In the first phase, the corpus of conduct books (CoBooCat) will be compiled, with the aim of gathering three sub-corpora from the periods 1835–1855, 1875–1895 and 1915–1935 that are as complete as possible. After transcription and annotation, the corpus will be analysed from various perspectives, summarised in the following bullet points that also indicate the main research area:

Historical politeness and socio-pragmatics

  • Speech acts: Conduct books provide valuable data about courtesy and speech acts from the period under study. Nevertheless, the encoded acts such as requesting need to be contrasted with data from other text types, accessible for example via CORDE, in order to determine to which extent, they are adhered in general usage. 
  • Conversational norms: Many conduct books set out the standards for polite conversation. These are described in general terms or specifically for conversation at the table.
  • Mitigation: Polite speech is associated with the use of certain propositional procedures (syntactical and lexical-semantic means), on the one hand, and modalities, on the other.
  • Address forms and formulae: In the context of a hierarchically organised society, conduct books provide for three situations: the expected verbal behaviour towards subordinates, peers, and superiors. Often honorific titles are also listed.

History of translation: For the 19th and the early 20th century, conduct books and educational treatises were translated from French, Italian and English and had a major influence on the national market.

Historical gender studies: In line with the greater involvement of girls and women in the education system and the development of special textbooks, the project is also seeking a link to historical gender studies.

History of text genres

  • Politeness-related vocabulary and collocations: Works on politeness-related vocabulary in Spanish cover the period up to the end of the 18th century. The analysis of the data provided by the corpus CoBooCat therefore aims to complete our knowledge of the word history of urbanidad and related terms in Spanish and will provide a first insight into Catalan.