Linguistic strategies to mark the discrimination of women in an eighteenth-century letter of sale

Abstract

After reading a letter of sale concerning a slave, the authors were struck by the linguistic resources that revealed the discriminatory conceptions around the slave and the buyer. This paper describes the formal structure and linguistic resources of the letter that reveal the social treatment given to women, depending on whether their social and generic discrimination during the Cuban colonial period is demonstrated at a textual level. For this, the following methodological steps were proposed: transcription, the realization of a commented guide, and the analysis of its formal structure and of the linguistic elements. The theoretical referents that provided information on the structure of notarial documents are Mijares Ramirez, Cortes Alonso, and Punal Fernandez. For the analysis of the linguistic categories that were analysed, the methodology started from the morphosyntactic comment proposed by Pons Rodriguez. In the document, fundamentally, the verbs and adjectives are used with the purpose of establishing a double discriminatory power over a woman taken as a simple item of merchandise and the way of imposing on her a lower status than the buyer in relation to the seller and the rest of the men present at the sale. The analysis that was carried out shows how a text like this requires, for its full understanding, an analysis based on the consideration of textual structures, linguistic resources, and historical and social contexts in order to access all its communicative intentionality, beyond its formulaic structure.