Changing styles of letter-writing? Evidence from 400 years of early English letters in a POS-tagged corpus

Abstract

We analyse the social embedding of stylistic change in the frequencies of nouns, lexical verbs and personal pronouns in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Our visualization methods show that the frequency of nouns exhibits a consistent decrease, while that of verbs and pronouns tends to increase over time. This suggests a colloquialization of the letter genre, which is particularly prominent in letters by women and the upper ranks as well as those written to socially close recipients. In the later eighteenth century, however, there is a convergence across genders and social ranks indicating the development of a shared, polite style among the increasingly highly educated middle and upper classes in the corpus.