Constructing and expressing friendship in the letters of Catholic missionaries: a linguistic analysis of the correspondence of New Norcia’s epistolary networks, 1850–1893

This thesis investigates the role of language and friendship in a collection of letters in Italian and Spanish from the epistolary networks of the Catholic mission of New Norcia, in nineteenth-century Western Australia. Developing an original historical- pragmatic approach to describe the relation between epistolary language and personal relationships, the study demonstrates how the construction and maintenance of friendships were achieved by variations in the linguistic structures expressing the writers subjectivities, social positionings and situational goals. These results offer new insight into the pragmatics of letter writing in Romance languages and into the history of friendship in Western culture.