Language and letters of the Bluestocking network : sociolinguistic issues in eighteenth-century epistolary English

This volume presents linguistic research on forty years’ worth of correspondence between Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) and her Bluestocking friends and family members, and insights into language change and variation at an historical micro level. This epistolary language use is investigated using the methods and frameworks of corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, and social network analysis. The studies range from the reconstruction and analysis of Elizabeth Montagu’s most prominent social networks to the analysis of changing morphosyntactic features and spelling variation in Montagu’s correpondence with her network members.