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In:Language Variation and Contact-Induced Change: Spanish across space and time
Edited by Jeremy King and Sandro Sessarego
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 340] 2018
► pp. 127–151

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Chapter 6
Hasta perder la última gota de mi sangre

Variation in commissive speech act behavior in Colonial Louisiana Spanish

Published online: 13 March 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.340.07kin
Abstract
In spite of the recent burgeoning of the field of Spanish socio-pragmatics, the category of commissive speech acts has been all but ignored in scholarship, particularly in contact varieties of the language. Colonial Louisiana presents an ideal context for this type of work. The analysis herein involves a corpus of 100 business letters between Spanish government and military officials in 18th century Louisiana. All commissive speech acts were identified and coded according to a modified version of the taxonomy presented in Bilbow (2002). Results of the study reveal that the level of power of the speaker (= letter writer) proved to be the most significant factor in the formulation of commissives. The level of relative power of a speaker appeared to guide not only the general type of commissives employed (e.g., promises vs. offers) but also the specific morphological expression of the speech act (e.g., future vs. present tense).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Commissive speech acts and the Spanish language
  • 3.Description of corpus and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Examples of commissive strategies
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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