The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between politeness and directive speech acts in medieval Spanish. The analysis, which is eminently descriptive, is based on fictional literature from the13th and 14th centuries, although there are also examples taken from historical corpora. The focus first falls on the pragmatic space of directive speech acts with regards to their formal properties, contextual cues and interpersonal features. The pragmatic modifiers that either soften or strengthen the illocutionary force or affect in some way the relationship between speaker and hearer are then taken into account. Finally, it is contended that politeness in medieval Spanish has a ritual component that helps maintain the social order and construe interpersonal relationships.

This paper is meant as a contribution to the Spanish historical pragmatics. It consists of a pragmalinguistic analysis of directive speech acts from five plays of the so-called bourgeois comedy of customs introduced in Spain by Enlightenment authors in the second half of the 18th century. The different linguistic expressions of these acts, their illocutionary values and their conditions of use are studied in detail.

It is described the use of Spanish aspectual verbal constructions in directive utterances between the 12th and 21st centuries. It is argued that, in addition to their aspectual values, these constructions fulfil some pragmatic functions in formal registers, especially some politeness verbal strategies in legal and administrative discourse, as well as the expression of instructions in procedural discourse. Some other illocutionary functions are found in dialogue. These non aspectual functions are documented from classical Spanish to the 20th century.

The objective of the study is to delve into the origin and the process of pragmaticalization of the expression mande, from a directive act of speech. Although its use is currently typical of Mexican Spanish, where with interrogative intonation mande is used to respond to the addressee‘s call or to ask the recipient to repeat the message that the sender has not understood or has not heard well, its uses are well documented in peninsular Spanish from the 16th century. With the help of discursive proximity texts (comedy, dialogue texts, etc. from 16th to 20th centuries), the author tries to find the socio-pragmatic contexts that contributed to the creation of the formula mande.

This paper examines the concept of micropoliteness or sympathetic politeness as a type of verbal politeness different from normal courtesy or strategic courtesy that have been used to explain some uses of forms of address in Spanish. This concept allows for a common explanation for some uses of Hispanic address forms, usually conceived as exceptional cases (the so-called: affectionate usted (Sp. usted de cariño/de coqueteo), patrician usted (Sp. usted Patricio), festive usted (usted festivo), affective su merced (Sp. su merced afectivo) or meliorative vosotros (Sp. vosotros meliorativo)). The analysis of the data provided in the bibliography and some of our own shows how these treatments described in the literature are not fully explained neither through the classic concepts of power and solidarity nor through other parameters that extend and complement the previous ones.