Abstract

This two-year project in historical pragmatics aims to investigate the diachronic evolution of linguistic (dis)courtesy in Italian across the centuries, from the 13th to the 20th. In particular, the project examines the formal and communicative evolution of various directive (prohibitions, commands, requests, proposals, advice, permissions), commissive (promises, threats) and expressive (expressions of thanks, apologies, greetings, insults, compliments) as well as the system of pronominal and nominal address. These pragmalinguistic phenomena and the communicative patterns of the past they imply are examined using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, inspired by the methodology of Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics.

The annotation scheme adopted takes into account various pragmatic phenomena that may co-occur and is therefore multi-level. In particular, the annotation takes into account speech acts (e.g. promises, commands, compliments, greetings), forms (e.g. discourse markers), functions (e.g. epistemicity, mirativity, expression of agreement or disagreement) and pragmatic purposes (e.g. drawing attention, seeking agreement or confirmation), as well as the sociolinguistic dimension relating to the gender of the characters. The texts annotated in this way will be incorporated into the DIADIta corpus (Dialogic Interaction in Diachrony, a pragmatic history of the Italian language), a resource for the study of the historical pragmatics of Italian, accessible online at www.diadita.it.

The way in which the forms of address and speech acts under examination are used across different centuries will not only enable us to reconstruct the most significant pragmalinguistic changes that have occurred in the history of our language, but also to better understand certain aspects of the linguistic construction of interpersonal relationships in Italian society throughout history.

To this end, the research will be conducted on literary texts that mimic oral and dialogic communication, dating from the 13th to the 20th century, drawn mainly from the DIADIta corpus. The research therefore aims to identify the crucial moments of rupture and transition in the evolution of the pragmatic system of Italian.