Letters are often more colloquial in style than other text types, and scholars investigating historical varieties of languages have, therefore, often favoured them. However, these texts were never designed for linguistic studies and have certain methodological and theoretical limitations. In Orality in written texts, Amador-Moreno uses material collected in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) to argue that private correspondence can be considered legitimate data for language studies by looking at how speech-like features are recorded in letters written by Irish emigrants and their families. For that endeavour, she presents a historical (socio)pragmatic study of discourse-pragmatic, deictic, and morphosyntactic features in early Irish English (1700s–1900s).
The book consists of seven chapters, each supplied with an independent reference list. Chapter 1 starts by establishing the field of historical (socio)pragmatics through carefully disentangling the different disciplines that overlap with, and have influenced, this field. Amador-Moreno further gives a detailed overview of letter studies, both with regard to regional and diachronic corpora (including CORIECOR) and addresses the advantages and challenges of working with this material. Chapter 2 discusses various topics related to Irish emigration that are important to contextualise the letter data—for example, literacy, the shift from Irish to English, or ethnic and social backgrounds of the letter writers—and always acknowledges the implications for CORIECOR. Chapter 3 turns to the speech-like nature of emigrant letters, which, as exemplified in ‘I fancy I am speaking to you verbaly while I am writing this scroll to you’ (70), was often implied by the writers themselves. The succeeding three chapters present empirical case studies that further ‘explore the degree of orality encapsulated in private correspondence’ (3) through skilfully mixing quantitative and qualitative methods. Using a historical pragmatic approach, chapter 4 focuses on the discourse-pragmatic markers anyhow/anyway, like, sure, and so, which contributed to maintaining a ‘social interactiveness’ (125) between the correspondents across time and space. Chapter 5 supplements historical interpretations of Irish emigration with linguistic facts through combining corpus-analytic tools with historical discourse analysis and investigating how deictic forms (determiners, adverbs, and pronouns) can signal distance from, or belonging to, either Ireland or the host country. Chapter 6 takes a more variational perspective and discusses the influence of, for example, education and literacy on embedded inversion in interrogatives. Any reader still left with questions will find a concise summary of the chapters and their relevance for the discussion of orality in written texts in chapter 7.
What clearly distinguishes this book from most scholarly works I have read is the innovative cross-disciplinary perspective, the rich reference to relevant literature in every chapter, and the illustrative use of examples, not only from the letters, but from poems, ballads, novels, paintings, or even modern commercial advertisements. The combination of different historical contexts, various theoretical and methodological approaches, and the application of these in linguistic case studies makes this volume appealing to a broad audience—from student to professor, from social historian to historical (socio)linguist, or discourse analyst, to name just a few.
