Polite speaking through conduct book
Polite speaking through conduct books, published in Catalonia (1800-1936) (CoBooCat)
The main aim of the project is to make a fundamental contribution to the history of linguistic interaction in modern times based on a corpus of conduct books published in Catalonia from 1800 to 1936 (CoBooCat).
Conduct books are a highly stereotyped text genre which responds to the sociopolitical and educational necessities of the Spanish society in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. They encode polite verbal and nonverbal behaviour in central communicative situations or social spaces such as visiting, meetings, school, church, etc. Polite verbal behaviour prescribed in them focuses on speech acts, conversational norms, mitigation strategies, and address forms and formulae. The stereotyped aspect is visible in the typical politeness-related vocabulary and collocations.
Given the societal transition in the 19th and 20th century towards a more egalitarian and individualistic society, we would expect language use to reflect this. Conduct books, however, were published with the aim of preserving and passing on traditional behaviour and thus also traditional language models. They were usually intended for the (lower and higher) middle class and upper working class, mostly with the aim of enabling social advancement. In the transitional period under study, we therefore assume there to be traces of resilience of the previous aristocratic and collectivist model, which we expect to detect in these prescriptive textbooks.
Ayuda PID2024-156825NB-I00/MICIU/
