Paternoster, Annick 2025 This essay argues that the Italian formula che ti venga NP is a conventionalised linguistic expression of impoliteness, particularly as a disease curse, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Still used in contemporary Italian, examples such as che ti venga il gavocciolo (‘may a plague sore take you’) appear in medieval legislative texts and judicial records. Theologically, these curses were deemed sinful and blasphemous. Drawing on two historical corpora – the COrpus Diacronico dell’ITaliano (CODIT) and an eighteenth-century corpus of Carlo Goldoni’s dramatic oeuvre – the study finds 132 instances of the curse. Quantitative analysis examines subjunctive and pronoun use, word order, intensifiers, and disease nouns, revealing a preference for severe illnesses like the plague and rabies. The qualitative analysis focuses on rare benedictive uses, reinforcing the hypothesis that che ti venga NP is predominantly impolite. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogical texts provide further metapragmatic evidence of its conventionalised status. This interdisciplinary approach fills a research gap by highlighting the syntactic stability of the Che ti venga NP phrase over centuries, paving the way for cross-cultural comparisons of similar expressions. application/pdf https://susi.usi.ch/global/documents/334597 https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1334597 https://susi.usi.ch/documents/334597/files/10.1515_9783111477084-005.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/9783111477084 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1515/9783111477084-005 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/ark/12658/srd1334597 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess CC BY-ND The Grammar of Impoliteness. - Berlin - De Gruyter. - 2025, p. 129-178 Curses Disease curses Formula Impoliteness Maledictions Swearing info:eu-repo/classification/udc/81 Che ti venga NP, a conventionalised impoliteness formula for Italian disease curses (14th–20th century) http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_3248