Promoting negative politeness in nineteenth-century England The case of letter-writing manuals

In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.