29.4024, Review: Greek, Ancient; Latin; Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics: Denizot, Spevak (2017)

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Subject: 29.4024, Review: Greek, Ancient; Latin; Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics: Denizot, Spevak (2017)

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Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2018 12:11:43
From: Katharine Shields [katharine.shields.13 at ucl.ac.uk]
Subject: Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-5257.html

EDITOR: Camille  Denizot
EDITOR: Olga  Spevak
TITLE: Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 190
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Katharine Shields, University College London

SUMMARY

This volume, arising from the workshop “Pragmatics and classical languages” at
the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea in Leiden in 2015,
contains six chapters about Latin and six about Ancient Greek, divided into
three sections on speech acts, word order, and discourse markers and
particles. An introductory chapter explains why a pragmatic approach is useful
for studying Greek and Latin phenomena for their own sake, not only as part of
‘historical pragmatics’, and provides general background to establish a
framework each of the three sections. In the first section, ‘Speech Acts’,
there are chapters on ‘ὤφελον’, illocutionary force and modality, Latin ‘em’,
the vocative, words meaning ‘please’ in Latin questions; in the second
section, ‘New insights into word order’, chapters treat directives with
stative verbs, the right periphery in Greek, and the Latin and Greek versions
of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (henceforth RGDA); and in the third section,
‘Pragmatic interfaces’, topics include the case of ‘particles’, conclusive
markers in Plato’s Theaetus, the Latin question particle ‘-ne’, Greek καί, and
adversative particles in Greek. Given the range of material in this volume, it
seems appropriate to give here a summary and brief discussion of the contents
of each chapter:

Chapter 1: Pragmatics in Latin and Ancient Greek: An introduction. Olga Spevak
and Camille Denizot. 1-13. This introductory chapter gives some general
theoretical background for the volume, arranged in three sections
corresponding to the sections of the book. It situates the chapters within
existing literature, primarily that on Latin and Greek rather than within
pragmatic studies in general, but nonetheless providing a coherent framework
for the rest of the volume. 

PART 1: SPEECH ACTS
Chapter 2: Illocutionary force and modality: How to tackle the issue in
Ancient Greek. Antonio R. Revuelta Puigdollers. 17-43. This chapter first
discusses methodology for investigating modality and illocutionary force:
internal analysis of Greek data, typological parallels and comparative
material, and the works of ancient grammarians. The second part of this
chapter is a study of the development of ‘ὤφελον’ from a verb to an
illocutionary particle. This analysis is heavily dependent on the explanation
in Allan (2013), but stage IV of the development as proposed by Allan is
expanded by Revuelta Puigdollers into three separate stages, and significant
new evidence of these later phases of grammaticalization from the choice of
negation, combinations with desiderative particles and from the remarks of
ancient grammarians is put forward.

Chapter 3: Pragmatic functions of the Latin vocative. Michal Ctibor. 45-62.
This chapter argues for a greater variety of functions of the Latin vocative
than the traditional CALL and ADDRESS. The distinction made between
vocative-construction and vocative-utterance (and the subsequent Saussure
reference) at the start of the chapter seems quite unnecessary for the rest of
the otherwise very clear explanations; the discussion of CALL and ADDRESS and
their definitions in previous studies, particularly Levinson (1983) and Dickey
(2002), is very useful. Ctibor adds to these the vocative as a marker of
discourse structure (with an extensive quote from Sallust in English
translation as an example), of sincerity and guarantee, and the “reduplicated
vocative of discontent.” There are many helpful parallels with English and
other modern languages. 

Chapter 4: Discursive and pragmatic function of Latin em: Grammaticalization,
pragmaticalization… interjectionalization? Luis Unceta Gómez. 63-82. Unceta
Gómez proposes a pragmatic and discursive function for the particle ‘em’. Its
primary function is presentative, but it can also have a discourse deixis
function: this is well demonstrated through the examples. ‘em’ also becomes a
secondary interjection, expressing subjectivity or emotivity of the speaker.
This last point is not entirely convincing, given the restrictive definition
of interjections the author gives: the examples are all asides in Plautus and
Terence, where it is claimed the addressee is eliminated (and presumably,
therefore, ‘em’ cannot perform any of the discourse functions described in the
previous section), although it is conceded that the audience might be a
‘non-addressed recipient’ (p74n18). However, it seems to me that, regardless
of the emotional content, these examples could all be interpreted on the level
of textual cohesion, as reference to the previous discourse segment, showing
the audience that this is commenting on the previous segment. More discussion
of this point would be desirable.

Chapter 5: Quapropter, quaeso? ‘Why, for pity’s sake?’ Questions and the
pragmatic function of quaeso, obsecro, and amabo in Plautus. Chiara Fedriani.
83-109. This chapter explores the functions of ‘quaeso’, ‘obsecro’ and ‘amabo’
in questions in Plautus, beyond their use as politeness markers. Fedriani
describes these words as ‘Pragmatic Markers’ (PMs). Speech Act theory is
discussed more explicitly in this chapter than the others in this section, and
the examples are divided into three types of question: referential, directive
and expressive. The secondary values of these PMs (exasperation, urgency or
impatience; as a floor-yielding device; involvement or surprise; with negative
reactions or echo-questions) occur sometimes in the first and usually in the
third type of question, where they are related to personal stance, but in
directive questions they function (as with imperatives) as politeness markers.

PART 2: NEW INSIGHTS INTO WORD ORDER.
Chapter 6: Constituent order in directives with stative verbs in Latin.
Concepción Cabrillana. 113-35. This chapter combines approaches to constituent
order with stative verbs like ‘to be’, and constituent order in directives.
Monovalent and bivalent structures are analysed by speech act subtype.
Consideration is given to lexicalised expressions and they are justifiably
included in the analysis. The effect of focal quality on constituent order is
also considered. Cabrillana concludes that the type of speech act is relevant
for constituent order, as well as modality. In bivalent structures, modality
affects word order less than in monovalent structures. 

Chapter 7: The right periphery in Ancient Greek. Emilia Ruiz Yamuza. 137-58.
Polybius books 1-5 are the material for investigation of Right Periphery (RP)
in Ancient Greek. The types of syntactic structures which appear in this
position, and the functions of the RP elements in the information structure,
text structure, and the interaction between speaker and hearer are discussed.
The table on p151 shows the different structures that are used for the RP
element when it has different functions. 

Chapter 8: Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Word order and pragmatics of the Latin
original. Esperanza Torrego. 159-79. And chapter 9: Res Gestae Divi Augusti:
Pragmatic Structure and word order of the Greek translation. Jesús de la
Villa. 181-210. These two chapters discuss the word order of the RGDA. As they
point out, most previous studies of both Greek and Latin word order are based
on literary texts (Dik 2007 for Greek and Panhuis 1982 and Spevak 2010 for
Latin are the main studies used for comparison), so these studies are useful
for comparisons between literary and non-literary texts. Furthermore, the
comparison of versions of the same text in different languages can provide
evidence for differences in word order. The highlight of these two chapters is
the discussion of the points where the Greek text differs from the Latin
model, given in chapter 9 (p190-208): while those which involve a significant
change in syntactic structure don’t provide useful information for comparing
word order, different pragmatic interpretations can provide indirect evidence
for Greek word order. There are also cases where there is no pragmatic
motivation for the difference, but the difference appears to be the result of
differences in the basic word order pattern of each language. The political
motivations for particular pragmatic interpretations by Greek speakers are
given consideration. de la Villa concludes that the Greek text shows a
preference for the basic template (as for literary texts described by Dik
2007), and patterns that deviate tend to follow the Latin. These two chapters
together make an excellent case for the usefulness of research into word order
in non-literary texts, as well as those outside the Classical period: at
several points, the author stresses that firm conclusions about the reasons
for deviation from the standard pattern in Greek cannot be made since there is
not yet enough evidence for word order in non-literary texts or post-Classical
Greek, while this work is starting to fill that gap. 

PART 3: PRAGMATIC INTERFACES: THE CASE OF “PARTICLES”
Chapter 10: On the distribution of some interactive/conclusive discourse
markers in Plato’s Theaetetus. Liana Tronci. 213-34. This chapter expands on
previous work on particles in Plato (des Places 1929, van Ophuijsen 1993,
Sicking 1997) by taking account of the formal and morpho-syntactic features of
‘ἄρα’, ‘οὐκοῦν’, ‘οὖν’, and ‘τοίνυν’ (primarily position in the
sentence/discourse and verb modality), which correlate with the pragmatic
function of the particles: each particles is discussed in turn, and a summary
of the data for this is clearly presented in a table on p230. The function of
these particles under Anscombre and Ducrot’s argumentation theory (not in the
bibliography) is briefly discussed in the final paragraph. While the
conclusions about the pragmatic functions of the particles follow the previous
studies, this chapter makes a good case for the value of investigating the
combinations of formal features with which particles appear as an explanatory
tool for their pragmatic functions.

Chapter 11: Polar questions in Latin with and without the enclitic particle
–ne. Josine Schrickx. 235-55. In this chapter, building on the author’s work
on ‘-ne’ for the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, Schrickx asks firstly, what are
the pragmatic functions of polar direct questions, and secondly, whether there
is a difference between those with ‘-ne’ and those without a particle. An
overview of ‘-ne’ in Latin until Apuleius shows that it is more frequent in
direct than indirect simple questions, and in alternative indirect questions
than simple ones. It is also more frequent in Plautus and Terence than any
other author, and consequently these make up the corpus for the rest of the
chapter. Questions without a particle are more often related to the speech
situation, and certain words are more likely to occur with ‘-ne’ attached. A
convincing case for the etymology of ‘-ne’ as affirmative rather than negating
is put forward, based its function emphasising the host word. 

Chapter 12: A unitary account of the meaning of kaí. Emilio Crespo. 257-72.
This chapter argues for a unitary meaning of ‘καί’, “of accompaniment,
addition and combination which is realised with several values depending on
the context” (p271), with examples of the uses of ‘καί’ as a coordinator,
adverb of addition or of emphasis, and its function when at the beginning of a
sentence.

Chapter 13: Ancient Greek adversative particles in contrast. Rutger J. Allan.
273-301. This chapter aims for a contrastive semantic description of the most
common adversative particles, ‘ἀλλά’, ‘καίτοι’, ‘μέντοι’ and ‘μήν’. The
extensive theoretical section covers “intersubjective coordination” (Verhagen
2005), Functional Discourse Grammar, the Invited Inferencing Theory of
Semantic Change (Traugott 1999), and the polysemy approach to semantic theory
(as proposed by Mosegaard Hansen 1998 for particles), which explains
developments as extensions from a prototype. A detailed ‘typology of
adversativity’ is also given. Allan discusses under this framework in turn,
and summarises the different adversative functions in a table on p. 298. In
the conclusion, this is convincingly used to argue for the explanatory power
of a polysemy approach. 

EVALUATION

Although it would be possible to read each chapter individually as a
stand-alone study (with the exception of Chapters 8 and 9, the two studies on
the RGDA), repeated use of similar text corpora (in particular Plato for
Greek, and Plautus and Terence for Latin in Chapters 4, 5, and 11), and the
engagement with existing scholarship on Greek and Latin pragmatics feeds
threads of ideas which run through the book: topics which are treated multiple
times include the multifunctionality and polysemy of particles, questions,
grammaticalisation, and diachronic developments. The main strength of this
volume is the stimulus it provides for future research. A number of chapters
explicitly identify large existing gaps in scholarship (for example, Chapter 9
on non-literary, post-classical Greek word order), and even more suggest
further areas for research in their conclusions. 

Most of the data on which the analysis is based are presented fully, but at
times the arguments would be clearer if the tables were presented earlier in
the chapter, not just in the conclusion; at other times claims are made about,
for example, a word being more or less common with a particular enclitic, but
the numbers are not provided to back this up (or to show how strong this
inclination is), although the author presumably had them available, and such
vagueness has a tendency to undermine the points being made. Some chapters
cover the theoretical material much more thoroughly than others. 

Greek texts quoted are provided in the original alphabet along with an
orthographic transliteration, and a table on pxvi. shows the transliteration
along with the C5th/4th pronunciation (including digraphs). A foreword gives a
brief summary of each chapter. Bibliography is provided at the end of each
chapter, and there is both an index locorum and a general index at the end of
the book. 

The aims for the volume are set out in the editors’ foreword (viii) – firstly,
new insights into pragmatic phenomena, and interaction between Latinists and
Hellenists. On the latter point, Chapters 8 (Torrego) & 9 (de la Villa) on
word order in the Latin and Greek versions of the RGDA is an excellent example
of the benefits of this interaction, but one might question whether there are
many other texts where this would be so useful. Nonetheless, this volume will
be valuable for researchers of both languages, and Hellenists will be
interested to read at least the more theoretical sections of the chapters on
Latin, and vice versa. Further, the approaches in this volume could more
generally be useful for research on other corpus languages, since similar
problems of text types (p2-3) apply to, for example, Coptic or Syriac. 

Overall, this book provides useful insights for readers interested in the
specific Latin and Greek phenomena which are discussed, and a stimulus for
further research on the pragmatics of corpus languages. 

REFERENCES

Allan, Rutger J. 2013. Exploring Modality’s Semantic Space Grammaticalization,
Subjectification and the case of ὀφείλω. Glotta 89. 1–46.

Dickey, Eleanor. 2002. Latin forms of address: from Plautus to Apuleius.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dik, Helma. 2007. Word order in Greek tragic dialogue. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt. 1998. The function of discourse particles: a
study with special reference to spoken standard French. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.

van Ophuijsen, Johannes M. 1993. οῦν, ἀρά, δή, τοίνυν: The linguistic
articulation of arguments in Plato’s Phaedo. In C. M. J. Sicking & J. M. van
Ophuijsen (eds.), Two studies in Attic particle usage: Lysias and Plato,
67–164. Leiden: Brill.

Panhuis, Dirk G.J. 1982. The Communicative Perspective in the Sentence: A
Study of Latin Word Order. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

des Places, Édouard. 1929. Etudes sur quelques particules de liaison chez
Platon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Sicking, Christiaan. 1997. Particles in questions in Plato. In C. J. Ruijgh &
Albert Rijksbaron (eds.), New approaches to Greek particles. Amsterdam:
Gieben.

Spevak, Olga. 2010. Constituent order in classical Latin prose. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.

Traugott, Elizabeth. 1999. The role of pragmatics in semantic change. In
Pragmatics in 1998: Selected Papers from the 6th International Pragmatics
Conference, Vol. 2, 93–102.

Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity discourse, syntax,
and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Katharine Shields is a PhD student at University College London, working on
the linguistic features of Greek and Hittite law codes and legal texts. Her
research interests include the other languages of ancient Anatolia and digital
humanities.





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