Between deference and power: a study of directive acts in private correspondence in classical Spanish

Abstract

This paper analyses the evolution of the pragmalinguistic mechanisms used to formulate directive speech acts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish, focusing on a particular discursive genre: private correspondence. Through a specialised corpus of 300 letters, 1378 samples of directive acts have been examined, highlighting the prevalence of direct constructions such as imperative utterances and realizative expressions. The results obtained confirm that politeness in this period was based on the notion of social hierarchy and, from a linguistic point of view, depended on the combination of pragmalinguistic mechanisms with forms of address. Therefore, the presence or absence of the latter constituted one of the central axes of classical politeness.