Greeting Formulae in Las cartas del Boom

Abstract

This work approaches a corpus of 208 greeting formulae extracted from the epistolary correspondence exchanged between Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez, published under the title Las cartas del Boom (2023). The paper questions the definition of greeting offered in previous literature and analyses its structure in relation to four independent variables (sender, date, extension of the letter and underlying speech act) with the purpose of understanding which factors influence the variation of greeting formulae in the corpus. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, the greeting formulae are systematized the into ten groups based on their formal (nominal head and syntactic structure) and semantic-pragmatic features, and are organized along a continuum ranging from the pole of immediacy to that of communicative/interpersonal distance. At the extreme of immediacy lies the combination of Modifier + Nickname, while the communicative pole is represented by the combination of First Name + Last Name. Lastly it is concluded that, in the choice of the greeting formula, the most explanatory factors are the identity of the sender (idiolect) and the date of the letter.