Unutrašnji i vanjski modifikatori zahtjeva u italijanskom epistolarnom korpusu iz XV stoljeća
Internal and external request modifiers in a 15th century Italian language epistolary corpus

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses internal and external request mitigation used in letters sent by the Republic of Ragusa to her ambassadors in the Bosnian Kingdom during the first half of the 15th century. The central concept on which the research is based is the face-threatening act (FTA) taken from the traditional politeness model devised by P. Brown and S. Levinson (1987). According to the traditional model, requests belong to speech acts that are intrinsically facethreatening because they represent the imposition of the speaker’s will on the interlocutor. We have approached the corpus by conducting a qualitative analysis of certain paragraphs in which the head act is clearly recognizable as the act of requesting. Based on the fact that speech acts are addressed to Bosnian nobles through the ambassador, we hypothesize that it has to be mitigated because the Republic of Ragusa is not in a position of power over the interlocutor. The results imply that numerous external modifiers are used, and that the use of internal modifiers is limited. The next step in the research is a quantitative analysis of the entire corpus with the goal of determining the frequencies of the use of different mitigators.

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