Impoliteness in non-literary Seventeenth-Century english texts written by women

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore expressions of impoliteness in non-literary texts written by women in the seventeenth century. Texts published between 1612 and 1699 will form our corpus of texts. These texts have been downloaded in their facsimile form as found in the EEBO collection. Manual analyses have been performed in order to identify and tag cases of impolite speech, as defined in Culpeper (2011). Albeit unusual, expressions of contempt have been detected in books by women in the field of midwifery, as put forward in Alonso-Almeida and Mele-Marrero (2014), and these seem to indicate authorial affectivity concerning gynecological works by males to ultimately claim a territory felt to naturally belong to females. In our paper, we are not actually focusing on value-laden words denoting lack of courtesy in the evaluation, say, of the other writers’ published works or theoretical approaches. We are interested in grammatical devices, either epistemic or effective, whose primary pragmatic function is to communicate impoliteness behaviour in discourse. Conclusions deal with an account of the situated impoliteness strategies used by women in the texts selected.