This paper aims at carrying out a contrastive analysis of a corpus of 16th-19th century notarial documents. We focus on the evolution of one of the most characteristic cohesive mechanisms of this textual type: the lexical anaphora.
In this study, we can observe the linguistic change during the 16th and 17th centuries and the 18th and 19th centuries. In these last two centuries, the prose becomes less repetitive and richer in lexical elements. Likewise, the link between the linguistic expression and the speech acts prevailing in this textual type can be observed as a sign of identity.