Discernment2 and Discernment1: does historical politeness need another binary?

Annick Paternoster

doi:10.1515/pr-2023-0078

Article

Discernment2 and Discernment1: does historical politeness need another binary?

Annick Paternoster
Annick Paternoster holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp (BE) and lectures Rhetoric and Stylistics at the Istituto di studi italiani, University of Lugano (CH). She pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda based on historical pragmatics, the pragmatics of im/politeness and metapragmatics, with a special interest in instructional literature in good manners. She is the author of Historical Etiquette. Etiquette Books in Nineteenth-Century Western Cultures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Together with Gudrun Held (University of Salzburg) and Dániel Kádár (Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China; Hungarian Academy of Sciences), she has edited the Special Issue Politeness in and across Historical Europe for the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (24.1).

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From the journal Journal of Politeness Research Volume 20 Issue 1

Abstract

Historical politeness scholars use Discernment as a second-order metaterm for compulsory social behaviour that is scripted according to circumstances and rank difference. However, in Renaissance courtesy books the Italian verb discernere ‘to discern’ has a first-order meaning: to individually work out appropriate behaviour when the fit of rules to circumstances is unclear. Discernment1 and Discernment2 appear to contradict each other. This paper addresses a theory gap: a theory of Discernment2 must unravel the link with Discernment1, given that Discernment1 functions as a metaterm in prescriptive politeness sources from a historical period for which scholars believe social practices are determined by Discernment2. Using a self-built corpus of ca. one hundred nineteenth-century etiquette books in US-UK English, French, Italian and Dutch, I conduct a semantic analysis of discern* (92 hits) and its collocate “tact”, tact, tatto, takt (575 hits), which point to a practical type of reasoning, to carry out a careful assessment of the unique and complex situation at hand before deciding on a course of action. However detailed etiquette scripts are, discernment (tact) is needed to process the complexity of real-life circumstances. Hence, Discernment1 and 2 appear complementary.

Keywords: discernment; etiquette; politeness; spirituality; tact

Corresponding author: Annick Paternoster, Istituto di studi italiani, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland, E-mail: annick.paternoster@usi.ch

About the author

Annick Paternoster

Annick Paternoster holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp (BE) and lectures Rhetoric and Stylistics at the Istituto di studi italiani, University of Lugano (CH). She pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda based on historical pragmatics, the pragmatics of im/politeness and metapragmatics, with a special interest in instructional literature in good manners. She is the author of Historical Etiquette. Etiquette Books in Nineteenth-Century Western Cultures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Together with Gudrun Held (University of Salzburg) and Dániel Kádár (Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China; Hungarian Academy of Sciences), she has edited the Special Issue Politeness in and across Historical Europe for the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (24.1).

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Received: 2023-09-14

Accepted: 2023-12-15

Published Online: 2024-01-24

Published in Print: 2024-02-26

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https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2023-0078

Keywords for this article

discernment; etiquette; politeness; spirituality; tact