Plàcia a Déu ‘May it Please God’: Constructions with the Verb Plaure ‘Please’ in Medieval Catalan

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to discuss some uses of subjunctive constructions formed with the verb plaure ‘please’ in medieval Catalan. These constructions were used as permission requesting directives, and later, as indirect directives. In a group of the medieval Catalan occurrences the speaker applies for God’s or another divine persons’ consent. This paper demonstrates that the construction (no) plàcia a Déu ‘may it (not) please God’ became a conventionalized phrase with a special role in interpersonal interactions, arguing that it followed a specific path of semantic change and underwent subjectification. As to the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis, the aim of the present paper is to argue for a comparative stance and for a qualitative contextual analysis in order to identify illocutionary values of utterances surviving in written form. The findings show that, instead of analyzing only the speech act verbs themselves, it is important to take into account further factors as well, e.g. the social context of the interaction, encyclopedic information, the content and “weight” of the request, the cultural context of the period, and the structure of the interaction. Moreover, it is worth considering the whole semantic and functional field, investigating together constructions that are suitable to perform illocutionary acts belonging to the same type.