Citación, relaciones textuales y tradicionalidad en el discurso preeconómico español

Abstract

Abstract An important part of an argumentative text is to anticipate the potential criticisms made by the opponent and refute them with new arguments. This paper focuses on the linguistic strategies used to fulfill this pragmatic requirement in a corpus formed by representative works of the emerging Spanish economic thought in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These texts, called in Spanish “arbitrios” and “proyectos”, form a new type of specialized discourse, which, placed at the service of the State, assumes the function of dealing with the phenomena that affect the economic system and proposes measures that guarantee its stability. Throughout the expositive sequences, the author introduces external voices to pretend doubts and objections and provide answers to them. Based on the studies on textual polyphony and the model of discourse relations, a diachronic analysis of this construction is conducted and patterns of linguistic traditionality are identified. The analysis leads to new data about the elaboration processes that took place in the non-literary high prose during the transit from the classical to the modern stages of the Spanish language.