Rasgos de oralidad en el discurso epistolar: análisis de cinco cartas indianas del siglo XVI

Abstract

Through linguistic tensions and contrasts between communicative
immediacy and communicative distance, the sixteenth-century
letters written in the Spanish Indies constitute key evidence for the reconstruction
of the language spoken at that period. This paper analyzes
five letters written by semi-literate individuals living in New Spain in the
mid 16th century, whose speech register could be characterized as informal.
Written by authors without writing practice, these letters reveal
numerous processes that resemble the significant features of spoken language. Particularly, many syntactic and pragmatic textual features do
not correspond to the specific rules of written communication.