Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2026

Requests are a type of directive speech act in which the speaker aims to get someone to do something that that person might not have done without being asked. In the case of Arabic papyri, the scholarly attention requests have received has been limited mainly to petitions addressed to government officials and other figures of authority (Khan 1990a, b; Rustow 2020; Weitz 2022), and to commercial and private letters exchanged between equals (Grob 2010). In petitions, expressions inquiring about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the desired action, in raʾayta (‘if you think it a good idea’) or ra raʾyaka (‘think it a good idea’), are regularly invoked to mitigate the request’s sense of imposition. Similarly, Arabic papyrus letters exhibit a predictable epistolary structure with fixed expressions signalling the correspondents’ common background as a technique to mitigate the abruptness of requests formulated with an imperative (Grob 2010: 119). This paper examines another request formulation, regularly attested in Arabic papyrus letters, that of employing a verb with the meaning ‘to want’ (arāda; aḥabba) used in the first person. By tracing attestations of this formula diachronically from the seventh to the tenth century and analysing its use in context, it can be shown that constructions with I/we want in the papyri change over time from an expression of genuine desire to a conventional nicety. This change can be related to the important role of patronage and socially inter-dependent relationships in the medieval Islamic empire. It confirms a third-wave understanding of politeness as socially construed and conditioned by time and place.

This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin (Dickey 2010, 2012, 2016b), English (Kohnen 2008; Ridealgh and Jucker 2019; Jucker 2020; Groot 2024) and Dutch (Rutten and Van der Wal 2012, 2014; Rutten 2019) have received the attention of scholars for their potential to shed light on interactional norms and politeness in historical societies, the pragmatic features of historical Arabic letters have not. This article will focus on the politeness strategies employed in eight letters by two members of the same household who lived in the Fayyoum, asking their brother for material and/or financial support. This will demonstrate that these letters, similar to general trends in the wider corpus, display a preference for the use of direct imperatives to make requests. Two important mitigating strategies were employed and can be found in the use of vocatives, and the general framing of the letter through its structure and the use of formulaic elements; these are crucial to communicate the tone of the letter and establish the relationship between the initiator and the addressee. Besides these general strategies, this article also considers how the gender of the initiator of the letters contributed to the strategies that are employed in the letters, showing that social ties and related social obligations formed an important part of the framing of the requests.

This paper details two case-studies in which politeness strategies are conveyed through practices of mitigation in Italian merchant letters during the Renaissance. The first case-study concerns the successful negotiation of trade practices between Italian merchants working in London with the “merchant of Prato”, Francesco di Marco Datini. The second case-study looks at the collaboration between local merchants from Milan and the Datini merchants back in Tuscany. How were practical goals requested and achieved? And what were the linguistic manifestations of such requests? What “work” is language doing when we examine the pragmatics behind (im)politeness in letter writing? This article aims to investigate these questions in a corpus of merchant letters from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The results show that negotiation occurs through indirect requests, shedding further light on how politeness is expressed in a framework of historical pragmatics.

Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004] and Tiisala [2004]) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective (Nevala 2004a). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014), we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the many changes occurring in the system of forms of address, which includes both nominal and pronominal forms, can be modelled sociopragmatically, with reference to both sociolinguistic factors and politic behaviour in the sense of Watts (2003). We also observed differences between the private letters in our corpus and a limited number of business letters that we had at our disposal at the time, and it is this issue that we explore in this paper. On the basis of a recently compiled subset of business letters by seventeenth-century merchants (van der Wal and Rutten 2024), of whom we also have private letters, we first analyse the distribution of forms of address in the business letters against the background of what we know about private letters in general. We then compare qualitatively the use of forms of address in the business letters with private letters by the same writers, focussing on three prolific authors.

Requests are speech acts that ask somebody to do something that they might not have done without being asked. They impose on the addressee. In Present-day English, a range of linguistic devices are often used to make this imposition more palatable, such as questions about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the required action and the use of the courtesy request marker please. However, this form of non-imposition politeness is relatively recent. In this paper, I focus on the politeness of requests before the onset of non-imposition politeness (i.e., in the eighteenth century). In the data consisting of the four-million word Corpus of Long Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novels (epicol18), polite requests rely on what I call “supplication politeness” rather than “non-imposition politeness”. They regularly use a format that includes a performative speech act verb, such as “I beg you…”, “I beseech you…” or “I entreat you…”. The courtesy request marker of choice was pray, a grammaticalised version of I pray you. Both of these elements frame the speaker in the role of a supplicant begging the addressee to do something rather than as an advice giver inquiring after the addressee’s willingness or ability to do it.