Cover not available
Article published In:
Politeness in and across Historical Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster, Gudrun Held and Dániel Z. Kádár
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1] 2023
► pp. 68–85

Diplomatic letters from the Republic of Ragusa in the fifteenth century

(Im)politeness strategies in diplomatic epistolary discourse

| University of Sarajevo

In this paper, I study the ways in which (im)politeness strategies are used in letters sent by the Republic of Ragusa to its ambassadors in the Bosnian Kingdom during the fifteenth century. The corpus for this research comprises the Lettere di Levante collection, today kept in the Dubrovnik State Archives, Croatia. I aim to determine the politeness strategies that were used in the letters based on the Brown and Levinson framework. The paper focusses on mitigating strategies used when making requests, expressing condolences, offering congratulations and making threats. The research reveals patterns in conversational and written exchanges, whose goal is to be conventionally polite and diplomatic. This research aims to offer insights into intercultural communication in Europe, inter-European influence, and communication patterns in diplomatic discourse and might be of interest to political scientists, historians and diplomats.

Keywords: condolences, congratulations, epistolary discourse, fifteenth century, politeness formulae, promises, Republic of Ragusa, requests, threats
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical context of the diplomatic letters
  • 3.The corpus
  • 4.Methodology and theoretical framework
  • 5.Conventional politeness modalities in diplomatic letters
    • 5.1Mitigation strategies in orders and requests
    • 5.2Formulae of condolences and congratulations
  • 6.Mitigating conventionally impolite forms
    • 6.1Threats
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 23 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00060.lal
References

Sources

Lettere di Levante
Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku.
Austin, John L.
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Banfi, Emanuele
2017 Italiano e altre varietà italo-romanze in Europa e nel Mediterraneo nel secolo XIX [‘ Italian and Other Romance-Italian Varieties in Europe and in the Mediterranean During the XIX Century ’]. Florence: Cesati.Google Scholar
Blanco Salguiero, Antonio
2010 “Promises, Threats, and the Foundation of Speech Act Theory”. Pragmatics 20 (2): 213–228.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain
1985 “Crosscultural Pragmatics and the Testing of Communicative Competence”. Language Testing 2 (1): 16–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1987 “Indirectness and Politeness in Requests: Same or Different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bousfield, Derek and Miriam A. Locher
(eds) 2008 Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bull, Peter
2008 “Slipperiness, Evasion and Ambiguity: Equivocation and Facework in Non-committal Political Discourse”. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27 (4): 324–332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bull, Peter and Anita Fetzer
2010 “Face, Facework and Political Discourse”. International Review of Social Psychology 23 (2/3): 155–185.Google Scholar
Chaplais, Pierre
2003 English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul
1990 “Politeness, Politics and Diplomacy”. Discourse & Society 1 (2): 201–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron V.
1988 “Text and Context: Cognitive, Linguistic, and Organizational Dimensions in International Negotiations”. Negotiation Journal 4 (3): 257–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
1996 “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness”. Journal of Pragmatics 251: 349–367. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
2019  s.v. “History of Diplomacy”. Accessed 24 December 2019.Google Scholar
Escandell Vidal, Maria Victoria
1996 Introducción a la pragmática [‘ Introduction to Pragmatics ’]. Barcelona: Ariel Letras.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1989 Language and Power. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Havrylyshyn, Oleh and Nora Srzentić
2015 Institutions Always “Mattered”: Explaining Prosperity in Mediaeval Ragusa (Dubrovnik). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Held, Gudrun
2005 “Politeness in Italy: The Art of Self-Representation in Requests”. In Leo Hickey and Miranda Stewart (eds), Politeness in Europe, 292–305. Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
House, Juliane and Gabrielle Kasper
1981 “Politeness Markers in English and German”. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, 157–185. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Daniel and Michael Haugh
2013 Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Križman, Bogdan
1951 O dubrovačkoj diplomaciji [‘ On Ragusean Diplomacy ’]. Zagreb: Školska knjiga.Google Scholar
Kurtović, Esad, Lejla Nakaš, Drago Župarić, Ana Lalić and Dženan Dautović
2018 Codex diplomaticus Regni Bosnae: Pisma i povelje srednjovjekovne bosanske države [‘ Codex diplomaticus Regni Bosnae: Letters and Charters from the Medieval Bosnian State ’]. Sarajevo: Mladinska knjiga.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey
1989 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
2014 The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nicolson, Harold
1950 Diplomacy. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Online Etymology Dictionary
2020  s.v. “diploma”. Accessed 23 January 2020.Google Scholar
Searle, John R.
1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1976 “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts”. Language in Society 5 (1): 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tadić, Jorjo
1935 Pisma i uputstva Dubrovačke Republike [‘ Letters and Commissions from the Republic of Ragusa ’]. Belgrade: Srpska kraljevska akademija.Google Scholar
Tasso, Torquato
1959 La letteratura italiana: storia e testi. Volume 22. Torquato Tasso – Prose [‘ Italian Literature: History and Texts. Volume 22. Torquato Tasso – Prose Works ’]. Verona: Riccardo Riccardi editore.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charlotte
2016 Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A Corpus-Assisted Metalanguage Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth
(ed.) 1989 Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar