Annick Paternoster

Summary
Stylistics of literary dialogue. The pragmatics of politeness and impoliteness. Historical pragmatics. Metapragmatics in relation to conduct and etiquette manuals.

Biography
I hold a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics and Literature from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where I subsequently lectured Terminology and Translation at the University of Leuven Campus Antwerp (formerly Katholieke Vlaamse Hogeschool). I have lectured at the Istituto di Studi italiani since its foundation in 2007. Between 2014 and 2019 I was a collaborator of the research project "The Reasons for Politeness", no. 153031. For a summary of the project and the output data, click here.

Research

My research is interdisciplinary and positioned at the intersection of the pragmatics of (im)politeness, historical pragmatics, and metapragmatics. I examine politeness (and impoliteness) from a historical perspective, focusing on formulaic, conventionalised routines that emerge in diachronic corpora of Italian. My analysis integrates literary texts with a wide range of prescriptive sources - etiquette and conduct manuals, rhetorical treatises, schoolbooks, children’s literature, etc. - which I read as sites where historical communities reflect on and regulate what counts as “polite” interaction.

2022 saw the online publication of the Corpus dei Galatei Italiani dell'Ottocento (CGIO) or Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Italian Conduct Books, a specialised corpus compiled by Annick Paternoster and Francesca Saltamacchia. The CGIO contains a representative sample of the vast production of conduct and etiquette manuals in Italy during the long 19th century, 1800-1920. To download CGIO from SwissUbase, click here.

Invited talks (2024–2025): at the conference "Lo scrittoio delle donne tra verismo e postverismo. Intellettuali, scrittrici, pubbliciste, drammaturghe tra Otto e Novecento", organised by the Verga Foundation, Catania, December 2024; at the conference "Pragmatica storica e diacronica dell'italiano: interazione tra parlanti, interazione tra categorie", University of Genoa, September 2025; at the research seminar "Les discours normatifs de la politesse", Groupe de recherche DiachroPoli, Université de Grenoble Alpes, November 2025.

Recent Publications

-2025. Che ti venga NP, a conventionalised impoliteness formula for Italian disease curses (14th-20th century). In Daniel Van Olmen, Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper and Riccardo Giomi (a cura di), The Grammar of Impoliteness. Berlin/Leiden: The Gruyter Brill, pp. 129-178. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111477084-005. 

-2024. “Amour-propre ‘Self-Love’ and Flattery: Face Pessimism in Late-Modern French Sources”, in FACE: (New) facets of a Sociopragmatic Concept, ed. by Gudrun Held, 62-86. (Studies in Pragmatics, Volume: 24) Leiden: Brill. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004702837_004

- 2024. Discernment2 and Discernment1: Does Historical Politeness need Another Binary? Special Issue ed. by Jim O'Driscoll e Michael Haugh. The Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture, pp. 59-86.

- 2022. Historical Etiquette. Etiquette Books in Nineteenth-Century Western Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Forthcoming:

-“Che ti venga il cancaro!”, maledire con la malattia in un corpus diacronico, il Gutenberg italian 2020”, in Maledire Dio. Blasfemia e repressione nell’Italia moderna - a cura di F. Barbierato e P. Scaramella, Napoli, Bibliopolis.   

- “Ne les rudoyez pas”. Rules and formulae for master-servant orders in French nineteenth-century conduct and etiquette books. In The Journal of French Language Studies.

-Saper vivere, saper leggere, saper scrivere: i manuali di etichetta di fine ottocento. In «Lo scrittoio delle donne» tra verismo e postverismo: intellettuali, scrittrici, pubbliciste, drammaturghe, tra Otto e Novecento (1850-1922), Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Catania, 5-7 dicembre 2024), 2. Vol, a cura di G. Alfieri, A. Manganaro, R. Verdirame, Biblioteca della Fondazione Verga, Serie Convegni n. 10, Catania-Leonforte, Fondazione Verga-Euno Edizioni 2025, pp. 423-438.

Public engagement

I curated, together with Francesca Saltamacchia (ISI) and Luca Saltini (Biblioteca cantonale Lugano), the exhibition “Costumi soavi, dolci maniere”. Galatei e manuali d’etichetta nel Ticino dell’Ottocento, Canton Library Lugano, from the 20th of November 2018 to the 12th of January 2019. The exhibition was funded by the Pica Alfieri Foundation, Lugano, and was accompanied by a catalogue and an anthology of etiquette books.

Radio: I have been interviewed for the BBC World Service and for RSI—Radio Svizzera italiana, Rete Due.