Acerca de las estrategias verbales de la petición cortés decimonónica

The purpose of this article is to analyse strategies and linguistic resources which characterize the verbal politeness of the directive speech acts in European Spanish of the nineteenth century, specifically verbal politeness of the requests. We have collected texts written in the 19th century and these will be analysed. In this work we will offer various examples which serve to illustrate of concrete usage of this historic period. The justification for this work is that we consider that it is necessary to pay more attention to the pragmatic aspects of the past. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of the verbal politeness of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) and the theory of speech acts of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1976). The results of the analysis show diverse linguistic strategies of the politeness present in the corpus. In our work we have found that speakers tended to use preferentially in their requests indirect and softened linguistic form.