Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2023

This paper considers the guidelines for polite conversation and appropriate comportment presented in Cicero’s philosophical treatise De Officiis (44 bce), examining them in the light of recent scholarship on modern conduct manuals (e.g., Terkourafi [2011], Alfonzetti [2016], Culpeper [2017] and Paternoster and Saltamacchia [2017]). In particular, it considers: (1) Cicero’s attempt to impose order on conversational practices; (2) his guidelines on rebuking others appropriately (a topic often omitted from modern manuals); (3) the ways in which his views on conversation coincide with modern theories of politeness; (4) his association of polite manners with moral behaviour and social class; and (5) the role of caricature in his depictions of inappropriate behaviour.

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the first stages of the development of European politeness, through the analysis of the metalanguage of politeness used in two Latin poems with the title Facetus (Facetus: cum nihil utilius and Facetus: moribus et vita), both dating from the twelfth century. These two texts established a fertile genre of behaviour manuals, developed during the Middle Ages both in Latin and in vernacular languages, and illustrate an intermediary moment of transition from ancient conceptualisations of politeness (given that they heavily draw on Roman ideas and literature) to early modern ones. The semantic analysis of the Latin politeness meta-terms used in those poems, such as facetus, decorus, mos or decus, allows us to get a glimpse, through the emic perspective offered by these meta-terms, of the moral order underlying the code of courtly behaviour.

This paper seeks to explain the development of European politeness as a result of courtly behaviour where “complaisance” played an important role. As traces left in the so-called “language of politeness” of numerous European linguacultures show, mutual “pleasing” determined social performance in hierarchically organised societies by merging aesthetic concepts of form and order with ethical values of benevolence and charity. An analysis of the lexical item placere (‘to please’) in Early Modern Italian and French documents highlights the existence of six different formulaic usages, characterised by a high consistency in frequency, evolution and diffusion all over Europe. Appearing mainly in connection with interactive moves where will is at stake, placere-formulae represent co-operative means, which ease social relationships by conditioning and “embellishing” directives with different elements of social decorum. As acts of submission originating in the Medieval ars dictandi, they became integrated over time into the French dogma of “polished” conversation as an elitist “art de plaire” (Faret 1665). From France they spread into the European courts establishing a conception of politeness that has been underestimated in pragmatics so far.

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.

In this paper, I argue for a systematic study of the role that language contact has played in the development of German, French, Italian and Spanish address systems. While the current state of research clearly points to contact-induced changes in Early Modern European polite address, some important desiderata concerning the precise direction, nature and scope of contact influences remain. Against this background, I present historical foreign language manuals as a promising source for the comparative study of historical European address practices and their development. Through an explorative analysis of metapragmatic comments and model dialogues in selected foreign language manuals, the increasingly dynamic pressures experienced by interlocutors both to distance themselves from one another and to express solidarity come to light, as multi-level address systems emerge and mixed styles of address gain in importance.

This paper reconstructs the model of polite conversation that is outlined in two Italian conduct books, Della Casa’s Galateo (1774 [1558]) and Gioia’s Il Nuovo Galateo (1802–1827), a model which will then be compared with one detailed in the German text Über den Umgang mit Menschen by Adolph Knigge (1788). The main aim of this study is to highlight the similarities and differences in texts from different historical time periods and geographical areas, in order to identify a European model of polite conversation, whose roots lie in classical, humanist and Renaissance traditions, and which has some features that are still relevant today. There are some clear similarities between this European model and first-generation theories of politeness, despite the different intent that should distinguish “normative texts” and “descriptive models”. This raises an interesting theoretical question: when studying a social and ethical issue such as politeness, to what extent is it possible to advocate a clear separation between description and prescription?

The paper focusses on ritual “politeness” in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia from a historical sociopragmatic perspective. The analysis of ceremonial literature and memoirs aims to highlight the instrumental role that the performance of conventional gestures and the use of conventional formulae have in presenting the self/other image. The period under consideration attests to the prominence of the Ottoman cultural model in the Romanian Principalities; nevertheless, the conduct prompted by Western and Central European culture was also rapidly emerging in these borderlands at the same time. When Romanian participants shift their behaviour in intercultural interactions according to the Eastern or Western norms, the choices they make have profound implications (political, social, and cultural).

This paper presents a case study which brings together the fields of contrastive pragmatics and historical pragmatics. Specifically, we contrastively investigate the ways in which the speech act set of “farewell” – representing the closing phase of an interaction – was realised in nineteenth-century historical letters in different linguacultures, including the English, German and Chinese ones. We argue that contrastive pragmatics provides a fruitful contribution to historical research for two inter-related reasons. First, contrastive pragmatics allows us to identify similar pragmatic patterns between typologicially “close” linguacultures, such as the English and the German ones. Second, it prompts researchers to attest the validity of such patterns by comparing such typologically close linguacultures with more distant ones such as the Chinese. Our study is based on a corpus of family letters written to elderly relatives.

Etiquette has only marginally attracted the attention of politeness scholars. This article aims to fill a knowledge gap as it explores the concept in a more systematic way, using nineteenth-century prescriptive metasources from four countries (Britain, France, Italy and the United States). Etiquette is found to form a complicated, all-encompassing body of tendentially amoral, mandatory norms, adapting the minutiae of court protocol to private settings. Since the conventions of etiquette are sequentially structured as scripts with a social gatekeeping function, they can be seen as rituals – that is, schematic, performative interaction that is emotionally invested. Furthermore, given the combination of mandatory behaviour and a concern for rank (precedence), etiquette is seen as a manifestation of Discernment, although etiquette privileges non-verbal aspects of interaction, with less attention for language advice. I consider “etiquette” to be a historically and geographically situated first-order term for the analytical concept of Discernment: emerging in Europe and in North America in the late eighteenth century, it is still in use today.

In the 1960s, Swedish address practices underwent a change from an intricate system of honorifics to universal use of the informal second-person singular du. This study challenges the common characterisation of this so called “du-reform” as very quick and straightforward. Previous studies, relying on reported usage and written language, suggest that the formal pronoun ni was considered impolite, while the informal du was restricted to use amongst family and close friends. I used advertising films to trace diachronic usage patterns in dialogue and in addressing the viewer. My study shows evidence of change over a period of fifteen years. It also shows that the formal address pronoun ni and informal address by du were both used in addressing the viewer long before the du-reform. The du-reform is a noteworthy change in European politeness behaviour. Today, the informal du is the unmarked address form in Swedish.

Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders’ own understandings – that is, French people living in Finland and Finns who live or have lived in France – my study lies within the framework of a discursive approach, and draws upon data from five focus-group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis. My study shows that the different forms of government, levels of urbanisation and branches of Christianity reportedly influenced differences in Finnish and French politeness. Yet, during participants’ stays in these respective countries, an affinity towards politeness was described as stemming from globalisation. Future research should examine if the frames of expectations of politeness in Europe are generally moving closer towards one another.