ABSTRACT
A great deal of everyday life is made up of linguistic activity, both oral and written. Some speech acts are important and may have far-reaching consequences, e.g. saying I do in a wedding ceremony, writing a job application, discussing holiday plans, whilst others are more inconspicuous and even trivial, e.g. saying good morning, passing the time of day, asking for another beer, thanking, inviting someone round on the telephone, etc. It is not easy to reconstruct the linguistic aspects of everyday life from the past in great detail. Nor is it easy to trace the linguistic elements of everyday life in a diachronic slice for different groups of speakers/writers, e.g. the linguistic units that made up the average peasant day, say in 1828, or that of a bourgeois lady in 1890 are scarcely recoverable. Even the humble shopping list proves to be a historically elusive text-type.
