Verbal Politeness in Italian Twentieth Century Books of Manners

The paper aims at analyzing the concept of politeness in some Italian books of manners (galatei) written in a stretch of time going from the period after the First World War up to the 1970s. The main aim is to show that galatei – wrongly neglected in pragmatic research – express a complex concept of politeness, which is not only of a normative type but includes also strategic and instrumental components. This implies that the galatei perspective on politeness encompasses a certain awareness that people abide by the social code of good manners for a multiplicity of reasons that vary in relation to the wider political, ideological and socio-cultural changes occurring in a given society.