Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers

这个雄心勃勃的项目利用几乎未被触及的档案来回答有关阅读，写信和格鲁吉亚英格兰的日常语言以及社交网络对这些重要文化习俗的贡献的重要问题。来自语言，历史和文学研究领域的多学科团队将解决问题，并以创新的方式将联合收割机方法与当前广泛的研究领域的学术辩论相结合。它将为这一时期的英国社会文化提供新的视角，并将通过探索一个引人注目但相对不为人知的档案，帮助推出一个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个图书馆。我们将利用这些论文来探讨四个相关的研究问题，阅读，书信写作，语言实践和社交网络在格鲁吉亚英格兰的作用。(I)社交网络对语言和文化行为的维持和变化至关重要，这一点在各个学科领域越来越重要。在构建了论文中提到的作家、收信人和其他人的“个人特征”之后，我们将绘制出玛丽汉密尔顿所属的所有社交网络。这一系列随后将包括一个突破性的比较的运作和影响的社会网络成员在不同领域的阅读的做法，写信和语法结构，在那里我们将进行更专业的调查。(II)我们将对档案中提到的阅读实践进行全面分析，确定流通，接受和反应的模式是否显示出与文本类型或文本作者的阶级/性别/感知特征相一致的任何显着差异。我们将区分印刷和手稿文本在整个。这条线索将有助于我们理解，除其他外，18世纪的佳能形成。(III)在格鲁吉亚晚期，礼貌不仅是一种社会文化现象，而且在语言使用中也具有核心重要性。我们将从几个角度来研究这些信件，以追踪它们对历史语法和书信写作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，包括社会网络关系，如何影响称呼的形式，从而有助于保全面子的战略。这一系列的研究将大大增加我们对晚现代英语历史中的社会语言学和社会语用因素以及语言标准化历史的了解。(IV)《汉密尔顿论文》涵盖了英语动词结构史上的一个关键时期，尤其是“be”作为助动词的用法发生了变化，比如“your being looking well”的消失和“was being debated”的出现，这是许多主要但相对被忽视的助动词系统重新调整的两个症状。我们将对社交网络和个人一生中的变化过程进行细致的分析，从而更好地了解这一时期的语言，英语的历史和语言变化的机制。四个研究方向中的每一个都将产生并利用自己的系统化实例数据库。这些数据库的基本基础是一个版本的玛丽汉密尔顿论文是可靠的和可搜索的文本，名称，概念和词性。因此，该项目的一个有价值的附加产品将是一个完整的，学术的，可读的版本的文件，可在开放获取在线。

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.