Politeness, Contextual Factors and Address Forms in Italian Comedies: Developments from the 16th to the 20th Century

This contribution investigates the diachronic development of Italian address forms and politeness strategies through the analysis of six comedy plays written between the sixteenth and the early twentieth century. The study focuses on how pronouns, nouns, and honorific titles encode social relations and how their use changes according to contextual variables such as power, social distance, familiarity, gender, age, social status, and interactional setting.
Address systems are central to the expression of verbal politeness since they reflect speakers’ evaluation of interpersonal relations. In Italian, the historical coexistence and competition between T-forms and V-forms, including tu, voi, and lei, provide an especially rich field for observing shifts in politeness conventions. These changes are connected not only to linguistic developments, but also to broader social, political, and cultural transformations, including the rise of courtly behaviour, the influence of Spanish ceremonial models, the spread of honorific titles, the emergence of bourgeois values, and the later critique of excessive deference in modern society.
Methodologically, the study considers comedy as a privileged source for historical pragmatics. Although literary texts do not reproduce spoken interaction directly, theatrical dialogue offers stylised but meaningful evidence of socially recognisable patterns of address. The selected plays, from Machiavelli and Della Porta to Goldoni and Pirandello, allow to compare different periods, social environments, and character types.
The analysis shows that address forms are dynamically shaped by both vertical relations of power and horizontal relations of distance or intimacy. Over time, Italian politeness moves from more rigidly hierarchical and ceremonious models toward more complex and unstable systems, in which older forms coexist with emerging norms. The contribution ultimately demonstrates that forms of address are historically situated tools through which speakers negotiate status, identity, respect, intimacy, and social change.