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Abstract
This article provides an initial approach to historical (im)politeness strategies in the context of letter writing. It uses a sub-corpus of coriecor which contains letters written by Irish immigrants that relocated to the US and their intimates. The article focusses on reproaches (Albelda Marco 2023; Tulimirović 2023) and it applies Archer’s (2017) model to all instances of this speech act extracted from the data. This results in two different sub-corpora, one containing what is here defined as “Face Enhancing Reproaches” (fer) and “Face Aggravating Reproaches” (far). These two sub-corpora are contrasted through the Sketch Engine software and the most predominant lemmas in fer (still, before, what, your, account, home, uneasy, dear, like and wish) are analysed and discussed in relation to their function for (im)politeness purposes. This article sheds light on the face-enhancing value of these linguistic items to encode this speech act within the specific context in question.
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