Pragmatic Approaches To Latin And Ancient Greek

Pragmatics forms nowadays an integral part of the description not only of modern languages but also of ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. This book explores various pragmatic phenomena in these two languages, which are accessible through corpora consisting of a broad range of text types. It comprises empirical synchronic studies that deal with three main topics: (i) speech acts and pragmatic markers, (ii) word order, and (iii) discourse markers and particles. The specificity of this book consists in the discussion and application of various methodological approaches. It provides new insights into the pragmatic phenomena encountered, compares, where possible, the results of the investigation of the two languages, and draws conclusions of a more general nature. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on pragmatics in general and to scholars of Latin and Ancient Greek in particular.

This volume collects papers on pragmatic perspectives on ancient theatre. Scholars working on literature, linguistics, theatre will find interesting insights on verbal and non-verbal uses of language in ancient Greek and Roman Drama. Comedies and tragedies spanning from the 5th century B.C.E. to the 1st century C.E. are investigated in terms of im/politeness, theory of mind, interpersonal pragmatics, body language, to name some of the approaches which afford new interpretations of difficult textual passages or shed new light into nuances of characterisation, or possibilities of performance. Words, silence, gestures, do things, all the more so in dramatic dialogues on stage.

The volume assembles about 50 contributions presented at the Intenational Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, held in Rome, March 2015. This Colloquium opened a new series of international conferences that has replaced previous national meetings on this subject. They embrace essential topics of Ancient Greek Linguistics with different theoretical and methodological approaches: particles and their functional uses; phonology; tense, aspect, modality; syntax and thematic roles; lexicon and onomastics; Greek and other languages; speech acts and pragmatics.

Politeness serves to manage social relations or is wielded as an instrument of power. Through good manners, people demonstrate their educational background and social rank. This is the first book to bring together the most recent scholarship on politeness and impoliteness in Ancient Greek and Latin, signalling both its universal and its culture-specific traits. Leading scholars analyse texts by canonical classical authors (including Plato, Cicero, Euripides, and Plautus), as well as non-literary sources, to provide glimpses into the courtesy and rudeness of Greek and Latin speakers. A wide range of interdisciplinary approaches is adopted, namely pragmatics, conversation analysis, and computational linguistics. With its extensive introduction, the volume introduces readers to one of the most dynamic fields of Linguistics, while demonstrating that it can serve as an innovative tool in philological readings of classical texts.

The volume assembles about 50 contributions presented at the Intenational Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, held in Rome, March 2015. This Colloquium opened a new series of international conferences that has replaced previous national meetings on this subject. They embrace essential topics of Ancient Greek Linguistics with different theoretical and methodological approaches: particles and their functional uses; phonology; tense, aspect, modality; syntax and thematic roles; lexicon and onomastics; Greek and other languages; speech acts and pragmatics.

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.

In this two-volume work, the first full-scale treatment of its kind in English, Harm Pinkster applies contemporary linguistic theories and the findings of traditional grammar to the study of Latin syntax. He takes a non-technical and principally descriptive approach, based on literary and non-literary texts dating from c.250 BC to c.450 AD. The volumes contain a wealth of examples to illustrate the grammatical phenomena under discussion, many of them from the works of Plautus and Cicero, alongside extensive references to other sources of examples such as the Oxford Latin Dictionary and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. While the first volume explored the simple clause, this second volume focuses on the complex sentence and discourse. The first three chapters examine different types of subordinate clause; the following four then explore relative clauses, coordination, comparison, and secondary predicates. Later chapters investigate information structure and extraclausal expressions, word order, and discourse and related features. The Oxford Latin Syntax will be a valuable and up-to-date resource both for professional Latinists and all linguists with an interest in Classics.