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Abstract

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 data, both in terms of the level of directness employed in their head acts as well as the degree of tentativeness which accompanies them. The corpus for the study consists of 200 institutional letters composed in two settlements of the Louisiana territory between 1778 and 1802. Study findings reveal that speakers in Spanish Louisiana showed a clear preference for directly formulated speech acts, but that the level of tentativeness used in this period was highly dependent on the relative power of the speaker in the interaction. The results thus call into question traditional notions of the ‘rights’ speakers possess to issue certain types of speech acts.