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The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853- 1982: the Development and Analysis of Archival Language Resources

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The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853- 1982: The development and analysis of archival language resources Morton, R. Submitted version deposited in Coventry University’s Institutional Repository Original citation: Morton, R. (2016) The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853-1982: The development and analysis of archival language resources. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Coventry: Coventry University Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Some materials have been removed from this thesis due to third party. Pages where material has been removed are clearly marked in the electronic version. The unabridged version of the thesis can be viewed at the Lanchester Library, Coventry University. The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853-1982: The development and analysis of archival language resources RALPH MORTON Thesis presented to the Graduate School of Coventry University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in CORPUS AND HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS COVENTRY UNIVERSITY MAY 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research couldn’t have happened without the support of lots of people. Firstly I’d like to thank the New Connections project partners at The National Archives and the BT Archives. Siân Wynn-Jones and David Hay at BT in particular have been very helpful in providing information about their collections and archives in general. Many thanks to Hilary Nesi, Emma Moreton, and Sheena Gardner for giving me the opportunity to conduct this research in the first place, and for their subsequent supervision and guidance. I was very lucky to have such a strong team supporting me and I very much hope we get the chance to continue working together. I would also like to thank Ramesh Krishnamurthy, whose infectious enthusiasm for corpus linguistics is one of the main reasons I became (and remain) interested in this field of research. Special thanks to Angela Morton and Andrew Morton for many years of love and support. Finally, a massive thank you to Katie Hall who put up with me patiently for the four years it took to complete this study, helped piece my thoughts back together when they were scattered, and is all round a wonderful person. Thanks to all. ii ABSTRACT This thesis reports on the construction and analysis of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of business letters taken from the archives of British Telecom. The letters in the corpus cover the years 1853-1982. This is a crucial period in the development of business correspondence but is so far underrepresented in available historical corpora. This research contributes knowledge in two main areas. Firstly, a number of methodological issues are highlighted with regard to working with public archives to produce linguistic resources. The way in which archives are typically organised, particularly the lack of item-level metadata, presents a number of challenges in terms of locating relevant material and extracting the sort of metadata that is necessary for linguistic analysis. In this thesis I outline the approach that was taken in identifying and digitising the letters for the BTCC, the issues encountered, and the implications future projects that make use of public archives as a source of linguistic material. Secondly this study contributes new insights into the development of English business correspondence from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The results show a notable decline in overtly deferential language and an increase in familiar forms. However, these more familiar forms also appear in fixed-phrases and conventional patterns. This suggests that there was a move from formalised distance to formalised friendliness in the language of business correspondence in this period. We also see a shift away from the performance of institutional identity through phrases such as ‘I am directed by…’ towards an increased use of the pronoun ‘we’ to represent corporate positions. This shift in corporate identity seems to coincide with the decline in deferential language. Finally an analysis of moves and strategies used in requests suggests that, as the twentieth century progressed, authors began to use a wider range moves to contextualise and justify their requests. Furthermore, though the same request strategy types remain popular over the timeline of the BTCC, there a degree of diversification in terms of how the most popular request strategies are expressed and indirect strategies that rely more on implicature become somewhat more prevalent. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents 1. Chapter 1 - Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1. Project background ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1.1. The BT Archives ..................................................................................................... 1 1.1.2. New Connections ................................................................................................... 1 1.2. The current study .......................................................................................................... 2 2. Chapter 2 - Literature review ................................................................................................ 4 2.1. Aims and Structure of the Chapter ............................................................................... 4 2.2. The development and content of historical and letter corpora ................................... 4 2.2.1. Digital Letter Collections ....................................................................................... 4 2.2.2. Historical corpora .................................................................................................. 5 2.2.3. Contemporary Letter Corpora ............................................................................. 11 2.2.4. Historical-contemporary gap............................................................................... 12 2.3. Studies of patterns in general language change since the 19th century ..................... 13 2.3.1. Nineteenth Century Language Change ............................................................... 13 2.3.2. Twentieth Century Language Change ................................................................. 16 2.4. Previous Studies of language change in letter writing practice. ................................. 19 2.4.1. Historical Personal correspondence.................................................................... 19 2.4.2. Historical Business correspondence .................................................................... 25 2.4.3. Historical Personal-Business correspondence comparison ................................ 28 2.4.4. Contemporary correspondence .......................................................................... 30 2.4.5. Post-Business Letter Era ...................................................................................... 33 2.5. Previous studies of letter writing guidance ................................................................ 34 2.6. Research Questions ..................................................................................................... 38 3. Chapter 3 – Methodology and Data .................................................................................... 40 3.1. Aims and structure of the chapter .............................................................................. 40 3.2. Overview of corpora .................................................................................................... 41 3.3. Overview of corpus analysis ........................................................................................ 45 3.4. Methods of measuring language change .................................................................... 47 3.5. Methods of analysis .................................................................................................... 49 iv 3.5.1. Letter Writing Manuals (to answer RQ1 - What can be added to our knowledge of letter writing conventions by analysing three letter writing manuals contemporary with the period represented in the BTCC?) ................................................................................. 49 3.5.2. Formal Features (to answer RQ2 - How does practice in the BTCC correspond to advice given in letter writing manuals of the relevant period?) ......................................... 50 3.5.3. Corpus techniques (to answer RQ3 - What are some of the linguistic features of the correspondence in the BTCC that can be identified using corpus analysis, and in what respects do these change over time?) ................................................................................ 51 3.5.4. Qualitative analysis of individual request letters (to answer RQ4 -How are requests characterised in the corpus?) ............................................................................... 55 3.6. Methods of corpus creation ........................................................................................ 59 3.6.1. The British Telecom Correspondence Corpus ....................................................
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