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This paper analyzes three Spanish particles, namely al parecer, por lo visto and según parece, whose status as pure evidentials (i.e., elements that only convey 'source of information') has been put into question. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, to observe the incidence of prosody in triggering the contextual meanings usually expressed by evidentials, i.e., politeness, impoliteness and self-image activities; secondly, to find out whether their prosodic behaviour provides any hint of their core meaning being 'source of information'. In order to carry out this analysis, a corpus of circa three million words of Peninsular Spanish has been compiled, which aims to reflect a variety of registers (formal and informal) and genres (both confrontational and non-confrontational). The study reveals different prosodic behaviours exhibited by pure evidentials on the one hand, and contextual meanings on the other. Theoretically speaking, the concept of 'relational work' embraces all the contextual meanings, and therefore explains the prosodic difference more effectively than other concepts. On the other hand, data show a high number of cases in Spanish where evidentials are used with their pure meaning, thus supporting the existence of elements exclusively conveying 'source of information', without any further contextual nuance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the language of business communication has become a popular topic of scholarly investigation in recent years, studies on historical business interaction appear sparsely in the literature. The current paper addresses a number of aspects of business language in the Spanish of Colonial Louisiana, specifically the extent to which the variable of power in professional interactions affected the form of directive speech acts issued, as well as the relationship between indirectness and politeness in this genre of communication. The study presents data from a corpus of 100 letters written between government officials in late 18th century Louisiana. The results of the study indicate that, although superiors most commonly utilize direct request formulations and inferiors tend to revert to nonconventionally indirect strategies, these generalizations do not account for a significant portion of the speech act behavior of these speakers. I argue that the notion of tentativeness is crucial to an understanding of the linguistic behavior exhibited in the corpus documents. Additionally, I posit that subordinates in Colonial Louisiana made extensive use of a conventionally direct request strategy which was employed in a formulaic manner in business communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]