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Part of
Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster and Susan Fitzmaurice
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 299] 2019
► pp. 147–170

Chapter 4
Commitment fulfillment and politeness

Commissive speech acts in colonial Louisiana Spanish

| Louisiana State University

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 200 institutional letters penned by Spaniards in the North American colony in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. I argue that owing to their frequent mitigation commissives should not be understood as intrinsically polite speech acts. I tentatively posit that, due to evident changes in linguistic strategy employed by Louisiana Spaniards, colonial North America felt the effects of the revolutionary fervor.

Keywords: colonial Louisiana, Spanish, commissives, politeness, mitigation, supportive moves
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Colonial Louisiana and European regime change
  • 3.Commissive speech acts
    • 3.1Commissives and politeness considerations
    • 3.2Commissives and the Spanish language
  • 4.Description of corpus and method
  • 5.Commissives in colonial Louisiana institutional communication
    • 5.1Examples of Commissive Strategies
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.05kin
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Kádár, Dániel Z., Gudrun Held & Annick Paternoster
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Paternoster, Annick
2022. Introduction. In Historical Etiquette, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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