Politeness in 13–16th Century Catalan

Abstract

The present study aims to discuss some politeness strategies in 13–16th century Catalan, based on a corpus pragmatic analysis of requests from the Computerized Corpus of Old Catalan (Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic [CICA]), found by searching for occurrences of the speech act verbs pregar ‘ask, pray’ and suplicar ‘supplicate, beg, beseech’. Results of the present study provide evidence that politeness in 13–16th century Catalan was realized by different linguistic means than in contemporary Catalan. It focuses on some conventionally indirect strategies that consisted in using the verb voler ‘want’ to transfer the imperative force from the performance of the requested act to the hearer’s willingness. At the intersection of speech act research, politeness studies, historical pragmatics and corpus pragmatics, this study also discusses some methodological challenges of these areas.