Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.92–121

A perspective on “impoliteness” in early modern Romanian court and diplomatic interactions

| University of Bucharest

The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective (Jucker [ed.] 1995; Culpeper and Kádár [eds] 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen [eds] 2010; etc.). The approach adopted in this study favours a first-order im/politeness view (Watts et al. [eds] 1992; Eelen 2001; etc.), which is mainly concerned with the evaluation of behavioural elements by the participants in a communicative event. As im/politeness in Romanian is under-researched from a historical sociopragmatic perspective, this analysis tries to fill a gap exploring the seventeenth to early-eighteenth century cultural patterns and their characteristics in only two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia (separate states from the Middle Ages until their union in 1859).

My analysis is limited to the understanding and practices of “impoliteness” in official settings (court and diplomatic interactions), aiming to capture the production and evaluation, as well as some self-reflexive aspects (Eelen 2001; Kádár 2013) and emotional effects of “impoliteness”. The corpus consists of Moldavian and Wallachian chronicles from the second half of the seventeenth-century and first half of the eighteenth-century, presenting local court life and also scenes at the Ottoman court.

Keywords: emotional effects, evaluation, impoliteness, metalinguistic comments
Article outline
  • 1.Preliminary remarks
  • 2.Theoretical and methodological aspects
    • 2.1Remarks on im/politeness
    • 2.2Discernment
    • 2.3Im/politeness and emotions
    • 2.4Narratological theories
  • 3.Historical context
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1General remarks on politeness in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries Romanian Principalities
    • 4.2Classificatory impoliteness
      • 4.2.1External evaluation
      • 4.2.2Internal evaluation
    • 4.3Meta-pragmatic aspects
    • 4.4Expressive impoliteness
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Corpus
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16010.con
References

Corpus

AB - Istoria Ţării Romîneşti de la octombrie 1688 pînă la martie 1717 (Cronica Anonimă despre Brâncoveanu) in Cronicari munteni , vol. II1 1961 Edition by Mihail Gregorian, introductory study by Eugen Stănescu, Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură.Google Scholar
Costin – Miron Costin, Opere 1958 Critical edition with introductory study, notes, comments, variants, index and glossary by P.P. Panaitescu. Bucureşti: Editura de Stat pentru Literatură şi Artă.Google Scholar
Neculce – Ion Neculce, Opere. Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei şi O samă de cuvinte 1982 Critical edition and introductory study by Gabriel Ştrempel. Bucureşti: Minerva.Google Scholar
RG – Radu Greceanu, Începătura istoriii vieţii luminatului şi preacreştinului domnului Ţărîi Rumîneşti, Io Costandin Brîncoveanu Basarab-voievod… in Cronicari munteni , vol. II1 1961 Edition by Mihail Gregorian, introductory study by Eugen Stănescu. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură.Google Scholar
RP – Radu Popescu, Istoriile domnilor Ţărîi Romîneşti in Cronicari munteni , vol. I1 1961 Edition by Mihail Gregorian, introductory study by Eugen Stănescu. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură.Google Scholar
Arndt, Horst and Richard Janney
1985 “Improving Emotive Communication: Verbal, Prosodic and Kinezic Conflict Avoidance Techniques”. Per Linguam 11: 21–33.Google Scholar
Bax, Marcel
2010 “Rituals”. In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics (Volume 8: Historical Pragmatics), 483–519. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2011 “An Evolutionary Take on (Im)politeness: Three Broad Developments in the Marking out of Socio-proxemic Space”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 255–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bax, Marcel and Dániel Z. Kádár
2011 “The Historical Understanding of Historical (Im)politeness: Introductory Notes”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bayraktaroğlu, Arın and Maria Sifianou
2001 “Introduction”. In Arın Bayraktaroğlu and Maria Sifianou (eds), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boia, Lucian
2002 România: ţară de frontieră a Europei [‘Romania. Borderland of Europe’]. Bucureşti: Humanitas.Google Scholar
Bryson, Anna
1998 From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Daniel E.
2001 Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Constantinescu, Mihaela-Viorica
2013 “Forme și strategii ale politeții la cronicari” [‘Politeness Forms and Strategies at the Chroniclers’]. In Rodica Zafiu et al. (eds) Limba română: variație sincronică, variație diacronică [‘Romanian: Synchronic Variation, Diachronic Variation’], Volume II1, 53–66. București: Editura Universității din București.Google Scholar
2015a “Observații asupra mărcilor comportamentale ale politeții la cronicari (sec. XVII-XVIII)” [‘Remarks on Politeness Behavioural Markers at the Chroniclers (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries)’]. In Marius Sala et al. (eds), Lucrările celui de-al cincilea simpozion internațional de lingvistică, București 27–28 septembrie 2013 [‘Proceedings of the Fifth International Linguistics Symposium. Bucharest, 27–28 September 2013’], 763–76. București: Enciclopedic Gold.Google Scholar
2015b Principatele române între Orient și Occident: dinamica modelelor culturale ale politeții și impoliteții în secolul al XIX-lea [‘The Romanian Principalities between the Orient and the Occident: The Dynamics of Cultural Models of Politeness and Impoliteness in the Nineteenth Century’]. București: Editura Muzeul Național al Literaturii Române.Google Scholar
2015c “Metacommunicative Aspects of Im/politeness in mid-19th Century Romanian Principalities”. Diversité et identité culturelle en Europe [‘Diversity and Cultural Identity in Europe’] 12 (1): 61–78.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2011 Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Jane Demmen
2011 “Nineteenth-century English Politeness: Negative Politeness, Conventional Indirect Requests and the Rise of the Individual Self”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 49–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Dániel Z. Kádár
(eds) 2010 Historical (Im)politeness. Bern and Berlin, etc.: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö
2014 Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Gila Shauer, Leyla Marti, Meilan Mei and Minna Nevala
2014 “Impoliteness and Emotions in a Cross-cultural Perspective”. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 301: 67–88.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A.
1987 Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park, California: Sage.Google Scholar
Eelen, Gino
2001 A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
Gáldi, Ladislas
1939 Les mots d’origine néo-grecque en roumain à l'époque des phanariotes. Budapest: Kir. M. Pàzmàny Péter Tudom ányegyetemi Görog Filológiai Intézet.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard
1972 Figures III [coll. « Poétique »]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael
2015 Im/Politeness Implicatures. Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Held, Gudrun
2010 “Supplica la mia parvidade… Petitions in Medieval Society – A Matter of Ritualized or First Reflexive Politeness?” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 11 (2): 194–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hitchins, Keith
2014 A Concise History of Romania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hofstede, Geert
2001 Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations. (Second edition.) London: Sage.Google Scholar
Ide, Sachiko
1989 “Formal Forms and ‘Discernment’: Two Neglected Aspects of Linguistic Politeness”. Multilingua 8 (2/3): 223–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Işık-Güler, Hale and Şükriye Ruhi
2010 “Face and Impoliteness at the Intersection with Emotions: A Corpus-based Study in Turkish”. Intercultural Pragmatics 7 (4): 625–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janney, Richard and Horst Arndt
2005 [1992] “Intracultural Tact versus Intercultural Tact” In Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (eds), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, 21–70. (Second revised and expanded edition, with a new introduction.) Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H.
(ed.) 1995 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Historical Pragmatics”. Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (5): 894–906. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “In curteisie was set ful muchel hir lest: Politeness in Middle English”. In Jonathan Culpeper and Daniel Z. Kádár (eds), Historical (Im)politeness, 175–200. Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2011 “Positive and Negative Face as Descriptive Categories in the History of English”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 178–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen
2000 “Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: Insults from Flyting to Flaming”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 67–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(eds) 2010 Historical Pragmatics. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z. and Jonathan Culpeper
2010 “Historical (Im)politeness: An Introduction”. In Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds), Historical (Im)politeness, 9–36. Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z.
2013 Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Daniel Z. and Michael Haugh
2013 Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z. and Sara Mills
2013 “Rethinking ‘Discernment’”. Journal of Politeness Research 9 (2): 133–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z. and Annick Paternoster
2015 “Historicity in Metapragmatics: A Study on ‘Discernment’ in Italian Metadiscourse”. Pragmatics 25 (3): 369–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelly, Catriona
2007 Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher
1985 “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachttheorie und Sprachgeschichte”. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 361: 15–43.Google Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas
2008 “Directives in Old English: Beyond Politeness?” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Speech Acts in the History of English, 27–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langlotz, Andreas and Miriam A. Locher
2013 “The Role of Emotions in Relational Work”. Journal of Pragmatics 581: 87–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. and Mick Short
2007 Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. (Second edition. First edition 1981.) London: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Lintvelt, Jaap
1989 [1981]  Essai de typologie narrative. Le “point de vue ”. Théorie et analyse. Paris: Corti.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A. and Andreas Langlotz
2008 “Relational Work: At the Intersection of Cognition, Interaction and Emotion”. Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée 881: 165–91.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A. and Richard J. Watts
2005 “Politeness Theory and Relational Work”. Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 9–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Relational Work and Impoliteness: Negotiating Norms of Linguistic Behaviour”. In Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds), Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, 77–99. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mazilu, Dan Horia
2008 Văduvele sau despre istorie la feminin [‘Widows or about Feminine History’]. Iaşi: Polirom.Google Scholar
Muchembled, Robert
2004 Societatea rafinată. Politică şi politeţe în Franţa, din secolul al XVI-lea până în secolul al XX-lea [‘Polished Society. Politics and Politeness in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century’]. (Translated from French by Ilie Dan.) Chişinău: Cartier.Google Scholar
Ogiermann, Eva
2009 On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Palander-Collin, Minna
2009 “Variation and Change in Patterns of Self-Reference in early English Correspondence”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10 (2): 260–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paternoster, Annick
2015 Cortesi e scortesi. Percorsi di pragmatica storica da Castiglione a Collodi. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
Pernau, Margrit, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, Rochona Majumdar, Angelika C. Messner, Myoung-kyu Park, Emmanuelle Saada, Mohinder Singh and Einar Wigen
2015 Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pippidi, Andrei
1980 Hommes et idées du Sud-Est européen à l’aube de l'âge moderne. București: Editura Academiei/Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S.Google Scholar
Plantin, Christian
2011 Les bonnes raisons des émotions. Principes et méthode pour l’étude du discours émotionné. Berne: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rathmayr, Renate
1999 “Métadiscours et réalité linguistique: L’exemple de la politesse russe”. Pragmatics 9 (1): 75–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosetti, Alexandru, Boris Cazacu and Liviu Onu
1971 Istoria limbii române literare: de la origini pînă la începutul secolului al XIX-lea [‘History of the Romanian Literary Language: From the Beginnings until the Early 19th Century]. (Volume 11.) Bucureşti: Minerva.Google Scholar
Rothman, E. Natalie
2009 “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (4): 771–800. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ruhi, Șükriye and Daniel Z. Kádár
2011 “ ‘Face’ across Historical Cultures: A Comparative Study of Turkish and Chinese”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1/2): 25–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Semino, Elena and Mick Short
2004 Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Short, Mick, Elena Semino and Martin Wynne
2002 “Revisiting the Notion of Faithfulness in Discourse Presentation Using a Corpus Approach”. Language and Literature 11 (4): 325–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Somel, Selçuk Akşin
2010 The A to Z of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, Maryland, USA: The Scarecrow Press.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen
2007 “Theories of Identity and the Analysis of Face”. Journal of Pragmatics 391: 639–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Conceptualising ‘the Relational’ in Pragmatics: Insights from Metapragmatic Emotion and (Im)politeness Comments”. Journal of Pragmatics 431: 3565–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stevanovic, Melissa and Anssi Peräkylä
2014 “Three Orders in the Organization of Human Action: On the Interface between Knowledge, Power and Emotion in Interaction and Social Ralations”. Language in Society 43 (2): 185–207. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Stoica, Gabriela
2010 “Lexicul socio-afectiv în româna veche. Studiu de caz – ruşine” [‘Socio-affective Lexicon in Old Romanian. A Case Study-Shame’]. In Rodica Zafiu, Adina Dragomirescu and Alexandru Nicolae (eds), Limba română: Controverse, delimitări, noi ipoteze (I), 355–66. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas Jucker
2010 “Trends and Developments in Historical Pragmatics”. In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Pragmatics, 3–30. Berlin and New York: Degruyter.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, Marina
2008 “Toward a Unified Theory of Politeness, Impoliteness and Rudeness”. In Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds), Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, 45–74. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ţighiliu, Iolanda
1998 Societate şi mentalitate în Ţara Românească şi Moldova. Secolele XV-XVII [‘Society and Mentality in Wallachia and Moldavia. Fifteenth – Seventeenth Centuries’]. Bucureşti: Paideia.Google Scholar
Verschueren, Jef
1999 Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
2000 “Notes on the Role of Metapragmatic Awareness in Language Use”. Pragmatics 10 (4): 439–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “The Metapragmatics of Civilized Belligerence” in Ulrich Busse and Axel Hubler (eds), Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English: A Contribution to Historical Pragmatics, 111–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard J.
2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 “Linguistic Politeness Research: Quo vadis?” In Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (eds), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, xi–xlvii. (Second revised and expanded edition, with a new introduction.) Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard J., Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich
(eds) 1992 “Introduction”. In Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (eds), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, 1–17. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar