Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Online First

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.

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.