Speaking to their audiences: a sociohistorical linguistic look at interactional language and women's novels, France and England, 1670-1770

"Using principles mainly from interactional sociolinguistics and sociohistorical linguistics, this study has examined fourteen epistolary novels by French and English women, from 1670 to 1770, for language that 'speaks to' audiences in an interactional way. A primary objective was to investigate whether women's novels specifically foster relationships via language use. Five categories of such interactional language emerged: Addressing Audiences with T/V Personal Pronouns, Omission of Openings and Closings in the Letters, Activating Common Ground, Signalling Storytelling, and Invitations to Engage. While the first two categories suggest distinctions between usage in the French and English works, the last three shift the focus to the question of audience position. This shift highlights that the 'participants' in these 'conversations' are engaged not only in the narrator-to-audience and character-to-character relationships identified by Halliday as occurring in fiction, but also in a blended audience position that may allow the external reading audience to 'adopt the mantle' of letter recipient or to otherwise share the letter recipient's 'relationship' with the stories. Not all of the novels offer this third relationship. Some of the novels firmly position the external reading audience as 'outsider', not only to the stories but also to the relationships depicted in them. This finding reflects an apparent development in the genre of epistolary novel, one that codifies distinctions between this genre and that of simply writing letters that are not entirely 'real'. In turn, these findings led not only to links with Bakhtin's theory of the multi-languaged novel but also Habermas' theory regarding the private and public spheres in the period. In fact, this approach to the interactional language of novels may allow pathways to operationalize further research in those directions, and to consider whether there are differences between the relationships fostered via language in novels by women and men." -- Abstract.