Evaluative matrices and impoliteness in the corpus of women’s instructive texts in English (1800-1899)

Abstract

This presentation deals with the study of the matrices introducing that-clauses in a corpus of instructional texts written by women, i.e., the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (1800-1899), COWITE19. These matrices can show various aspects relating to the authors’ assessment, involvement, and understanding of the information framed by these matrices. The corpus is made up entirely of instructional texts, especially recipes. Women’s legitimatising voice may become evident in these evaluative matrices, as they can convey a series of interpersonal meanings that may clearly signal their experience and good command of the knowledge that is told. The texts used in this study are markedly authoritative due to their didactic nature, and so the boundary between deontic modulation and imposition may be a fuzzy one in these texts. This contribution therefore aims to find out whether these matrices can indeed function as impoliteness devices and what contextual elements help to safely identify this pragmatic function of matrices. For the analysis, I will follow Kádár & Culpeper (2010), Culpeper (2011), and Leech (2014), among others, for the notion and categories of impoliteness.