The Languages of Aristophanes: Aspects of Linguistic Variation in Classical Attic Greek
Abstract
By examining linguistic variation in Aristophanic comedy, Andreas Willi opens up a new perspective on intra-dialectal diversity in Classical Attic Greek. A representative range of registers, technical languages, sociolects, and (comic) idiolects is described and analyzed. Stylistic and statistical observations are combined and supplemented by typological comparisons with material drawn from sociolinguistic research on modern languages. The resulting portrayal of the Attic dialect deepens our understanding of various socio-cultural phenomena reflected in Aristophanes' work.
... Sobre Náucratis y el conjunto de emporia, véase más abajo, con bibliografía. 5 En general véase Brixhe 1988, Hall 1989, Colvin 1999, Hall 2006, Willi 2003y 2004 En el caso de Acarnienses, parece claro que es una expresión persa. Véase Willi 2004, con bibliografía completa. ...
... Véase Willi 2004, con bibliografía completa. 7 Sobre esto véase Brixhe 1988, Willi 2003 No está claro si καρβᾶνα es de etimología egipcia, cf. Dem. ...
Esta contribución presenta un estudio del contacto lingüístico más temprano entre el griego y el egipcio y los primeros préstamos léxicos que encontramos en la literatura griega. Para situar dicho contacto, se postula un escenario para este trasvase léxico en el trasiego comercial tanto en las colonias griegas en Egipto como en otros puertos del Mediterráneo, como el Pireo y Halicarnaso en época clásica.
... Комедія використовує присягання для підвищення афективності та створення додаткових імплікатур. При цьому комісивні формули є цінним джерелом для аналізу мовного різноманіття: різних стилів, діалектів і соціолектів (Willi, 2003;Fletcher, 2014). Третій розділ зосереджується на лінгвістичному аналізі елементів ідіоматичних формул. ...
Присяги і клятви в давньогрецькій культурі є знаковим явищем, тому в останні десятиліття вони привертали неабияку увагу дослідників: Sommerstein, A. H., & Fletcher, J. (2007) та Sommerstein, A. H., & Torrance I.C. (2014), а також порівняно недавнішні роботи, Lateiner (2012), Klosko (2019) та Van Hove (2021). Водночас жанр комедії, і арістофанівський матеріал зокрема, є майже недослідженою цариною для вивчення окресленого обʼєкту дослідження – комісивних комунікативних актів та відповідних їм давньогрецьких ідіоматичних мовних формул.
... Ehrenberg's (1943, p. 13) 'sociology of Old Attic Comedy' demonstrated that Aristophanes' comedies preserved the 'atmosphere' of Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries, saying "We shall best grasp and comprehend the 'atmosphere' … when a source answers our questions without intending to do so". This methodology was explicitly transplanted into the field of linguistic variation by Willi (2003a) on the basis that while Aristophanes was obviously parodying certain linguistic genres, he wasn't attempting to answer fundamental sociolinguistic questions, but rather trying to tell a story and make his audience laugh. This enables us to credit his comedies with some explicatory value for contemporary spoken Attic. ...
... Dies ist eine gesamteuropäische Entwicklung des Humanismus, die im griechischen Drama der Antike ihre Wurzeln hat (vgl. Zimmermann 2014, Willi 2003. Ab dem 16. ...
... 27 See Foucault (1979). Dover's treatment of Aristophanes' style (1970) is purely linguistics-based -likewise, Colvin (1999) and Willi (2002;. While operating within the horizon of philological positivism, Taillardat (1965) remains the most comprehensive study on Aristophanes' metaphorics. ...
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?
The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism.
These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.
... En segundo lugar, y en relación con lo anterior, la aplicación del modelo variacional permite separar, al menos teóricamente, el dominio de lo coloquial como variedad estilística prototípica de la inmediatez comunicativa, de lo conversacional, como conjunto de prácticas asociadas a la interacción hablada como situación pragmática. El presente estudio tiene como propósito general profundizar, precisamente, en este último aspecto, el de la interacción comunicativa y su representación en el diálogo literario en griego antiguo, con el objetivo de explorar la estructura que articula 3 Véanse, entre muchos otros, los estudios tradicionales de Adrados (1975), Stevens (1976) y López Eire (1996, y los más recientes de Willi (2003), Collard (2005) y López Eire (2006. 4 Entre la mucha bibliografía publicada sobre estilística platónica destacan los trabajos recogidos en Thesleff (2009). ...
Este trabajo estudia los usos de la interjección εἶἑν en el corpus platonicum con auxilio de la metodología del Análisis de la Conversación. El examen de la posición en la organización secuencial de la interacción hablada que ocupan los turnos que contienen la interjección determina que el uso prototípico de la expresión se dé en contextos de cierre secuencial, en posición de inicio de turnos que forman parte de posexpansiones. La alta frecuencia de este uso puede explicar la especialización y convencionalización de la interjección como fórmula de cierre y apertura de nueva secuencia en su uso interactivo y, de manera menos frecuente, también en contextos polifónicos en el seno del discurso monológico.
... Two areas which have been particularly relevant are those metalinguistic comments which deal with the social dimension and with the historical dimension of the Ancient Greek language. Metalinguistic comments aimed at the social dimension of Ancient Greek imposed social categorizations of reality such as barbarian vs. Greek (Hall 1989, 1997, 2002, Gruen 2012,6 non-Attic vs Attic (Colvin 1999, Willi 2003, male vs. female (Willi 2003: 157-197;up-to-date ref-1 See Dickey (2007) for a guide; useful companions include Matthaios, Montanari & Rengakos 2011, Montanari, Matthaios & Rengakos 2014, and Montanari 2020. 2 See Matthaios 1999and Schironi 2018 for comprehensive studies of the extent of linguistic knowledge that we can carefully infer to have been derived from Aristarchus. 3 See Sluiter 1990. ...
While ancient metalinguistic resources such as lexica and scholia are increasingly studied in the field of ancient scholarship (Montanari 2020), they are investigated less within the historical sociolinguistics of Ancient Greek. Analysing the Atticist lexica by Phrynichus, Moeris and Aelius Dionysius, this article illustrates the historically persistent connection between social perception of and diachronic change within Ancient Greek. Although the historical relevance of Atticist prescriptivism has been observed, the evidence that these social evaluations provide for Post-Classical Greek language change is rarely assessed systematically (except for objectionable ideological reasons). I demonstrate that the Atticist lexica display metalinguistic awareness of the major mor-phosyntactic changes characterizing Post-Classical Greek (pace Lee 2013:286): paradig-matic (e.g. analogical levelling in verbal system of endings, voice and augment), category changes, category renewal (e.g. dual, pronouns, periphrasis), syntactic change (category expansion of ἔμελλον and τυγχάνω) and case changes (e.g. from case to prepositions).
... Una excelente tesis doctoral sobre la cuestión fue presentada por Christiaan Leopold Caspers en 2011 y, aunque su trabajo tiene mucho que ver con nuestros intereses, hemos seguido una línea muy diferente, ya que Caspers se preocupará sobre todo de las ideas de Eurípides acerca del lenguaje en vinculación con los pensadores sofistas como Protágoras, Antifón y Gorgias. Otros trabajos en la misma línea serán los de Downing (1990), Kraus (1987) y Willi (2003). 9 Cf. ...
En la tragedia de Eurípides, habrá ocasiones sumamente significativas en las que la escritura juegue un papel muy importante. Intentaremos estudiar la relación entre el responsable de la escritura, el propio texto escrito, su lector inmediato, los oyentes de la lectura y el receptor interceptor en Ifigenia en Áulide de Eurípides. Hemos analizado en otra ocasión esta relación en Ifigenia en Táuride, donde, según creemos, se reflejan múltiples aristas de estas relaciones complejas vinculadas con la escritura. Nuestra propuesta consiste ahora en postular que estas relaciones se presentan de manera aún más compleja en Ifigenia en Áulide: además de su naturaleza triple (entre el escritor y el texto, entre el texto y su lector, entre el lector y los oyentes), se presentan otras relaciones: la escritura y su reescritura, el cambio de opinión del escritor y la lectura forzada, ajena a la voluntad del escritor. Estas complejidades de relaciones constituirán una clave para la correcta interpretación de la tragedia.
... Βιβλ. X, [35][36][37]. ...
In Clouds, Aristophanes deals with a wide range of educational issues of the kind which recur in all cultures throughout the world. What is his intention when dealing with Socratic way of learning and teaching (initiation-language and terms of philosophical activity in phrontistêrion)? In this comedy we find opposing values such as the traditional aims of education and the 'modern' beliefs of sophists. By using certain learning techniques he highlighted cultural polarities and incongruities (Better Vs Worse Argument), so he emphasized the dichotomy between the empty theorizing of the new intellectuals and the real practical needs of education (i.e. learning skills, implementation in praxis etc.)
... 13. Es sabido que los efectos cómicos pueden ser creados a partir del empleo de un vocabulario especializado fuera de sus contextos normales, como ha sido examinado en varios trabajos interesados en la dimensión del lenguaje en la comedia aristofánica (Kloss 2001;Willi 2003;y Beta 2004). Willi (2003, p. 73-76, cuadro 3.1) ofrece una lista de términos legales (fundamentalmente a partir de Avispas) y, aunque concluye que en gran medida se trata de palabras que no corresponderían a un discurso de especialistas (p. ...
p>A pesar de que suele decirse que, a diferencia de las obras aristofánicas, la comedia de Menandro no se caracteriza por incluir referencias al derecho ateniense, un análisis de sus piezas conservadas permite apreciar un número considerable de alusiones a leyes, litigios y procedimientos judiciales. El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar dos pasajes en que se despliega ese recurso del plano jurídico ( Sam. 570-588; Her. 18-40) con el fin de examinar las estrategias mediante las cuales allí Menandro manipula literariamente el derecho. En particular, se relevará en ambos textos la voluntad por apelar de modo genérico y vacilante al universo del derecho. A partir de una comparación con el pasaje de Escudo 174-189, se concluirá que la imprecisión y la vaguedad –características privilegiadas de estas referencias– replican los malentendidos tipos de los enredos cómicos y las incertidumbres de status con las que los argumentos de las piezas suelen revestir a sus personajes.</p
Background. This paper investigates the pragmatic and sociolinguistic features of oaths in the corpus of Aristophanes' comedies, with a particular focus on "Acharnians" and "Lysistrata." From a communicative perspective, oaths are part of a complex ritual that combines verbal and non-verbal actions to confirm the truthfulness of a declaration and ensure the fulfillment of promises through an appeal to a deity. Typically, concise formulas invoking higher powers generally introduce the declaration and only occasionally specify sanctions for breaking the oath. Thus, oaths function not only as commissives, expressing promises and commitments, but also as representatives, focusing on the truthfulness of statements; expressives, enhancing the emotional background; and declaratives, performing speech acts. Methods. This article employs structural and corpus methods, functional and discursive analysis, conversational analysis, and hermeneutic techniques. Results. Using constructivist approaches to language study, the article analyses multifunctional idiomatic units, considering their structural elements such as particles, theonyms, noun case forms, articles, and sentence position. The analysis reveals that variations in these elements create pragmatic and sociolinguistic implicatures related to the presence or absence of propositional or presuppositional negation, focus of attention, modification of the illocutionary force of the utterance, and representation of the speaker's socio-cultural identity. Specifically, gender, dialectal, thematic, and genre-stylistic markings of the formulas are identified. Conclusions. The application of constructivist and hermeneutic methods allows for the examination of idiomatic oath formulas on both the local and discursive levels, uncovering implicit meanings essential for comic effects that cannot always be reflected in translations. A corpus analysis of formula variability in dramatic genres highlights their stylistic predominance in comedy and conversational style in particular. The study concludes with a comprehensive examination of a fragment from "Lysistrata" (78-89) to reveal the contextually driven dynamics of the oaths.
Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that fill the predicate slot of a sentence, such as to make a suggestion in I made the suggestion that she join us. While qualifying as semantic-lexemic phrasemes (collocations and idioms) in Mel’čuk’s Sens-Texte framework, they sit at the lexicon-syntax interface. They qualify as verbal multi-word expressions lexically speaking and form complex predicates syntactically. In classical and post-classical Greek, support-verb constructions form an internally heterogenous group of constructions, yet one that has existed since the earliest records of the language and survives into the modern variety. The present chapter capitalises on the over 2000 years of continuous written history of Greek, and the internal heterogeneity of the group of support-verb constructions, in that it investigates the origins and pathways of three members of this group in the literary (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and documentary (Duke Database of Documentary Papyri) corpora of Greek. The bulk of documentary texts dates from the 3rd c. BC onwards, whereas the earliest literary texts date from around the 8th c. BC. The variety of sources allows us to trace the three structures of interest through the centuries in varying environments and thus to trace traditions and independent developments. δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi existed as a collocation ‘to give judgement(s)’ from archaic times and into the medieval period, in classical times, the idiom δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi ‘to pay the price for one’s actions’ arose and became indexed for the technical and higher registers. In χάριν ἀπολαμβάνω kharin apolambanō ‘to receive a favour’, the prototypical compound ἀπολαμβάνω apolambanō seems to be diatopically and subsequently diastratically indexed but retreats into the higher registers after the classical period; the canonical simplex verb λαμβάνω lambanō predates it in early classical verse and postdates it. προσέχω τὸν νοῦν prosekhō ton noun exists as an idiom especially in medical discourse from at least classical times onwards but in parallel also as a pragmateme from archaic times onwards. Support-verb constructions are a pattern that is considered near universal in languages, such that especially the methodological tool of the support-verb-construction field developed and drawn upon in this chapter is transferable beyond Greek.
What if formularity, meter, and Kunstsprache in Homer weren't abstract, mechanical systems that constrained the poet's freedom, but rather adaptive technologies that helped poets to sustain feats of great creativity? This book explores this hypothesis by reassessing the key formal features of Homer's poetic technique through the lenses of contemporary linguistics and the cognitive sciences, as well as by drawing some unexpected parallels from the contemporary world (from the dialects of English used in popular music, to the prosodic strategies employed in live sports commentary, to the neuroscience of jazz improvisation). Aimed at Classics students and specialists alike, this book provides thorough and accessible introductions to the main debates in Homeric poetics, along with new and thought-provoking ways of understanding Homeric creativity.
Theorizing about language and its place in the world began long before Plato and Aristotle. In this book, Jacobo Myerston traces the trajectories of various proto-linguistic traditions that circulated between Greece and Mesopotamia before the institutionalization of Greek philosophy. By following the threads of transcultural conversations, the author shows the impact of Mesopotamian semantics and hermeneutics on early Greek thinkers. He reconstructs the Greek appropriation of Mesopotamian semantics while arguing that, despite geographical distance and cultural constraints, the Greeks adopted and transformed Babylonian cosmological and linguistic concepts in a process leading to new discoveries. This book covers conceptions of signification present in cuneiform word lists, esoteric syllabaries, commentaries, literary texts like Enuma elish, Gilgamesh, Hesiod's Theogony, and the Homeric Hymns as well as the philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus.
This chapter examines Sophocles' plays in the light of face-threat politeness theory. It deals with the subject under the following headings: face-threat politeness theory, positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record strategies, and politeness and characterization.
The article revisits Aristophanes’ Daitales fr. 233 which is often taken as (the only) evidence of Homeric glosses being drilled by Athenian youth as part of their school education in 5th c. BC. The author discusses in detail the context of Aristophanic citation in Galen’s work, the state of the text of the fragment and its modern interpretations. In fact, nothing in the text itself directly suggests that learning glosses was part of the traditional school education in Athens. On the contrary, it can be argued that Aristophanes presented glosses as linguistic innovations and intellectuals studying them as sophists. The parallels between Daitales and Clouds, as well as Plato’s Kratylos and other fifth-century texts must be taken into account when interpretingthe dialogue between the Father and his Son in fr. 233. As a conclusion, the author suggests that the characters of Daitales should be interpreted differently: the Old Man in this episode of the play is not opposing the sophistic teachings, but rather using these in his argument as an instrument to demonstrate the Licentious Son his ignorance. The latter is apparently not a follower of the sophists and defends himself with his more practical knowledge of legal terms.
This paper examines impoliteness in ancient Greek, taking into account the linguistic structure of silencers and dismissals, their communicative functions and their gender distribution in three comedies by Aristophanes. Silencers and dismissals serve a number of different communicative goals: reinforcing disagreement, creating comic effect, and advancing the plot. We will analyse the possibilities that speakers have at their disposal to express them, and the interference that occurs with other speech acts that are conceptualised in a similar way.
The mutability of Philokleon's generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ in the second half of the play, and it is in the scene with the αὐλητρίϲ (‘ aulos -girl’), Dardanis, that the old man most explicitly plays the part of an irresponsible youth waiting for his son (in the role of father) to die. However, inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. More subtly and extensively, Bowie has shown how the three agones in which Philokleon unsuccessfully engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen's life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury. However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. This article will show how Aristophanes constructs this third lifecycle (counting Bowie's agones and his literal maturation before the play's action begins) before considering its implications for the wider characterization of Philokleon and in particular the final scene.
En este trabajo nos proponemos reflexionar sobre cuestiones generales de la traducción de textos clásicos antiguos, en particular de teatro griego –dada su naturaleza de libretos pensados para la escena–. A su vez, a partir de nuestra experiencia como traductores de Aristófanes, así como de los testimonios de otros traductores del mismo autor, nos ocupamos de puntualizar una serie de dificultades –no exhaustivas–, a la hora de trasponer la lengua aristofánica al español, entre otras, los juegos lingüísticos, los nombres parlantes, el léxico obsceno, los coloquialismos, las menciones a los hechos y personajes de su tiempo.
This paper aims to examine whether imperatives are used in the same or a similar way in forensic, symbouleutic, and epideictic orations, what the semantic differences are between addressing the audience in the imperative and the so-called mandative subjunctive (which conveys requests, suggestions, and recommendations) or prohibitive subjunctive (which instructs the audience to avoid actions), and what impact these two moods are intended to have upon the judges and onlookers. It will be argued that subjunctives, when used in main clauses (those in subordinate clauses are not examined), take their level of forcefulness (i. e., how polite and discreet they are) from their immediate context, and that, in some instances, they may have a similar semantic force and persuasive potential to imperatives.
This paper argues that Lampito, the Spartan character who takes part in the pacifist plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC), has been inspired by both parents of Agis II, the king of Sparta who led the war against Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War and fortified Deceleia in 413 BC. Agis’ mother bore the quite rare name of Lampito as well; his father, the ‘pacifist’ King Archidamos II, voted against the war at the Spartan Assembly in 432. Aristophanes knew of Archidamos’ speech from oral tradition, possibly from the report of the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta or, alternatively and more probably, from public readings of Thucydides’ account of the pre-war debate that took place in the Spartan Assembly.
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.
This paper examines the use of prayers that are denoted by the verb euchomai , and their function as a means of affecting the cognitive/emotional disposition of people in forensic, symbouleutic and epideictic orations. It is argued that (references to) prayers may be of explicit or implicit character, and that they serve a variety of purposes: to secure the goodwill of the audience for the speaker; to present his character and civic/political qualities positively, while attacking, undermining and incriminating opponents for religious and political misconducts; to invite people in court or in the Assembly to think they are inspected by an invisible yet omnipresent divine audience; to refer to patriotism; and to triangulate relations between the speaker, his opponents and the audience.
To complement existing synchronic typological studies of the marking strategies of (past) habituality, this paper details the diachronic paths leading to and from past habitual constructions. The rich corpus evidence from the diachrony of Ancient Greek demonstrates at least four source constructions: (1) past counterfactual mood (in optative and indicative), (2) futures in the past, (3) iteratives (with -sk) and (4) lexical sources with semantic affinity to habituality (volition, habit, love). It is argued that the former two acquire habitual meaning through an invited inference of epistemic certainty of the statement by the speaker: what certainly would have happened in the knowable past is implied to be characteristic of the past. The past forms with the so-called iterative -sk (3) suffix follow the cross-linguistically frequent evolution of pluractional constructions through a form of semantic bleaching: past iterative > frequentative > habitual > habitual imperfective. Lexical sources (4) first acquire habitual meaning in the present after which only the more heavily grammaticalized ones receive past habitual usage through semantic bleaching and generalization of usage (as reflected by host class expansions). The paper is concluded with a diachronic map of these paths into habituality and the paths leading from past habituality into other domains such as genericity.
Rodríguez-Piedrabuena, Sandra (2022), «Ejes de cortesía lingüística en Eurípides», Veleia, 39, 173-192. (https://doi.org/10.1387/veleia.22353).
This paper provides an analysis of the distribution of deference and insults with regard to three linguistic politeness axes: Speaker-addressee, speaker-referent, speaker-bystander. In the following example, Theseus insults the Herald in the speaker-bystander axis, since he abusively speaks of him to a third participant:
E.Supp.426-28: κομψός γ’ ὁ κῆρυξ καὶ παρεργάτης λόγων.
The herald is a real smart-alec and over-argumentative.
The scale, on the one hand, of insulting and, on the other, of deference, works inversely. Therefore, a semi-circular continuum of pragmatic in-/sincerity is advanced. The S-addressee axis is the most unstable zone, both for the expression of deference and insults because it leaves way to over-and under-politeness, respectively. The S bystander axis is more effective both for the expression of deference and for conveying insults.
The expression καλῶς ἔλεξας can be literally translated as «you spoke beautifully», «you spoke well». The departure point of this paper is to examine how this formula works beyond its propositional meaning. The distribution of καλῶς ἔλεξας and variants is examined in terms of their position on the sequence organisation of turns at talk. Likewise, the formulae are analysed with regard to two key factors in Politeness Theory, namely Power and Distance, i.e. the difference in the status and the degree of familiarity between participants, respectively. The formula καλῶς ἔλεξας appears mostly in the second part of an adjacency pair or at third position, viz. as a post-expansion to an adjacency pair. In addition, καλῶς ἔλεξας is mostly uttered by characters with greater power to ones with less power in the interaction. As a result of this research, it is possible to explore the difference between agreement and approval and the formulae associated with these two different speech acts. Since approval is expected to be uttered by characters with greater power in the interaction, the formulae associated with it can work as taxemic markers, that is, markers of non-symmetric interactions between participants of different status.
This paper, focusing on and discussing salient passages from the whole corpus of Attic forensic speeches, examines the use and purposes of imperatives for persuasion. The main argument it puts forward is that imperatives should not be seen as an improper, impolite or abrasive means of communication in the law-court, but rather as a decisive and confident way of sustaining a triangular relation between the speaker, his opponent and the audience. The speaker, through the use of imperatives, talks about, and intermittently to, his opponent and conveys messages to the audience about him. These messages, combined with references to religion, patriotism, ancestral glory and the very existence of the polis , give the potential to orations to influence the verdict of the judges and determine the outcome of trials.
This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys . 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus . By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates’) become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever.
After Plutus’s recovery of his eyesight and the subsequent redistribution of wealth, an old woman, probably a hetaira, is suddenly abandoned by her young lover, who is now financially solvent and in no more need of her (Aristophanes’ Plutus, ll. 959-1096). The expression of her complaints —in front of Chremylus, the comic hero, and also of the young man, who approaches the hero’s house in order to express his gratitude to the god— results in an episodic scene devoted to the exposition of material precariousness of her decayed body. Behind this comic denigration, usual against old and ugly persons, there are also exposed various forms of body apprehension very subtly, on which this paper intends to explore. We refer to the affective and sensitive construction of corporality, to the dynamics of body language, to the physiological imprint of immateriality (such as pleasure or pain), among several aspects that prove the author’s special interest in the body.
This thesis aims to understand the social structures and normative language that underpinned the concept of law in the Greek poleis of the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, and the ways their legal cultures evolved as they began to produce written legislation. It will begin by identifying the social structures recognised in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, and the areas of dispute that appear to have triggered formal resolution processes, and use these to examine the mechanisms for regulating issues of violence, sexual access, property and inheritance before written law, and consider the concerns that may have driven poleis to seek new solutions to social problems. Since law is as much a phenomenon of language as of behaviour, it will then proceed to analyse the syntactical structures and diction for articulating norms in the oaths and gnōmai of Homeric and Hesiodic verse and will show that the capacity to produce complex, prescriptive, structured rules which expressed the consequences of actions was already in use in Hesiodic collections of normative principles and Homeric promissory oaths. It will also seek to compare these features with societies in the Near East which suggest that the Greeks’ normative culture did not develop in isolation but was also likely to have engaged with the customs and legal systems of their neighbours. This will then inform a comparison of the syntax and beliefs evident in written laws with the use of similar structures in our earliest poetic sources. It will argue that laws drew on key sources of cultural authority through their sense of both divine and community justice, while the language of written laws made use of existing diction for expressing consequences of actions and constructing formalised procedures. Finally it will examine how written laws became embedded in the polis’ wider normative culture, the changes they brought about and the ways they used or left space for existing legal behaviours. It will argue that the links between legal text and ‘oral law’ were a fundamental part of this evolution, using similar language and methods of dispute resolution to the areas of conflict identified earlier, and even using oral means of communication to be more widely propagated and understood. However, it will also consider the ways that written law changed the relationship between the citizens of Greek poleis and their laws, through their monumental presence and distinctive organisation. It will argue that, while the language for articulating law was rooted in earlier normative diction, the act of writing such rules down could have functioned as a means to channel the process of adjudication and maintain its consistency. It will also examine the cultural impact of written law as it changed the Greeks’ understanding of how rules could be created, with traditions of stories growing up around written law, and examples of laws being used alongside other norms both as sources of evidence, but also as a kind of moral education in philosophical and forensic discourse.
En este trabajo se identifican y describen los procedimientos de cortesía y descortesía verbal que se emplean en el tercer Mimiambo de Herodas y se estudia el papel que estos parámetros lingüísticos juegan como medios para la caracterización.
Time and form is a collection of essays on philosophy, art and politics based on courses held by Swedish and Brazilian scholars between 2006 and 2013, in the realm of the Linnaeus-Palme exchange program supported by Internationella programkontoret för utbildningsområdet (Sweden), under an academic cooperation agreement signed between Södertörn University (Sweden) and Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The aim of this academic cooperation was to foster a reflexive dialogue between two very different cultural, theoretical and pedagogical traditions with regard to pressing questions of our contemporaneity. In times of globalization, where traditional forms of life as well as established theoretical approaches are shaken in their most fundamental grounds, the search for new modes of co-existence and reflection becomes a matter of
special urgency. The different approaches and questions discussed in the present volume mirror this search for new forms of life and of theory: they are pursued here both as subjects of reflection and as ways to both as the subject of reflection and asthe way to reflect upon traditional philosophical issues.
EN: The study is an introduction to a relatively complicated reconstruction of a place of Socrates in the history of ancient philosophy. The starting point of the study is the “Socratic problem”. The aim of the study is not resolving the problem, but rather a thorough problematization of it. SK: Učebnica je uvedením do pomerne komplikovanej rekonštrukcie miesta Sókrata v dejinách antickej filosofie. Východiskom skúmania je tzv. „sókratovský problém“. Zámerom učebnice nie je jeho vyriešenie, ale skôr dôsledná problematizácia. 1. kapitola problematizuje miesto Sókrata v kontexte dejín západnej filosofie. Ďalšie kapitoly sa zaoberajú rôznymi aspektmi sókratovského problému, pričom ho dávajú do súvislostí so sókratovským myslením – s otázkou jeho dejinného postavenia a s možnosťami súčasného premýšľania o zmysle filosofie, ktorá sa často označuje za dedičku „sókratovského obratu“.
Title: Antisthenes: Four studies Abstract: The studies included in this collection are based on preserved testimonies on the Socratic philosopher Antisthenes. The first chapter is a sketch of Antisthenes intellectual biography, which relies on more or less reliable reports about his life and work. The second chapter suggests how to reconstruct Antisthenes’ thought if we were to accept the opinion of ancient doxographers that Antisthenes was one of the most close Socrates’ followers and at the same time the forerunner of the Cynic movement. The third chapter asks whether we can read Antisthenes speech Ajax and Odysseus as examples of Socratic searching for a good life. The fourth chapter deals with the therapeutic role of practical wisdom. Two appendices are attached: Appendix 1 is an extension of the explanation of Antisthenes’ concept of practical wisdom in his speeches Ajax and Odysseus. Appendix 2 is an attempt to interpret the last words of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, which give the Antisthenes’ thought a therapeutic significance.
This article focuses on the four theogonies which are documented in some texts and testimonies of Old and Middle Greek Comedy, namely in Cratinus’ Cheirons (frs. 258 – 259 PCG), in which Pericles and Aspasia are disguised as Zeus and Hera; Aristophanes’ Birds (693 – 703), a celebrated narration of the origins of these animals, presented as older than the gods; Antiphanes’ Anthropogony , on the births of several gods and humankind; and the disagreement between Cronus and Rhea in the fragment of an anonymous play of Middle Comedy ( adespota fr. 1062 PCG). In these theogonies several aspects will be analyzed: the gods or characters whose genealogy or birth is mentioned, the means of parody of the traditional literary form of theogony, and the political and social implications present in the first two fragments, in order to offer a complete picture of the theogonies in Greek comedy and their functions according to their context.
It has long been suspected that the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was intended to evoke the historical Lysimache, priestess of Athena Polias at the time of the play’s first production. But the reasons for this (partial) identification have been relatively little discussed. This paper argues that the Lysistrata engages more closely than has traditionally been assumed with urgent political issues at Athens in late 412 and early 411 BC, in particular with the decision in summer 412 BC to broach the ‘Iron Reserve’ of 1,000 talents set aside at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 8.15.1). A possible intervention of the historical Lysimache in the controversy over the appropriate use of the ‘Iron Reserve’ would help account for various otherwise surprising features of the Lysistrata .
Nominalization is a language operation which can be realized in different degrees of strength. The most important means of nominalization, esp. introductory and postposed subordinators and suffixes, are ordered on a scale of increasing nominalization, and a set of secondary nominalization processes like restrictions on modal particles, on tense and aspect, non-finite form of the verb and genitive case of the subject, are correlated with this scale.
The different power of the nominalization processes is both of a syntactic and a semantic nature: they operate on different levels of constituent structure, lowering proportionately to the strength of nominalization; and in equal proportion, the semantic properties of the sentence decrease and those of the noun increase. The latter concerns primarily the illocutionary force, getting lost through nominalization, but then also the individuation of the event denoted by the sentence. Its components, linguistically present in the nominal complements of the sentence, become optional under nominalization, the event is generalized, typicized. While the specification of complements is normal and often morphosyntactically obligatory for the sentence, it is only supplementary for the noun, serving its individuation. This is why we normally find a proportion between increasing nominalization and an increasing typicization of the event, a transition from the proposition to the concept.
This article, based on taped interviews with foreign workers with various native languages, indicates the features common to the German of all or most of the subjects. Many of these characteristics contribute to economy of speach — e.g. omission of article, preposition, pronoun or even verb, generalization of a particular verbal form (especially infinitive), tendency to drop bound morphemes. Some, however, do not affect this — e.g. the use of du, and the tendency towards the final position of the verb. This is because the foreign workers imitate their German superiors and because their language is therefore a compromise between their own simplified forms and the German speakers' ideas of simplification.
Aristophanes’ second play, Babylonians , included an attack on state offices and politicians and, probably, the city's treatment of its allies. According to the scholia of Acharnians , the play provoked Cleon to indict Aristophanes (or the play's producer Callistratus) for άδικία and ύβρις towards the δῆμος and the βοuλη on the grounds that he treasonably embarrassed the city before strangers at the City Dionysia. Cleon may also have questioned Aristophanes’ citizenship, suggesting that the poet (or Callistratus) was really a native Aiginetan, not a true Athenian. Aristophanes returned fire at the Lenaia of 425 with Acharnians , a play that renews Babylonians ’ attack on Athens’ misguided politics and politicians. Even more important, by making a separate peace with Sparta and by offering in his speech of self-defense before the chorus to defend the enemy, the comic hero Dikaiopolis commits ‘crimes’ equivalent to those for which Aristophanes was indicted.
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Use of a similarity transform, followed by numerical integration, allowed the conservation equations describing a flat laminar opposed-jet, moist CO, diffusion flame to be solved. Predictions utilizing finite-rate, elementary combustion kinetics give excellent agreement with experiment. The flame is one-dimensional in concentrations and temperature and comprises a useful and unique tool for investigation and verification of kinetic mechanisms of pollutant formation.
There are in iambic trimeters a number of examples of hiatus where is followed by forms of , mainly in Comedy but also (very rarely) in Tragedy. These are notable because they fall outside the usual range of hiatus in drama, which covers passages with interrogative (probably the most common) and , invocatory exclamations such as , and interjections. The use seems to deserve closer attention.
Discusses the sources of prejudice against the topic of the talk of women friends, the dimensions of social context that shape women's friendships, and the major differences between male and female friendships. On the basis of prior research and an interview study, it is proposed that talk is central to close friendships between women. Interview data from 20 27–58 yr old women reveal a broad range of conversational topics among women friends. Ss reported that talk with their close friends created a mosaic of noncritical listening, mutual support, enhancement of self-worth, relationship exclusiveness, and personal growth and self-discovery. Issues pertaining to research methodology, cross and subcultural differences, and the politics of female friendship are discussed. (47 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
