Groundbreaking volumes in historical (im)politeness, Culpeper & Kádár (2010) and Bax & Kádár (2011), have suggested that the nineteenth century represents a transition in the linguistic and cultural meanings and realisations of politeness in Europe, between Ancien Régime and the contemporary period. In the nineteenth century, Italy is inundated with conduct books. Tasca (2004) counts 186 original titles, resulting in at least 450 different editions, a true boom, which can probably be explained by the emergence of a bourgeois, individualistic code of conduct. Our Corpus dei Galatei italiani ottocenteschi (CGIO, Corpus of Italian Nineteenth-Century Conduct Books, 2,300,000 words) contains the 50 most representative sources of the long nineteenth century.

This paper focuses on requests. Firstly, I will summarise the metadiscourse on requests, its rules and formulae as prescribed by the sources in CGIO. Requests are mainly formulated by impositives, that is imperatives, echoing Ancien Régime concerns with rank (Held 2010; Paternoster & Saltamacchia 2017). Secondly, in line with the 3rd wave politeness theory and its tenet that politeness conventions should studied through frequency and/or metadiscourse (Terkourafi & Kádár 2017), I will present a quantitative study designed to investigate the usage of requests in CGIO and raise the question whether the rules and formulae for requests are put into practice when the authors use requests themselves, in the numerous rules that make up most of the texts. I will propose a first sample of results, produced with a manual annotation based on UAM Corpus Tools (O’Donnell 2008a; 2008b). So far, results indicate discrepancies between usage and metadiscourse. In fact, usages are mainly mitigated by way of ‘shields’ (Caffi 2007) that is, the addressee is ‘hidden’ by means of impersonal verbs, passive without agent, inclusive we, general statements, whereby mitigation is obtained by the defocalization of the deictic component ‘you’.

Sources

• Paternoster Annick / Saltamacchia Francesca (compilers). Corpus di galatei italiani ottocenteschi (CGIO), in preparation at the University of Lugano (CH) with a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, project nr. 100012_153031, Le ragioni della cortesia. La nascita della cortesia contemporanea nella trattatistica comportamentale italiana dell'Ottocento

References

• Bax, Marcel, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2011. “The Historical Understandings of Historical (Im)Politeness: Introductory Notes.” In Bax, Marcel / Kádár Dániel Z. (eds) Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness, Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12/1-2, 1-24.
• Caffi, Claudia. 2007. Mitigation. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
• Culpeper, Jonathan. 2017. “The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550-1620.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18 (2): 195-213.
• Held, Gudrun. 2010. “Supplica la mia parvidade…Petitions in medieval society — a matter of ritualised or first reflexive politeness?” Journal of Historical Politeness 11/2, 194–218.
• Kádár, Dániel Z., and Jonathan Culpeper. 2010. “Historical (Im)Politeness: An Introduction.” In Culpeper, Jonathan and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds), Historical (Im)Politeness. Bern: Peter Lang, 9-36.
• O'Donnell Mike. 2008a. The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration, in Bretones C., Carmen M. et al. (eds) Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente, Almería, Universidad de Almería, pp. 1433-1447.
• O'Donnell Mike. 2008b. Demonstration of the UAM CorpusTool for text and image annotation. Proceedings of the ACL-08: HLT Demo Session (Companion Volume), Columbus, Ohio, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 13–16.
• Paternoster Annick, and Susan Fitzmaurice (eds.). Forthcoming. Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 299).
• Paternoster Annick, and Francesca Saltamacchia. 2017. “(Im)politeness formulae and (im)politeness rules: metadiscourse and conventionalisation in 19th Century Italian conduct books.” In Elena Maria Pandolfi, Johanna Miecznikowski Sabine Christopher, Alain Kamber (eds.), Studies on Language Norms in Context. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (Duisburg Papers on Research in Language and Culture), 263 - 301.