“Per carità”: da formula di preghiera a espressione di disaccordo

The paper investigates the diachronic development of the phrase per carità from the thirteenth century to 1947 in the context of requests. Conventionalised as a polite request, the phrase subsequently acquires an impolite meaning. In addition, the last stage of the development represents a modification of the speech act with which per carità is commonly associated: besides being a directive, it starts expressing disagreement. The current study uses a mixed method: (i) a qualitative approach based on a historical dictionary and on the Corpus dei Galatei Italiani dell’Ottocento (CGIO) ‘Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Italian Conduct Books’, vehicles of a prescriptive politeness metadiscourse; (ii) these results are then compared with a quantitative approach using the COrpus Diacronico dell’Italiano (CODIT) ‘Diachronic Corpus of Italian’. The diachronic development of per carità has four stages: prepositional use in requests, parenthetic use in requests, parenthetic use with silencers and refusals, and elliptical parenthetic use. The earliest parenthetic uses date back to a play by Goldoni, while the first impolite uses are in Manzoni’s Promessi sposi 1840.