The construction of epistolary discourse in an eighteenth-century cordovan corpus

Abstract

Although traditionally there are few linguistic studies dedicated to the so-called first modern Spanish dated between 1675 and 1830, recent studies show that various interesting changes in the Spanish language of grammatical, syntactic or discursive nature began and developed in 18th century. Therefore, and due to the interest in epistolary gender and its mixed character (formal and colloquial), in this paper we intend to contribute to a better knowledge of how discourse is constructed in letters ―comparing the different forms of syntactic ilation, especially the subordinating structures and discursive connectors―, which orational elements are the most recurrent, what is the pragmatic value with which they are used and which elements show aspects of the orality of the time. For this purpose, an unprecedented corpus of private letters from the Provincial Historical Archive of Córdoba will be analyzed.