Power and indirectness in business correspondence: Petitions in Colonial Louisiana Spanish

Abstract

Although the language of business communication has become a popular topic of scholarly investigation in recent years, studies on historical business interaction appear sparsely in the literature. The current paper addresses a number of aspects of business language in the Spanish of Colonial Louisiana, specifically the extent to which the variable of power in professional interactions affected the form of directive speech acts issued, as well as the relationship between indirectness and politeness in this genre of communication. The study presents data from a corpus of 100 letters written between government officials in late 18 th century Louisiana. The results of the study indicate that, although superiors most commonly utilize direct request formulations and inferiors tend to revert to nonconventionally indirect strategies, these generalizations do not account for a significant portion of the speech act behavior of these speakers. I argue that the notion of tentativeness is crucial to an understanding of the linguistic behavior exhibited in the corpus documents. Additionally, I posit that subordinates in Colonial Louisiana made extensive use of a conventionally direct request strategy which was employed in a formulaic manner in business communication.