Towards a typology of greeting formulasin the history of Spanish

The aim of this paper is to analyse in the history of Spanish two typesof greeting formulas, defined as discursive units of the expressive speech actthat serve to open the communicative channel of social relations.Based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987) and through asystematic search in the CORDE corpus of texts reaching until the end of thenineteenth century, we will try to find (i) the socio-pragmatic factors that playthe most important role in each type of greeting; (ii) the paradigmatic origin ofeach formula, (iii) their sociocultural distribution and the informative and dis-cursive preferences, and (iv) their level of predominance at certain periods of time.