Che ti venga NP, a conventionalised impoliteness formula for Italian disease curses (14th–20th century)

Paternoster, Annick

doi:10.1515/9783111477084-005

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Paternoster_2025_ De Gruyter_9783111477084-005

Book chapter

Che ti venga NP, a conventionalised impoliteness formula for Italian disease curses (14th–20th century)

Paternoster, Annick ORCID Istituto di studi italiani (ISI), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera

2025

Published in:

The Grammar of Impoliteness. - Berlin - De Gruyter. - 2025, p. 129-178

English 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.

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