Pragmatica storica dell’italiano: ieri, oggi, domani

The aim of this paper is twofold: it seeks to provide both an introduction to the volume and a reasoned overview of the historical pragmatics of Italian, which constitutes the thematic and methodological thread uniting the contributions of this special issue. The paper offers a critical synthesis of key findings from previous studies in historical pragmatics, with particular focus on the Italian language, and re-evaluates the current state of the field along with recent trends in diachronically oriented pragmatic research on Italian, through which the contributions in this issue may also be contextualized. Drawing on these observations, the paper concludes with a discussion of a set of desiderata intended to guide the future development of the discipline.