This collection of original contributions dealing with Hispanic contact linguistics covers an array of Spanish dialects distributed across North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Bosporus. It deals with both native and non-native varieties of the language,… read more
The present study seeks to reconsider popular assumptions regarding the dynamics of power in interpersonal interactions in light of data from an historical North American speech community. Specifically, I examine directive and commissive speech act formulations in colonial Spanish Louisiana… read more
The present study investigates commissive speech acts in the Spanish colony of Louisiana in order to present insight into Spain’s perspective on linguistic politeness in light of European regime change during the period of the French Revolution. The corpus chosen for the current study consists of… read more
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… read more
This paper considers the applicability of modern theories of language to data from pre-modern language varieties. Specifically, I address the extent to which Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) taxonomy of directive head acts is valid for use in descriptions of these speech acts in Early Modern… read more
This article examines the types of syntactic mitigators employed in directive head acts in familiar letters written during the Spanish Colonial period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). In addition to analysis of the head-act-internal verbal modifiers used in Early Modern Spanish… read more
