Colliers, farmers, strikers. The discussion of work-related themes in Late Modern Scottish letters and diaries

Abstract

In business discourse, the discussion of work relations is a very interesting branch of study, especially when it refers to contexts that are relatively distant in time and/or space. In this respect, emigrants’ letters and diaries are as invaluable sources of information today as they were when they were written. In this paper I intend to concentrate on nineteenth-century documents and focus on three main issues: the state of the job market, cases of conflict and negotiations, and the narration of accidents or other extraordinary events. The aim is to highlight the main linguistic strategies employed to convey meaning, in order to assess what topics were given prominence, and how they were narrated and evaluated. Data will be drawn from a corpus currently in preparation at the University of Bergamo; while its size does not allow quantitative findings to be offered yet, it is believed that qualitative observations on these unique materials may help shed useful light on the phenomena under discussion.

Keywords

• Nineteenth-century correspondence
• Late Modern English
• labour discourse
• evaluative language
• emigrants’ letters