Directive-commissive threats in the history of Genoese from the 17th to the 20th century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4396/20250602Keywords:
historical (im)politeness, (im)politeness, directive acts, threats, GenoeseAbstract
Linguistic (im)politeness can be defined as a set of verbal behaviours that protect (politeness) or threaten (impoliteness) the face of interlocutors and that are considered appropriate or inappropriate for sociocultural or contextual reasons (Brown and Levinson 1987, Leech 1983, 2014); indeed, no linguistic expression is inherently polite or impolite (Locher and Watts 2005: 16; see also Watts 2003, Culpeper 2011, Culpeper and Hardaker 2017). This study deals with the evolution of (im)politeness in Genoese - the Galloromance variety spoken in Genoa, Italy - from the 17th to the 20th century. The research is based on the analysis of speech-purposed texts: eight comedies written in Genoese between the 17th and 20th centuries, a genre chosen because it is mimetic of oral and spontaneous dialogic speech. The work focuses on the analysis of threats related to directives and investigates their functional evolution, showing that although threats are typical of genuine impoliteness and conflictual communication, after the 19th century there are some cases of threats pursuing polite purposes in non-conflictual contexts in the considered corpus. In this contribution we will discuss the reasons motivating this pragmatic evolution, comparing the pragmatic-linguistic data with the historical and sociocultural events that characterized the analyzed eras, and answer a crucial question: are these cases of politeness, mock impoliteness, or something else?
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