Sincerity and epistolarity: Multilingual historical pragmatic perspectives.

The history of letter-writing in Europe is profoundly multilingual: not just in the obvious sense that Europe is historically multilingual, but also in that the language of letters from different vernacular traditions often shares similar influences. Jane Austen's letters to her niece Cassandra, written in the first years of the nineteenth century, draw an idiosyncratic character whose notion of the letter is an occasion for an intimate, honest, if slightly mischievous intervention (ed. [8]: 114-115): In English letters, the writer's attitude has, over time, been conventionalized in the salutations that open and close letters. Likewise, the signatory encodes the relationship that the writer shares with the addressee with terms such as I sincerely i , I faithfully i , etc., but these emerge as constitutive of letters only in the nineteenth century, as discussed by Shvanyukova (this volume), who examines the gradual formalisation of the closing formula I yours sincerely i in the business letter and its codification in contemporary letter-writing manuals. [Extracted from the article]