From requesting to alms-seeking. The politeness formula fare la carità in nineteenth-century Italy

This contribution focuses on one particular politeness formula for requests, fare la carità di 'be so good as to (give)'. The aim of the paper was to reconstruct the meanings and contexts for the usage of fare la carità di in nineteenth-century Italy. The following sources were used: conduct books, dictionaries, novels and diachronic corpora. The essay first looked at politeness metadiscourse and examined the available language advice for requests in CGIO, a corpus of 51 nineteenth-century Italian conduct books. However, as there is none available for fare la carità di, three nineteenth-century dictionaries were consulted. These findings from the metadiscourse were then read against those from a qualitative analysis covering all the examples found in two of the most influential novels of that period, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, 'The Betrothed', 1840, and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, 1883. Finally, quantitative data from the historical corpora DiaCORIS and MIDIA were provided. This combined analysis (using metadiscourse alongside qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative data) produced the following results: the formula is used in two contexts, to make a (sometimes forceful) request and to beg for a handout. Both appear in roughly equal proportions until the end of World War II. After that, fare la carità di disappears from DiaCORIS. The paper tentatively concludes that the absence of the formula from the advice on requests in conduct books may partly be explained by its use as a specialised marker for alms-seeking, since conduct books fiercely criticise almsgiving to the undeserving poor.