Directive speech acts in the 18th century comedy of manners: Toward modern patterns and conditions of use?

Abstract

This paper is the second part of the study developed in Iglesias (2022). It consists of a pragmalinguistic analysis of indirect formulations of the directive speech acts from five plays of the so-called bourgeois comedy of customs introduced in Spain by Enlightenment authors in the second half of the 18th century. The different linguistic expressions of these acts and their conditions of use are studied in some detail. The analysis shows that, despite the fact that quantitative data could invite us to think of a pragmalinguistic continuity respect to the 16th and 17th centuries, we can find in these texts the first manifestations of form and meaning strategies belonging to non-impositive negative politeness (Jucker 2012, 2020), and a distribution of linguistic and usage directive patterns approaching to nowadays usage.