Language of Classical Literature - Böcker

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.

This book focuses on one of the basic – yet still rather neglected in Latin linguistics– grammatical categories: comparison of adjectives and adverbs. Which Latin adjectives and adverbs allow for comparative and superlative forms, and which ones do not? This question may seem trivial to those working with modern languages but is not at all trivial in the case of a dead language such as Latin that has no native speakers and a limited corpus of written texts. Based on extensive data collection, the book aims to provide today’s readers of Latin with some objective criteria for determining the answer.

If you read a work by Cicero or Seneca and then open The Pilgrimage of Egeria, Augustine, or Gregory of Tours, you will soon notice that Late Latin authors quote authorities differently. They provide a perfect example of synthesising two potentially conflicting traditions – “classical” and “biblical”. This book examines how the system of direct discourse marking developed over the centuries. It focuses on selecting marking means, presents the dynamics of change and suggests factors that might have been at play. The author guides the reader on the path that goes from the Classical prevalence of inquit to the Late innovative mix of marking words including the very classical inquit, an increased use of dico, the newly recruited ait, and dicens, influenced by biblical translations. The book suggests that Late authors tried to make reading and understanding easier by putting quotative words before quotations and increasing the use of redundant combinations (e.g. “he answered saying”).

This study investigates the role of embedded narratives in Silius Italicus’ Punica, an epic from the late first century AD on the Second Punic War (218–202 BC). At first sight, these narratives seem to be loosely ‘embedded’ in the epic, having their own plot and being situated in a different time or place than the main narrative. A closer look reveals, however, that they foreshadow or recall elements that are found elsewhere in the epic. In this way, they serve as ‘mirrors’ of the main narrative. The larger part of this book consists of four detailed case studies.

Anyone reading an Ancient Greek text will notice the abundance of pragmatic particles (e.g. ἄρα, γάρ, γε, δέ, δή, μέν, μήν, οὖν), a much-debated and challenging class of expressions. What are their semantic contributions, and how should we account for their notorious polyfunctionality? In this book, Kees Thijs provides a state of the art of modern particle theory, which he then applies to two of the most versatile Greek particles, μήν and δή. Using a diachronically oriented polysemy approach and a large-scale, varied research corpus, Thijs offers a new, unified account that significantly improves on both traditional handbooks (e.g. Denniston) and more recent particle studies.