А 1982 LOVE LETTER: A PRAGMAPHILOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

This paper presents, for the first time, the facsimile and its transcription of a personal letter written in the late 19th c. by a young peasant from North-Eastern European Russia to a peasant girl from the same region. The data are then analyzed in several steps, be ginning with some relatively obvious orthographic and grammatical features, then more subtle features, like punctuation and false starts, and fi nally we condifer the information that is connected to the letter: the girl’s answer to this letter, and the information from the letters by the young man’s family members as well as other archival data. 

The primary objective of performing this gradual analysis is to demonstrate the inevitable limitations of an analysis that is based on the letter text alone, and — assuming that the scholar’s goal in analyzing texts of personal nature is to maximally approximate their semantic and pragmatic content — the explanatory power of the context, both linguistic (as represented in this case by the reciprocating speech act of the girl’s answer) and extra linguistic (the realia of time and place in the man’s letter as it can be learned through archival and historical research). In conclusion, we emphasize that historical texts of personal nature, even when created by ostensibly “simple” authors, including those dating from a relatively recent past, challenge the analyst to carry out a most meticulous work, both textual and pragmaphilological. We also underscore the crucial dependence of the philologist on the knowledge borne out of factors that lie far from the immediate texts analyzed.