Linguistic Studies and Essays

Italian Historical Pragmatics: ieri, oggi, domani

2025-05-22T14:58:08+00:00

Questo contributo intende fornire un’introduzione ragionata alla pragmatica storica, guardando al suo percorso cronologico a partire dalla sua fondazione e fino ai giorni nostri, senza trascurare però possibili linee di sviluppo futuro. Più precisamente, lo scopo è innanzitutto quello di far emergere quelle che all’inizio si sono delineate come le maggiori aree di interesse e i più fecondi approcci della pragmatica storica nel panorama internazionale e in quello degli studi sulla lingua italiana in particolare. Quindi, sulla base di questa sintesi critica e con uno sguardo ai più recenti orientamenti, si passeranno in rassegna i saggi contenuti in questo Special Issue enucleando il contributo che essi possono fornire alla disciplina. Infine, ci si propone di tracciare per il domani alcuni desiderata da individuare alla luce di ciò che è stata, ieri, ed è, oggi, la pragmatica storica.

… as the usage wants you do

2025-04-01T10:49:05+00:00

The main goal of historical politeness research is “the historical understanding of historical (im)politeness.” A key challenge in this field—still relatively underexplored in Italy—is determining what past speakers considered polite. Among the sources available, texts containing metapragmatic comments on communicative forms and behaviors are particularly valuable, as they provide insight into historical speakers’ own interpretations of politeness. Etiquette books, entirely composed of reflective discourse on (im)politeness, are a crucial resource for reconstructing communicative patterns of specific periods and places. My research, based on the analysis of etiquette books aims to: (i) identify conversational principles outlined in these texts; (ii) trace continuity and change from Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) to contemporary manuals; (iii) compare these findings with first-generation politeness theories. The study reveals both notable diachronic continuity in conversational norms and unexpected parallels between prescriptive etiquette norms and descriptive politeness theories, raising the broader question of whether a clear-cut distinction between prescription and description is truly feasible in politeness research.

At the Lordship’s Pleasure… Or: how expressing one's will politely

2025-04-01T10:52:48+00:00

Since in Italian most of the so-called ‘language of politeness’ are expressions based on piacere (EPs) the paper deals with explaining their origin, development and accommodation as ‘politeness induced pragmatic markers’. An analysis of early vernacular texts demonstrates that – in continuous connection with directive speech-acts and the afforded courtesy constraints – EPs become conventionalised forms of verbal submission. As such, a great part of them has generated the common formulae of polite requesting. However, a particular Italian construction – the phrasal pattern che piaccia a X + infinitive – conquered its formulary character as a benevolent optionality device for processing both, the modular structure of public petitions and the ‘gentle’ speech-style of high-ranked persons.

Allocutivity, evidentiality, and (im)politeness in Italian

2025-04-28T10:06:28+00:00

In questo contributo ci proponiamo di delineare un modello analitico integrato volto a indagare la correlazione funzionale di diverse categorie linguistiche (in senso ampio) nel perseguimento di un dato scopo comunicativo, e dunque sul piano pragmatico: integrato perché volto a esplorare l’interconnessione di categorie nell’interazione e considerando più livelli del discorso. Dal punto di vista empirico, il contributo illustra le potenzialità euristiche che possono scaturire quando si pongono in correlazione categorie linguistiche finora esplorate solo in modo indipendente con le funzioni pragmatiche che queste possono assumere nel contesto. Nello specifico, la nostra ricerca prende in esame la gamma di funzioni pragmaticamente orientate sviluppata da due costruzioni basate su verbi di visione, ossia guarda che… e non vedi che…?, analizzate sulla base di un corpus di testi tratti dalla Biblioteca Italiana Zanichelli, che raccoglie circa 1.000 opere letterarie che vanno dal XIII secolo agli anni Trenta, e dal Primo tesoro della lingua letteraria italiana del Novecento, che include 100 romanzi selezionati per il Premio Strega dal 1947 al 2007. L’analisi mostra che le due costruzioni hanno sviluppato significati legati alla (s)cortesia a partire da un nucleo funzionale che esprimeva in origine altri valori semantico-pragmatici, quali l’allocuzione e l’evidenzialità.

Memory as a source of information in dialogic interaction within historical varieties of Italian

2025-03-14T10:59:45+00:00

According to recent proposals, memory can be considered a category that expresses evidential function, as speakers, by using expressions such as I remember or I recall (that...), provide evidence regarding the source of the information contained in a given utterance. However, specific and in-depth studies on this topic are still lacking. The present study presents the results of an investigation into memory as an evidential category, conducted on a selection of Italian theatrical texts composed between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Through a comprehensive analysis of the documents, all possible strategies for encoding memory with an evidential function found in the texts were identified and subsequently classified based on various parameters. The analysis of the collected data not only enhances our understanding of the relationship between the category of memory and other evidential categories but also sheds light on a range of semantic and pragmatic functions often associated with the expression of memory as an evidential source. These functions play a significant role at both interactional and intersubjective levels. Finally, the composition of the analyzed corpus also provides evidence of important elements of continuity in the diachronic interaction of these linguistic categories.

On the development of the illocutionary uses of "pure"

2025-04-01T10:49:57+00:00

This study investigates some aspects of the semantics and pragmatics of the adverb pure from a diachronic perspective. Relying on the description of corpus examples, an overview of the evolution of the adverb pure will be outlined and quantitative data will be presented on the development of the different functions of pure along progressive historical and linguistic stages, from ancient to contemporary Italian. In particular, the development of the illocutionary values of the adverb is explored, that is contexts of use in which pure operates as a modifier of the illocutionary force of the speech act. In addition, combining tools from historical linguistics (analysis of bridging contexts, conventionalization of contextual meanings) and interactional linguistics (analysis of communicative sequences, management of the common ground and conversational inferences), some contexts that may have fostered the reanalysis of pure and the emergence of its illocutionary values will be examined in more detail.

Paths of grammaticalisation and development of the pragmatic functions of general extenders

2025-03-14T10:02:05+00:00

General extenders are the result of grammaticalisation processes that have many similarities with those observed in discourse markers. After briefly presenting some of the most frequent phonic, syntactic and semantic phenomena in these processes, the configuration of e tutto il resto ‘and everything else’ as a general extender will be explained through the analysis of texts from the 15h C to the 20th C . Finally, we highlight the difficulties of studying these structures from a historical perspective due to the absence of data that could allow us to formulate solid hypotheses, as is the case with e cose del genere ‘and things like that’.

How and when everything has to go together? A pragmatic history of the modalized passive with andare

2025-03-14T14:50:36+00:00

As is well known, from the sixteenth century onwards the deontic passive with andare (henceforth PMA) occurs regularly in written texts as part of the history of the Italian language. It is less well known that the first attestations are strictly linked to specific text types: recipes, technical and normative documents, historical reports, plays and letters. In short, it appears in texts which are prescriptive and which use, completely or in part, the interactional strategies which are typically associated with speech and dialogue. In this paper we compare the two grammaticalization paths which involve andare + past participle, one typically past oriented and without modal force (quella casa è andata distrutta) and the other the present or future oriented PMA (quella casa va distrutta). We focus in particular on the interactional dimension involved in the genesis of the latter and the way it has come to constitute an intrinsic part of the modal subsystem of modern Italian.