Commitment fulfillment and politeness

Abstract

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.