Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers

这个雄心勃勃的项目利用一个几乎未被触及的档案来回答有关乔治亚时期英格兰的阅读、写信和日常语言以及社交网络对这些重要文化实践的贡献的重要问题。一个来自语言、历史和文学研究领域的多学科小组将以创新的方式解决问题，并结合有助于当前广泛研究领域的学术辩论的方法。它将为这一时期的英国社会文化带来新的曙光，并将通过探索一个引人注目但相对鲜为人知的档案，帮助推出令人兴奋的汉密尔顿研究的新流派，目前分散在英国和美国的11家图书馆。我们将利用这些论文来探索四个相关的研究问题，这些问题涉及阅读、写信、语言练习和社会网络在乔治亚时代英国的作用。(I)我们的研究始于这样一个前提，即社交网络对维持和改变语言和文化行为至关重要，这一前提在各个学科领域日益重要。在构建了作者、收信人和报纸上提到的其他人的个人资料后，我们将绘制玛丽·汉密尔顿所属的所有社交网络的地图。这篇文章随后将对社交网络成员在阅读习惯、书信写作和语法结构等不同领域的运作和影响进行开创性的比较，我们将进行更专门的调查。(Ii)我们将对档案中提到的阅读习惯进行全面分析，确定阅读习惯的传播、接收和反应模式是否与文本的体裁或作者的阶级/性别/感知特征一致。我们将在整个过程中区分印刷和手稿文本。这一线索将有助于我们对18世纪正典形成的理解。(3)在格鲁吉亚晚期，礼貌不仅作为一种社会文化现象，而且在语言使用中具有核心重要性。将从几个角度审查这些对应关系，以追踪对历史语法和书信手册中规范性规则使用的影响。我们将分析性别和社会地位，包括社交网络关系，如何影响称呼的形式，从而有助于挽回面子的战略。这一系列研究将大大增加我们对现代英语晚期历史中的社会语言学和社会语用学因素的了解，以及语言标准化的历史。(Iv)汉密尔顿的论文涵盖了英语动词结构历史上的一个关键时期，特别是作为助词的be的用法变化，例如失去了Your Being Look Well和出现了be be，这是许多重大但相对被忽视的助词系统调整的两个症状。我们将对社会网络和个人一生中的变化进程进行细粒度的分析，从而更好地了解那个时期的语言、英语的历史和语言变化的一般机制。这四个研究分支中的每一个都将产生和利用自己的系统实例数据库。这些数据库的基本基础是玛丽·汉密尔顿论文的一个版本，它是可靠的，可以搜索文本、名称、概念和词性。因此，该项目的一个有价值的额外产品将是一份完整的、学术的、可读的论文版本，可在线开放获取。

This ambitious project exploits an almost untouched archive to answer important questions about reading, letter-writing and everyday language in Georgian England and the contribution made by social networks to these significant cultural practices. A multidisciplinary team from the fields of linguistic, historical and literary studies will address questions and combine approaches that contribute to current academic debates across a broad range of research areas in innovative ways. It will shed new light on the culture of English society in this period and will help to launch an exciting new genre of Hamilton studies by exploring a remarkable, but relatively unknown archive, presently scattered over eleven libraries in Britain and the USA. We will use the Papers to explore four related research questions on reading, letter-writing, language practices and the role of social networks in Georgian England. (I) Our research starts from the premise, increasingly important in various disciplinary fields, that social networks are crucial to the maintenance and change of both linguistic and cultural behaviour. Having constructed a 'personography' of writers, addressees and others mentioned in the Papers, we will map all the social networks to which Mary Hamilton belonged. This strand will subsequently include a ground-breaking comparison of the operation and effects of social network membership across the different domains of reading practices, letter-writing and grammatical structure, where we will carry out more specialised investigations.(II) We will make a comprehensive analysis of accounts of reading practices mentioned in the archive, ascertaining whether patterns of circulation, reception and response show any significant differentiation in line with the genre of a text, or the class/gender/perceived character of that text's author. We will distinguish print and manuscript texts throughout. This strand will contribute to our understanding of, inter alia, eighteenth-century canon formation.(III) In the late Georgian period, politeness was of central importance not just as a sociocultural phenomenon but in language use. The correspondence will be examined from several angles to track the influence on usage of normative rules in historical grammars and letter-writing manuals. We will analyse how gender and social status, including social network relationships, bear on forms of address and thus contribute to face-saving strategies. This strand of the study will add significantly to our knowledge of sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic factors in the history of Late Modern English, and the history of language standardisation.(IV) The Hamilton Papers cover a crucial period in the history of English verb structure, particularly changes in usage of 'be' as auxiliary, such as the loss of 'your being looking well' and the advent of 'was being debated', two symptoms among many of a major but relatively neglected realignment of the auxiliary system. We will make a fine-grained analysis of the progress of change both across social networks and during the lifetime of individuals, leading to a better understanding of the language of the period, the history of English and mechanisms of language change generally.Each of the four research strands will produce and draw on its own systematic database of instances. The essential groundwork for these databases is an edition of the Mary Hamilton Papers that is reliable and searchable for text, names, concepts and parts of speech. A valuable additional product of the project will therefore be a complete, scholarly, readable edition of the Papers, available in Open Access online.