Tentativeness and insistence in the expression of politeness in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters

Abstract

This article explores some of the ways in which speaker subjectivity, especially the expression of tentativeness and insistence, is grammaticalized in the language of CCXI Sociable Letters, written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1664). Specifically, I examine some semantic-pragmatic meanings that might be associated with the English modal verbs can, may and will in Cavendish’s epistolary discourse. I argue that although these verbs exhibit the syntactic properties of fully-fledged auxiliaries by this time, their modern grammatical meanings (such as future time reference) are not yet fixed, allowing the pragmatic inference of a range of speaker-meanings in the context of this text. These meanings play a role in constructing different modal stances or attitudes for Cavendish’s speaker, such as tentativeness and its converse, insistence. I am interested in how the modal verbs might be understood as contributing to the linguistic expression of politeness in these early modern epistolary essays.¹