This contribution studies address forms in grammars and textbooks of several West and South Slavic languages of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, especially in the pedagogical dialogues that accompany these works. The languages in focus had been using several address forms borrowed from German (or Italian), and due to the efforts of linguistic purism, these borrowings were eliminated in the nineteenth century. The result is in all those languages a system of address pronouns consisting of the second person singular and plural. The purist efforts were motivated by the wish of restoring an older language form, or to approach an imagined ideal type of Slavic language; they are an effect of the national movements of these non-dominant ethnic groups (National Revival).
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.
This study examines evaluative adjectives and politeness evaluators in 9 popular etiquette books published in turn-of-the-century Italy between 1877–1914, with the aim to determine the values that are involved in the judgement of behaviour. Using Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005), I group positive evaluative adjectives in the following semantic sets: Normality, Capacity, Tenacity, Veracity and Politeness. Politeness comprises the subsets Conformity, Affection, Goodness and Pleasure. The paper establishes diversity and frequencies within the various lexical sets, which are used to design a conceptual map. The map shows the dominating ideological weight of etiquette and its core values of Normality and Conformity, which point towards intensely regulated behaviour in a large number of contexts.
The present study investigates commissive speech acts in the Spanish colony of Louisiana in order to present insight into Spain’s perspective on linguistic politeness in light of European regime change during the period of the French Revolution. The corpus chosen for the current study consists of 200 institutional letters penned by Spaniards in the North American colony in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. I argue that owing to their frequent mitigation commissives should not be understood as intrinsically polite speech acts. I tentatively posit that, due to evident changes in linguistic strategy employed by Louisiana Spaniards, colonial North America felt the effects of the revolutionary fervor.
In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.
In Late Modern times, both usage guides and letter-writing manuals commented on language etiquette, providing guidance on how to address specific recipients according to their rank, age, and gender, how to approach certain topics, and how to convey mutual status relying exclusively on language. Guides and manuals, however, cannot always be assumed to be accurate representations of what actually occurred in usage. In this contribution I intend to investigate these materials alongside authentic ones, in order to assess the extent to which texts convey their writers’ awareness of asymmetrical social status by placing particular emphasis on politeness moves. Special attention is paid to business discourse, where identity construal issues are crucial for the maintenance of successful networks.
This contribution studies address forms in grammars and textbooks of several West and South Slavic languages of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, especially in the pedagogical dialogues that accompany these works. The languages in focus had been using several address forms borrowed from German (or Italian), and due to the efforts of linguistic purism, these borrowings were eliminated in the nineteenth century. The result is in all those languages a system of address pronouns consisting of the second person singular and plural. The purist efforts were motivated by the wish of restoring an older language form, or to approach an imagined ideal type of Slavic language; they are an effect of the national movements of these non-dominant ethnic groups (National Revival).
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.
This study examines evaluative adjectives and politeness evaluators in 9 popular etiquette books published in turn-of-the-century Italy between 1877–1914, with the aim to determine the values that are involved in the judgement of behaviour. Using Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005), I group positive evaluative adjectives in the following semantic sets: Normality, Capacity, Tenacity, Veracity and Politeness. Politeness comprises the subsets Conformity, Affection, Goodness and Pleasure. The paper establishes diversity and frequencies within the various lexical sets, which are used to design a conceptual map. The map shows the dominating ideological weight of etiquette and its core values of Normality and Conformity, which point towards intensely regulated behaviour in a large number of contexts.
The present study investigates commissive speech acts in the Spanish colony of Louisiana in order to present insight into Spain’s perspective on linguistic politeness in light of European regime change during the period of the French Revolution. The corpus chosen for the current study consists of 200 institutional letters penned by Spaniards in the North American colony in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. I argue that owing to their frequent mitigation commissives should not be understood as intrinsically polite speech acts. I tentatively posit that, due to evident changes in linguistic strategy employed by Louisiana Spaniards, colonial North America felt the effects of the revolutionary fervor.
In this contribution I investigate linguistic strategies of making requests employed in a corpus of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals in English (Sadler 1835; Cooke 1850 [1770]; Cann 1878; Penholder 1890). The aim of the study is to establish whether linguistic prescriptions recommended to the users of the manuals reflect the contemporary shift towards negative politeness in English, as claimed in previous studies (Culpeper & Demmen 2012; Jucker 2012). The inventory of lexico-grammatical forms used to make requests will be devised by collecting examples from the sections of the manuals dedicated to commercial correspondence. The analysis of the examples reveals that the repertoire of strategies of making requests was vast, including categories such as modulated direct requests, as well as modulated indirect requests. The findings are discussed in the light of current politeness theories.
In Late Modern times, both usage guides and letter-writing manuals commented on language etiquette, providing guidance on how to address specific recipients according to their rank, age, and gender, how to approach certain topics, and how to convey mutual status relying exclusively on language. Guides and manuals, however, cannot always be assumed to be accurate representations of what actually occurred in usage. In this contribution I intend to investigate these materials alongside authentic ones, in order to assess the extent to which texts convey their writers’ awareness of asymmetrical social status by placing particular emphasis on politeness moves. Special attention is paid to business discourse, where identity construal issues are crucial for the maintenance of successful networks.