Colloquial English in Esther Piozzi’s 'Parlour Window'

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics offer a systematic analysis of human interactions produced in talkative everyday situations, identifying purpose and context of the users. Deductive hypothesis on how the spoken code may once have been in Early/Late Modern English, have been provided by historical linguists (Salmon 1965) who, in recent studies (Culpeper / Kytö 2010), on the basis of Corpus Linguistics, have carried out a comparative, diachronical analysis. Traditional language models are based on writing, but it is speech in its social context that mainly represents the language, even the language of the past. “Speech-related written genres” like dialogues, trials, plays (Culpeper / Kytö 2010: 2) seem to be a good representation of spoken face-to-face interactions. Hester Lynch Piozzi’s British Synonymy or An attempt at regulating the choice of words in familiar conversation, a work in two volumes published in 1794, is organized as a dictionary, but, in fact, it is a pretext for telling anecdotes and personal thoughts in a conversational style. This article, meant to be a descriptive contribution on Piozzi’s work, is divided in two parts: the first is a brief overview of the transcription of the oral code tradition in English culture based on the usage and custom more than norms and rules. In the second part, through the richly commented definitions of words Piozzi gives, from a discourse analysis perspective we try to detect the pragmatic function of some typical features of conversational style and concentrate on some rhetorical strategies employed by the author to create proximity with her reader.