Forms of address as politic behaviour in seventeenth-century Dutch private and business letters

Abstract Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004] and Tiisala [2004] ) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective ( Nevala 2004a ). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014) , we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the many changes occurring in the system of forms of address, which includes both nominal and