What Good is a Rebellious Teenager? Classics and Linguistics in the Twentieth Century

Copyright © 2001 by the American Philological Association. This article first appeared in Transactions of the American Philological Association 131 (2001) 289-296. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press

How to say 'please' in Classical Latin

Copyright © The Classical Association 2012. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.Article doesn't contain an abstract

Politeness in ancient Rome: can it help us evaluate modern politeness theories?

This paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data

Me autem nomine appellabat: avoidance of Cicero's name in his dialogues

© 1997 The Classical AssociationCicero's dialogue De Finibus depicts three conversations between the author and his friends. In the course of these conversations Cicero depicts himself as addressing his interlocutors directly, using the vocative case, on 45 occasions; the other characters, however, never address Cicero at all. What is the reason for this imbalance

Hesychius continued

© The Classical Association 2007. Book review of Hansen (P.A.) (ed.) 'Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon. Volumen III:Π–Τ'. (Sammlung griechischer und lateinischer Grammatiker 11/3.) Pp. xxxiv + 404. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Cased, €128. ISBN: 978-3-11-017852-4

Forms of address and terms of reference

© Cambridge University Press 1997This paper examines the relationship between the use of names and other words in address and in reference: how does the way that speaker A addresses B differ from the way that A refers to B, and what are the factors affecting this difference? The study, based on observation and interviews, attempts both to solve a problem in pragmatics and to help historical linguists and others who need to know the extent to which it may be justified to extrapolate from referential to address usage and vice versa

The ancient Greek address system and some proposed sociolinguistic universals

© 1997 Cambridge University PressThis article summarizes the results of a longer study of address forms in Ancient Greek, based on 11,891 address tokens from a variety of sources. It argues that the Greek evidence appears to contradict two tendencies, found in address forms in other languages, which have been claimed as possible sociolinguistic universals: the tendency toward T/V distinctions, and the principle that “What is new is polite.” It is suggested that these alleged universals should perhaps be re-examined in light of the Greek evidence, and that ancient languages in general have more to contribute to sociolinguistics than is sometimes realized

Word division in bilingual texts

Ancient Greek was normally written without word division; Latin, which had originally used word division, gave it up c. AD 100. Nevertheless many bilingual texts written after that date use word division, and this piece explores the reasons for this practice. It is concluded that word division was added to make reading easier for language learners, who were the main users of bilingual texts