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Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Annick Paternoster and Susan Fitzmaurice
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 299] 2019
► pp. 75–106

Chapter 2
The Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’, 1802) by Melchiorre Gioja, politeness (pulitezza) and reason

| Università della Svizzera italiana
| Università della Svizzera italiana

In 1802 Melchiorre Gioja published the Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’), a treatise that supplants the aristocratic model based on conventional ceremonies with a model based on ragione sociale ‘social reason’. The word and its morphological derived lexemes play an important role in the argumentative architecture of the treatise. We hypothesize that reason can be considered an argumentative keyword of the treatise, i.e. a word that evokes beliefs and values that function as endoxa. We examine the collocations and the constructions in which ragione and its derived lexemes enter, and we demonstrate how different key-constructions based on ragione are used to argumentatively justify politeness evaluations. This investigation not only confirms the argumentative keyness of the reason-related constructions, but also casts light on the utilitarian nature of the social reason underlying Gioja’s view of politeness.

Keywords: argumentation, politeness, nineteenth century, Italy, reason, cultural keyword, behavioural treatise, evaluation, metapragmatic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Key words as culturally shared evaluations
  • 3.The New Galateo
  • 4.The occurrences of “reason”: Frequency and polysemy
  • 5.Social reason
  • 6. In ragione di ‘by reason of’: Economic and mathematical origins
  • 7. Per/con ugual ragione ‘for/with the same reason’ and con maggior ragione ‘with more reason’ as argumentative indicators
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.299.03sal
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