"Signor mio, fate di me ciò che più vi piace". L'allocuzione nelle interazioni asimmetriche in italiano antico

This work aims to explore the social deixis in Italian asymmetric conversations in the XIV century. We conducted a pragmalinguistic analysis on the entirety of the dialogues in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which represents a kaleidoscope of interactants with various statuses and social identities. In ancient Italian, social deixis can be codified by a non-canonical selection of personal deixis – where both Tu and Voi can be addressed to a single interlocutor – or by having recourse to appellative forms. By a fine-grained analysis of the co-working of the two strategies, which are influenced by social factors such as status, gender or intimacy, we investigated the intricate mechanism of social deixis among different types of familiar relationships, including those between wives and husbands, and between parents and children. Additionally, we explored relationships which do not involve family bonds, in various contexts: during courting, in dialogues involving religious people, servants, self-employed workers, judges, and the king.