Deverbal pragmatic markers from Latin to Italian (Lat. 'quaeso' and It. 'prego'): the cyclic nature of functional developments

This chapter describes how Latin verbs quaeso and rogo ‘I ask, I pray’, and Italian verbs prego ‘I pray’ and chiedo ‘I ask’, developed politeness-related functions, and discusses these in relation to the notion of pragmatic cycles. Through the analysis of diachronically balanced corpora of Latin and Italian, the authors analyse micro-processes and conditions that foster the gradual pragmaticalization of the markers, describing morphosyntactic contexts, textual and pragmatic properties of the verbs involved, as well as the relationship between pragmaticalization and the evolution of forms into politeness devices. In particular, they show how similar pragmaticalization patterns are at work in both languages, as only one of the verbs in each is fully pragmaticalized (Lat. quaeso, It. prego), and how these patterns can be considered a pragmatic cycle.