RRL, LXIII, 1–2, p. 73–97, Bucureşti, 2018 THE HISTORICAL VARIATION OF THE PRAGMEME ‘GREETING’ IN ROMANIAN MIHAELA-VIORICA CONSTANTINESCU 1 Abstract. The article focuses on greetings and phenomena related to greetings from the perspective of pragmatic act and speech act theories. Greetings reflect a communicative behaviour with ritual roots. The analysis is based mainly on a corpus of written texts from the 17 th – 19 th centuries and on several corpora of present-day spoken Romanian. Greetings are utterances whose goal varies across time: in the premodern and at the beginning of the modern Romanian society the goal of a greeting is both to produce gratification and to highlight the obligations of social inferiors towards their superiors, in a rigid hierarchy (the preferred allopracts being mainly nonverbal). When the social hierarchy gradually begins to lose its rigidity, greetings are used to produce gratification and social bonds or even to promote a type of self-image. In the transition from marking social obligations to marking social bonds, some ritual forms have become conventionalized, obscuring for their users their original meaning. Keywords: pragmeme, allopract, pract, greeting, speech act, ritual, convention. 1. PRELIMINARY REMARKS This article focuses on greetings and on phenomena related to greetings from the perspective of the theory of pragmatic acts (Mey 2001, 2016b) and speech act theories (Austin 1962; Searle 1965, 1969). Greetings reflect a communicative behaviour with ritual roots. Not only verbal greetings are interesting, but also some conventional, autonomous gestures that could be categorized as allopracts. Metadiscursive comments indicate newly adopted and ‘acclimatised’ forms or old ritual forms that underwent the process of conventionalisation. 1 Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu is PhD lecturer at the Department of Linguistics, University of Bucharest. Teaching and research interests: Pragmatics, Stylistics, Rhetoric, Argumentation, Romanian as a foreign language. Member of a research group dealing with the study of Romanian parliamentary discourse. Publications: articles and studies in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes; two author books: on Romanian political humour during the communist period – Umorul politic românesc în perioada comunistă. Perspective lingvistice (2012), on im/politeness in the mid- nineteenth century Romanian Principalities – Principatele române între Orient şi Occident: dinamica modelelor culturale ale politeţii şi impoliteţii în secolul al XIX-lea (revised edition 2016). E-mail: constantinescumv@gmail.com.