Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

• Fátima Faya Cerqueiro ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

     Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

     Ciudad Real, España

     
• Localización: Cuadernos de investigación filológica, ISSN 0211-0547, Tomo 43, 2017, págs. 233-248
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.18172/cif.2955
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Verbos performativos en peticiones: evidencia en cartas del siglo XVIII
• Enlaces
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• Resumen
  • español

    En la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII el marcador de cortesía "pray" era el marcador pragmático más habitual en peticiones mientras que la nueva forma please empezaba a surgir. "Pray" era una forma gramaticalizada con origen en el performativo "I pray you/thee", pero "please" tiene un origen sintáctico diferente. En el mismo periodo se utilizaban otras expresiones performativas, frecuentes sobre todo en cartas, con el mismo patrón sintáctico que "(I) pray (you)" y que también se usaban en directivos. Estas expresiones hacían uso de la gran variedad de verbos de petición disponibles en el periodo de inglés moderno tardío, como "beg", "beseech", "desire", "entreat" y "request". Este trabajo revisa el conjunto de expresiones performativas utilizadas como marcadores de cortesía en peticiones en el "Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose" (1761-1790) para revisar su productividad y las funciones desempeñadas en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII.

  • English

    In the second half of the eighteenth century the courtesy marker pray was the default pragmatic marker used in polite requests while the new form please started to emerge. Pray was a grammaticalized form originated in the longer performative expression I pray you/thee, whereas the verb please had a different syntactic pattern. In the same period there were other performative expressions, particularly common in the epistolary genre, with the same syntactic pattern observed in (I) pray (you) and also used in directives. They resorted to the wide variety of requestive verbs available in Late Modern English, such as beg, beseech, desire, entreat, and request. This paper examines the set of different performative expressions used as polite request markers in the "Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose" (1761-1790) in order to provide an account of their productivity and functions in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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