczyk conversations in present-day Swedish, the only comprehensive work that I know of to date that is devoted speciically to initiating contact between strangers. he distinction, in particular the one between self- and other-orientation, has been a familiar topic in pragmatics: Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory relies on it (Brown and Levinson 1987; but see also, for example, Held 1989) as it relects the so-called double bind of communication in general (i.e., the tensions between the needs of the ego and the alter in communication). Apart from that, I rely on the well-established classiications of requests, in particular developed in speech act theory at its interface with politeness theories (see, for example, Barron 2003: 35). Initiations which contain requests could also be classiied in terms of the self versus other distinction, but, as in the majority of cases they involve both the encoder and the addressee, the distinction does not appear to be useful (except want statements in G, below). Moreover, I draw on some criteria commonly applied in the analyses of formulae in historical correspondence (Austin 2004; Elspaß 2012). In the data analysed here, ive patterns which occur fairly commonly (Examples A to E) and three further patterns, which are less frequent (Examples F to H), may be discerned. he major recurrent features of initiations are: (A) External reference (other-orientated) I have tooke this Liberty // of writing to you as I ham Informed // that you want men to go to the Cape // of Good hope (CO 48/42/f667; Joseph Dison) (B) (I)+name (self-orientated) John Laws and His wife wishes // to Engage to go to the Cape of good // hope (CO 48/44/f272; John Laws) (C) Other type of self-reference/Petitioner/Writer/Servant (self-orientated) Your Petitioner Charles Leach // Is a native of England born in Reading (CO 48/44/f291; Charles Leach) (D) (Opening) formulae (other than requests) I hope your Lordship will Pardon this // Liberty I take in thus addres+sing you at // this moment (CO 48/41/f120; George Anderson) (E) Formulaic requests (conventionalised) I have the Honour to request that // your Lordship will do me the favour to inform // me (CO 48/41/f249; Alexander Biggar) © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 283 he minor recurrent features of initiations involve: (F) Information transmission (other-orientated) this \is/ To Let you know // that vere out of all maser // of Employ (CO 48/45/f507; John Ready) (G) Want statement (impositive) (self-oriented) Being desirous of becoming one of the intended // Colony at the Cape of Good Hope (CO 48/41/f47; James Ainge) (H) Propositional reference (neutral) In consequence of the alarming increase of pauperism // a Special Committee has been appointed by the Guardians of the // Poor (CO 48/42/f34; John Cawood) Strategies A, F and H foreground the importance of the external base of initiations – in particular by their use of verbs of perception and knowledge (hear, see, understand, inform). Interestingly, a sort of public or open referential space seems to be constructed here: I am informed, hearing and seeing are commonly found in initiations. Similar examples include: (3) Sir haveing Bing informed By // an advertsement in the newisepaper (CO 48/45/f472; George Ross) (4) Sir Haveing understood that you are // About to as+sist he Emmigration of Familys // To the Cape of Good hope, (CO 48/45/f90; William and John Procter) Clearly, the type of space created in this way is diferent from that in familiar letters (see Section 1), the latter being mostly about the physical world of interaction, the intimacy of the epistolary interlocutors and containing references to internal space or space that is in some way closed. he analysed institutional letters also seem to difer from everyday interaction, where references which are speciically addressee-orientated are typical for contact initiations by superiors to inferiors and do not occur if this relationship is reversed, according to Svennevig (1999: 23, 231–4). In the data analysed here, the power is normally on the side of the recipient, so it is striking to see both the other-orientated (A and F) and self-orientated initiations (B, C and G). Moreover, the two further major types of initiations presented above show a strong degree of formulaicity or conventionalisation (D and E). However, elaborate formulaic initiations do not occur, most probably, as these would delay the presentation of the purpose. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 284 Matylda Włodarczyk Many of the initiations analysed here are easily categorised in terms of the classiication proposed above; however, in some cases, several diferent strategies are found in a single initiation. his is especially true if the initiation is diicult to separate from the request (see Example 5). (5) On reading in the public Prints [A] // that it was in the contemplation of Government // to send out settlers to the Cape, and being // Informed [A] from M\r/ Vansittart that all // application on the subject, should be made // to your oice, I take the liberty to ofer // my self to your Lordships notice [D], I have // for some time felt an inclination to reside // in some British Settlement [G] , […] (CO 48/42/f14; homas Colling) his example shows that an attempt at a quantiication of the strategies is not always a straightforward task and it usually involves accepting only one among many strategies as the central one in a given initiation. In view of Example 5, I have followed the order of appearance: the very irst strategy was the basis for classiication. his simpliies the intricate pragmatic construction of initiations and letters in general, but is a necessary concession if our aim is to observe patterns. 3.4 Results In the analysis below, I focus on two aspects of the initiations in the analysed data. Firstly, I trace the distribution of the parameters of the initiations mentioned above against an evaluation system based on the features of the technical literacy of the informants. In the following Section (3.4.1), I present some insights into the macro-speech act, the central illocutionary point of the analysed letters, and its diferentiation based on the proposed literacy scales. 3.4.1 Initiations vs. technical literacy he results of the analysis show that almost 38 percent and about 36 percent of all initiations in both informant groups are based on an external reference (Type A) with the reference linked to the addressee (anaphora) being by far the most frequent type of initiation. Moreover, in such cases, letters oten begin as an answer to some previous communication, which, technically, did may not have taken place (see Aldred’s letter above, Example 1). Some other category scores, with relatively lower frequency are not strikingly diferent between the two groups, as the scores for the following categories show: C (personal reference), D (opening formulae), F (information transmission) and H (propositional reference). A clear diference © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 285 in distribution between the two groups may be observed for fairly infrequent categories, such as Type B initiation ((I)+name), which only occurred in one letter in the standard category (about 1.9 percent), and in eight letters in the non-standard category (about 17 percent). Requests expressed as want statements only occur in the standard category (ive letters). Joint scores for categories D and E, which relect formulaic initiations, account for a signiicant proportion of the letters analysed and show a substantial discrepancy between the two groups of informants: 38 percent of the standard initiations are formulaic versus only 18 percent of these occurring in the non-standard letters. In the case of formulaic initiations, usually both addressee and encoder references are involved, so the communication space is, thus, constructed to include both sides. Table 4. Initiation types versus literacy poles8 initiation type standard raw freq. A. External reference B. (I)+name non-standard percent raw freq. percent 20 37.73 17 36.17 1 1.89 8 17.02 C. Personal reference 6 11.32 8 17.02 D. (Opening) formulae 9 16.98 6 12.77 E. Formulaic request 10 18.87 3 6.38 F. Information transmission 1 1.89 3 6.38 G. Want statement 5 9.43 – 1 1.89 2 H. Propositional reference total 53 100 47 – 4.26 100 To sum up, the two types of initiations – that is, those based on external reference, usually involving the addressee, as opposed to those based on formulae (opening or request) – are almost equally common for the users exhibiting standard literacy (about 38 percent versus 36 percent), while the remaining categories of initiations account jointly for about one-quarter of all the initiations for the standard informants. For the users with non-standard literacies, initiations based on external reference account for nearly 38 percent of all cases. Types B and C – personal reference based-initiations, including the I-reference – account for about 34 percent in the non-standard pool, with the remaining c. 30 percent of initiations distributed among the remaining fairly infrequent categories. he most striking diferences between the two groups of informants occur for the formulaic categories (Types 8. I have not assessed statistical signiicance here as a plausible signiicance test; chi square, for instance, tends to yield inaccurate inferences if sample sizes are small (e.g., Healey 2010: 268). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 286 Matylda Włodarczyk D and E; about 36 percent in the standard versus about 19 percent in the nonstandard group), and for the personal-reference reference categories which are not addressee-orientated (Types B and C; about 13 percent in the standard versus about 34 percent in the non-standard group). 3.5 Literacy versus macro speech act As I have noted above (Section 3.1), viewed in a genre perspective, the analysed data may be described as petitions, as their central illocutionary point is constituted by an institutional request (Example 6). However, in many letters, the overall purpose of the message is realised also by means of two other pragmatic acts: that of seeking information (Example 7) and that of an ofer (Example 8). (6) your peticioners // wood wish to Get the Liberty of Gowing with // their families out there as the wood wish to // Earn bre/a\d for them (CO 48/44/f104; Christopher Irwin) (7) whe wish to Knowen // Wat Conditions it Is on that you // wish for us to go as whe shall // Be Reddy on the Earliest notis+s // (8) I beg leave to ofer my Services / to the said Hon’ble Government (CO 48/42/f667; Joseph Dison) (CO 48/45/f124; J. Price) he underlying illocutionary aim of the analysed letters, the request, may be backgrounded, if other surface realisations such as these are present, but it nevertheless remains the chief illocutionary point of the petition. In particular, the last type of request realisation is interesting: it may also be interpreted as a disguised appeal for participation in the scheme in which the pragmatic roles of the petitioner (who has something to gain) versus the institution (who has the power to grant the request) seem to be reversed: it is the addressee who appears to be the potential beneiciary of the ofer, not the petitioner. he distribution of the three speciic types of speech acts in the two groups of informants is presented in Table 5. he speech act strategies seem to be sensitive to the literacy levels of the informants. he standard group shows a greater diferentiation, into three types of speech acts, with request and seeking information showing similar distributions. he ofer strategy is found in 13 percent of the standard letters and is not present in the non-standard letters at all. In the latter group, request accounts for 68 percent of all the letters while only 32 percent seek information (the latter score being similar to that in the standard set, i.e., 38 percent). © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 287 Table 5. Macro speech act versus literacy levels standard Illocutionary point non-standard raw freq. percent raw freq. percent Request 26 49 32 68 Seeking information 21 38 15 32 6 13 – – 53 100 47 100 Ofer (disguised request) total 4. Discussion he analysis of the initiations presented above may be interpreted against the indings of studies into the use of formulae and personal reference in historical letters. When it comes to the use of formulae, Beetz (1999), for instance, has shown that in Early Modern German, upper-class letters tended to be more ceremonial than letters from other informants. Bax (2010) has shown evidence for a similar elaborate and wordy type of epistolary politeness in eighteenth-century Dutch. Performative structures, which characterise epistolary formulae, were previously found to occur more frequently in low class and women’s letters in English and Dutch letters of the Early and Late Modern periods (Austin 2004; Rutten and van der Wal 2012). For Finnish letters in the nineteenth-century, Laitinen and Nordlund (2012) have shown that archaic usage, oten involving the use of formulae which the authors traced speciically to the administrative oral genres, is typical of lower-order informants. his is in line with the indings of Elspaß (2007) who has also linked the functions of formulae in this group of informants to the usability of the readymade lexicalised phrases as the so-called Formulierungshilfe. Włodarczyk (2015) has shown that for an upper-class informant, formulae do not survive corrections when such a person is drating a reply in a highly risky communicative situation. All in all, research has connected the frequent use of formulae more to the lowerorder informants, whose experience with letter-writing does not seem to be extensive; but most of the studies referred to above focused on the familiar letter. In the analysis of institutional correspondence presented in this paper, formulae use in contact initiations is signiicantly more frequent for the users whose levels of technical literacy are fairly high. As literacy levels may be taken to indicate systematic education and extensive experience with letter-writing, the encoders who show standard technical literacy are more likely to represent the upper- and middle classes rather than the lower orders of society. How then can the fairly frequent use of formulae in the opening of the letter and the request by the standard users and the infrequent use of the same by the users with non-standard literacy be explained? Clearly, institutional correspondence © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 288 Matylda Włodarczyk presents patterns of use that are diferent from the patterns commonly found in private letters. he use of formulae by the petitioners with high levels of technical literacy in the analysed letters may be related to their perceptions of institutional letters as routinised and based on speciic conventions, which in turn responds to the addressee’s expectations. he signiicance of both conventions and addressee expectations seems to be of great import for the success of the involved request, so the awareness and mastery of these may be an advantage that standard users have over the less literate writers. Another explanation may be that the initial contact situation constrains the experienced letter writers in their creative attempts, while the conventional is more important in institutional exchange when irst impressions are built than in serial correspondence of this kind. As for the less literate users, they are also likely to acknowledge the existence of the conventions, but their experience in addressing institutions may have been too limited to enable them to model their linguistic expression on routines. Besides, as the hypothesis formulated in Section 1 has predicted, the users who struggle over technical literacy are more likely to process their composition on the level of wording and transfer from speech to writing, and may hence fall short of evaluating it on the level of social norms and adequacy. As a consequence, in the concise genre of the institutional letter of request, these users appear to stick more to the point (hence the frequency of self-reference) – in other words, they focus more on the immediate aim of the initial letter: the presentation of the self (I-reference initiation and third-person reference initiation, e.g., Your petitioner) than on the overall social and institutional framework of interaction, where the importance of the established norm is greater. Example 9 is from a non-standard user. (9) I John Bourn bricklayer have // s+erved in the Royal artillery ive // years faithfully and honestly as my // Discharge will Certify May your // Lordship be pleased to grant me a // passage to the Cape as a Settler in // that country I have a wife and // three Children my age 31 // (CO 48/41/f465; John Bourn) Overall, the analysis above has shown that over one-third of the initiations in irsttimer petitions seem to be constructed within an external, open and oten public space in which a connection between the encoder and the addressee is built. he access to the addressee is thus gained through a commonly available channel, not in an individual, privileged or exclusive way. his strategy difers strikingly from that commonly used in personal letters, where intimate, closed or private space is constructed. Initiations by means of formulae, which are as frequent for the standard © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 289 users as the externally based ones (i.e., the irst, fairly frequent category), account only for about one-ith of the non-standard category, as discussed in more detail above. hese do not seem to function as a means of constructing a well-deined space of interaction to the same extent that the externally based initiations do. In terms of the direction of reference, conventionally, the formulae include both the encoder and the addressee, but they seem to function more as indicators of the writers’ awareness of social norms and institutional demands. Moreover, for the users with low literacy, one-third of the initiations are exclusively encoder-orientated (see the examples above). High incidences of self-reference are also common in personal letters in general (e.g., Palander-Collin 2009), which shows that the less literate encoders may simply have transferred patterns from this form of writing, if they have any experience in this respect, or even from everyday interaction. Alternatively, as I have suggested above, it is also likely that foregrounding the self in initiations gives the petitioners an opportunity of an immediate realisation of their intention (i.e., presenting themselves and their case to the institution). All in all, the proposed distinctions in literacy seem to have a bearing on the shape of the initiations in the data. here are some common points, but the diferent distributions of the individual features of the initiations, both the common and the less frequent ones, show diferent preferences of the two groups of informants who represent the two literacy types. 5. Conclusions William Aldred’s letters presented in full in Section 3 indicate that an analysis of contact initiations in institutional correspondence presents some diiculties. Is initiating contact similar to face-to-face interaction, where ice needs to be broken, as Aldred’s irst letter suggests, or is it routinised to such an extent that it does not pose any particular risks for encoders, as Aldred’s repeated initiation in the second letter shows? he analysis of one-hundred letters of application for the Cape of Good Hope colonisation scheme presented above has provided evidence for both interpretations. On the one hand, some repetitive patterns were discerned, in particular with respect to the type of space built in the initiations and the involved participation framework, which appear to difer substantially from personal letters. Externally based initiations, and the initiations which foreground the encoder, show that in institutional communication, the need for creating an individual relationship with the addressee is not of primary signiicance. he petitioners, in particular in the non-standard group, seem to be more focused on making a concise self-presentation than on fuliling the needs of the addressee, or on the personalisation of the connection between themselves and the target. On the other hand, a substantial share of the initiations in the standard group are formulaic and seem © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 290 Matylda Włodarczyk to be determined by the conventional constraints of institutional communication. Supericially, this type of initiation involves both self and addressee-orientated reference, but as this is realised chiely through linguistic freezes, it would be hard to read as a genuine attempt to create bonds with the addressee. All in all, the informants do not seem to express linguistic involvement and may not even be thinking about a real person as the target of their communication. his clearly shows that the degree of routinisation in this type of letter is fairly high. Still, if we take into account the surface realisation of the illocutionary point of the analysed petitions, the standard users show a degree of creativity: apart from requests and seeking information, a small group of informants also realise the central illocutionary point of the petition as an ofer. his is a clever pragmatic strategy that very subtly interferes with the power relations that are characteristic of this type of exchange. Needless to say, the size of the samples, as well as space restrictions, do not allow addressing all the questions that loom large in the background, such as: How much marking of social relationships do we ind in initiations? Is contact initiated in relation to the need for phatic communion? Does initiation in institutional correspondence work like in other types of communication at all? Some evidence of the responses of the Colonial Oice, which cannot be discussed here in greater detail, shows that, in general, the linguistic element, and in particular the other-orientated politeness, might have been largely redundant in terms of the perlocutionary efect, as even the most minimal applications were answered and manual labourers seem to have had a similar chance of receiving a reply to their applications as lawyers, doctors and high-rank army members.9 his suggests that in the samples of institutional correspondence analysed here, some norms of communication might have actually been suspended, while responses to the minimal letters constitute evidence for the importance of the act versus that of its linguistic realisation. he fact that oicial procedures of the Colonial Oice were not linked to the overall “polite” component of the application letters is, however, diicult to relate to the contemporary gentlemanly code of conduct, which guided the internal correspondence of this institution (see Włodarczyk 2013b) and was very much about the encoding of the social and institutional hierarchy. Finally, in reference to the hypothesis posed at the beginning of this paper (Section 1), the analysis has shown that initiations in institutional communication are dependent on the users’ literacy levels evaluated against the selected features of 9. An example of a minimal application: 5\th/ 1819 // Ro\bt/ Mallum // Taylor // Rezidence N\o/ 20 // *ins gardens Bromtton // A Single man Aged 24 years // © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved (CO 48/44_f565; Robert Mallum) Initiating contact in institutional correspondence 291 spelling, punctuation and morphosyntax. he speciic method of capturing some aspects of linguistic variation was applied in this paper because the social variables of the informants were diicult to retrieve, or cannot have been considered reliable. he evaluation scores are clearly just one way of approaching variation in manuscript data, and the scheme proposed here is open to modiication and extension, depending on the research questions and the nature of the analysed historical material. he social and pragmatic determinants behind linguistic data may obviously be retrieved by means of other methodologies, but the important aspect of the approach advocated above is that it emphasises the inextricable link between the two aspects of linguistic variation. he (socio)pragmatic perspective on the historical epistolary genre of petition involves the sociocultural setting of interaction, viewed in the medial perspective of the genre (see Culpeper 2009), as well as a range of linguistic features, viewed in a micro perspective of each letter. his seems to generate an “added value” compared to a purely sociolinguistic perspective, which is usually applied to the study of internal variables. Overall, the methodology adopted here allows for proposing a speciic participation framework for institutional correspondence in the nineteenth century focusing on the ordinary citizens and involving the linguistic relections of their pragmatic, genrerelated and technical competences (i.e., literacies). Such a perspective does not view individual competences as frozen and constant; on the contrary, for the users with nonstandard literacies in particular, it involves scope for change, and the acquisition of new skills and learning (Włodarczyk 2013c). he method presented here was designed speciically to capture aspects of language variation in the sources of evidence which have emerged in English historical linguistics recently, such as the broadly understood data “from below”. 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Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/pbns.235.06wlo Włodarczyk, Matylda. 2014. “Literacies on the Move to the Cape Colony: he 1820 Settler Database”. Unpublished conference paper presented at Mobility, Variability and Changing Literacies in Modern Times. June 2014. Utrecht. Włodarczyk, Matylda. 2015. “Nineteenth-Century Institutional (Im)Politeness: Responses of the Colonial Oice to Letters from William Parker, 1820 settler”. In Marina Dossena (ed.), Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English, 153–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Włodarczyk, Matylda. 2016. Genre and Literacies: Historical (Socio)pragmatics of the 1820 Settler Petition. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM. Wolfson, Nessa. 1983. Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House. Author’s address Matylda Włodarczyk Faculty of English Adam Mickiewicz University Al. Niepodległości 4 61–874 Poznań Poland wmatylda@wa.amu.edu.pl Biographical notes Matylda Włodarczyk is assistant professor in the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She has worked on the pragmatics of reported speech in Early Modern English and early nineteenth-century correspondence. She has recently published a monograph on the Late Modern petition letters viewed from the perspective of genre and literacies. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved