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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
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Constantinescu, Mihaela-Viorica
2023. Ritual and modern “politeness” in the Romanian Principalities during the Phanariot period. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1 ► pp. 124 ff. DOI logo

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