The present paper contributes to meta pragmatics, by examining the question of how historicity influences the validity of certain modern meta terms that are accepted as ‘neutral’ and ‘scientific’ in pragmatics. We argue that it is fundamental to explore the history and development of such meta terms, and also to study their historically situated meanings, in order to increase the self-reflexivity and rigour of analyses. We analyse the notion of ‘discernment’ as a case study, and we will show that the way in which the Italian equivalent of this term (discernere) – which supposedly influenced historical English understandings of ‘discernment’ as well – is used in historical Italian meta discourses contradicts the modern application of this meta term.

This article explores evaluations of impoliteness and over-politeness in crime novel dialogues, in reference to the Pragmatics of Politeness and the Discursive Model (Locher and Watts, 2005;Watts, 2003Watts, , 2005Watts, , 2010. Metapragmatic comments, in which dialogue participants evaluate the ongoing communicative behaviour, offer important insights into the values and social norms that make up interaction. Literary dialogues, as opposed to naturally occurring conversations, have the advantage of offering numerous metapragmatic comments. This study examines police investigator dialogues that contain metapragmatic comments of impoliteness and over-politeness, concentrating on two maverick figures, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh-based John Rebus and Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian Salvo Montalbano, both of whose fractiousness in regards to procedural rules extends to social norms as well. The first part of the analysis looks at impoliteness, confirming the image of the maverick for whom impoliteness is fairly stereotypical. The determining factor is police rank: I find frequent institutional, that is, legitimized, and unchallenged impoliteness by those who are higher in rank. Secondly, I look at instances of over-politeness. The inspector, who readily uses insincere politeness in order to manipulate a suspect or a witness, is sceptical when evaluating politeness in others. By not commenting on impoliteness and through extensive negative evaluations of politeness, the narrator creates a protagonist who has become disenchanted with politeness and uses impoliteness as if it were normal, appropriate behaviour.

This study examines evaluative adjectives and politeness evaluators in 9 popular etiquette books published in turn-of-the-century Italy between 1877–1914, with the aim to determine the values that are involved in the judgement of behaviour. Using Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005), I group positive evaluative adjectives in the following semantic sets: Normality, Capacity, Tenacity, Veracity and Politeness. Politeness comprises the subsets Conformity, Affection, Goodness and Pleasure. The paper establishes diversity and frequencies within the various lexical sets, which are used to design a conceptual map. The map shows the dominating ideological weight of etiquette and its core values of Normality and Conformity, which point towards intensely regulated behaviour in a large number of contexts.

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