The familiar letter in early modern English : a pragmatic approach / Susan M. Fitzmaurice.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-252) and index.

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English; Editorial page; Title page; LCC data; Table of contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1: The pragmatics of epistolary conversation; Chapter 2: Context and the linguistic construction of epistolary worlds; Chapter 3: Making and reading epistolary meaning; Chapter 4: Sociable letters, acts of advice and medical counsel; Chapter 5: Epistolary acts of seeking and dispensing patronage; Chapter 6: Intersubjectivity and the writing of the epistolary interlocutor; Chapter 7: Relevance and the consequences of unintended epistolary meanings.

This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis dem.

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