Gender-sensitive variation in letters of appeal (20th century). Some notes on directive and expressive speech acts

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to examine certain aspects of the history of women’s language through a corpus of letters dating from the first quarter of the 20th century and composed around historical events related to the Rif War (1909–1927). To achieve this objective, we have carried out a contrastive analysis in which we have examined fifty letters, twenty-five from men and twenty-five from women, and we have studied some issues related to the lin guistic formulation of the requests expressed in them, considering generolectal variation. The examination determines that there is no apparent variation in the formulation of the requests, but there is in the construction of the apology.