The Letter: Metacommunicative Features in Colonial Correspondence

Abstract

This chapter compares official/colonial internal correspondence over hundred years apart in order to investigate what they reveal about the metacommunicative features found in the internal correspondence between two colonial offices: the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and the other, the Mayor’s office in Liverpool one hundred years later. Official correspondence during World War I has not been studied from a linguistic perspective although official correspondence by the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope has been studied extensively by (Wlodarczyk in Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49:399–428, 2013). It is this work that was the impetus for this chapter. The study will compare the metacommunicative features in the two data sets using corpus methods, particularly keywords, frequency, concordancing and N-grams. The data will be analysed using AntConc (Anthony in AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software], Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, 2009) and WMatrix (Rayson in Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Computing Department, Lancaster University, 2009). The results suggest that there are similarities in the practice of letter writing over the different time periods but that the linguistic practices associated with the two colonial offices seem to differ because of the difference in the audience and the purpose of the communication undertaken. The language used by the clerks of the Cape Colony appears to be more formal and to use a wider linguistic repertoire of words, whereas fewer words to do with letter writing practices are used by clerks in the Liverpool Mayoral Office.

The framework for this chapter including terms and headings belong to Wlodarczyk (2013) and is used with permission from Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton.